THE PROGRAM GRILL

Advisory board meetings are usually boring affairs. Some distinguished dudes and dames come to visit a college or a school such as ours, once a semester or so. They listen to us bragging about accomplishments, and how everything is just hunky-dory, or on the verge of total and complete excellence. We give them handouts with stats and achievements, parade our distinguished faculty and students. All eat dinner and go home. We have an advisory board – check!

However, there is also a great need for us to hear the voice of practitioners in everything we do. We are a professional school, after all. And even though our connections with teachers, principals, counselors, school psychologists and nurses are rich and continuous, we rarely ask them to sit down with us and help us improve. Some of our programs actually do. For example the Early Childhood programs have a robust advisory board that I saw providing very specific and very good input on program redesign. There are probably others I do not know about. In my talks with superintendents, almost everyone offered some ideas on what we should change or improve. The problem is not in unwillingness of practitioners to participate.

I want to reinvent the advisory board, make it a little more fun, a little more pointed. Imagine a program grill, something like what the Comedy Central Roast. Of course, it will be a lot more polite, with no F-bombs thrown at the F-School, - but just a little livelier than your normal meeting. We would ask programs to send the board members a brief run-down on what they do: coursework, admission and graduation requirements, maybe some policies. Another option is to bring the plans for future revisions. But they can grill our website, our admission process, our outreach – any aspect of the School’s work. The board members would grill faculty on why and how they do things, what they teach and what they do not teach, and then come up with some recommendations on the spot. I’d ask for one wacky plus one serious advice as a package. I imagine it to be a public meeting, with some role for the audience, consisting of our students, friends, faculty, and other partners. Part theater, part business, all in good fun, with mutual respect and concern for quality and nothing else.

Of course, we don’t have to listen to the advice, which can make it fun the way optional things often are. If we had to listen, it would be called the state approval or the NCATE accreditation visit. Those two are good and necessary ways of getting feedback. But they are infrequent, bureaucratic and quite often do not penetrate very deep. Something more informal, more direct, and less official can give us insights and motivations not available now. What do you think? Vote now!