Professional Education Task Force Final Report

Transcription

1 Professional Education Task Force Final Report Task Force Membership: Carol Angell, Peggy Denton (first semester), Rob Dixon, Mark Gibson, John Greany, Tom Kernozek (second semester), Jennifer Miskowski (Chair), Keely Rees, Martina Skobic, Marcie Wycoff Horn The Professional Education Task Force received four charges: (1) to formulate a working definition of professional education on the UW L campus, (2) to generate a list of existing programs that should be considered professional education, (3) to research workload policies at similar institutions with comparable programs, and (4) to provide recommendations to the Workload Task Force, Provost, and governance bodies, if applicable. This report summarizes our work to date. Please note that the majority of professional education programs on campus at this time are part of the School of Education and the Department of Health Professions. Thus, most of the examples provided in this report are drawn from these programs. I. DEFINITION OF PROFESSIONAL EDUCATION Professional Education is defined at the University of Wisconsin La Crosse as any undergraduate or graduate program with a focus on training students to work in a specific field that has been approved by a professional association and/or accredited by an external organization. This is distinct from the Higher Learning Commission (HLC) accreditation of the institution. Professional Education programs are distinguished from traditional academic programs by typically possessing four or more of the following characteristics: (1) Program accreditation is required for graduates to practice in the field. (2) Curricular focus is on both content knowledge and development of specialized technical skills. (3) Requirement of a significant internship/apprenticeship to practice in the field. (4) Programmatic monitoring and assessment of professional dispositions as evidenced through behaviors. (5) Entry to the profession requires successful completion of a comprehensive, state, or national proficiency examination. (6) Practice of the profession is regulated through state licensure and/or national certification. II. LIST OF CURRENT PROFESSIONAL EDUCATION PROGRAMS ON THE UW L CAMPUS Found in Appendix A. III. WORKLOAD POLICIES The task force spent a significant amount of time discussing policies and practices of campus professional education programs and those of similar programs at peer institutions, as best as we could identify them. The overarching theme that emerged from those discussions is that the needs, expectations, practices, etc. vary between traditional academic programs and professional education programs, as well as within professional education programs on the

2 UW L campus. This was even more apparent when we considered similar programs outside this university. Hence, we could not develop or adopt a single formula that would accommodate the workload factors characteristic of professional education. Instead, we generated a short list of workload issues that we argue are mostly, or entirely, characteristic of professional education programs. The task force recognizes that ALL faculty members perform duties outside those listed in their contract or are considered to be standard expectations. Despite that, there are many unique aspects of professional education that must be acknowledged and considered when faculty workload is assigned. A. Professional advising in addition to traditional academic advising Many faculty members across campus serve as academic advisers, and for some, it represents a significant time commitment. In general, academic advisers provide counsel on course schedules, information on academically related activities, and general advice on career paths. Faculty and staff in professional education programs perform traditional academic advising, but also assist students in other aspects of their education. For example, School of Education (SoE) faculty advisers spend extensive time reviewing two portfolios for every teacher candidate, one prior to student teaching and one toward the end of their student teaching placement. The portfolio approval process is required for teacher licensing, and it requires each adviser to read approximately student portfolios that are 7 10 pages in length. Most of these papers are written and edited multiple times until they meet the proficiency rating on the rubric. Both SoE and Health Professions advisers work to help students develop professional dispositions/behaviors. This is critical in their socialization, communication and professional development within their discipline. Although dispositions are ultimately attended to by advisers, the full instructional staff is responsible. In SoE, disposition concerns can be raised by course instructors, university supervisors, or cooperating teachers. In the Physical Therapy program the faculty are responsible for monitoring, assessing and documenting professional behavior development for student interactions with faculty, patients/clients, other health care providers, students, and payers. The didactic portion of the curriculum requires that students demonstrate these professional behaviors prior to entering the clinical environment. Other professional education programs on campus may have varying but largely similar expectations. The number of students assigned to each for advising faculty/staff varies between professional education programs. For instance, each faculty member in Occupational Therapy and Physical Therapy serves 10 professional students, with many additional undergraduates who aim to enter the program. The faculty also participate in providing ongoing feedback to all students due to the overarching need to develop these professional behaviors. In the Early Childhood Early Adolescence Education program, faculty typically serve students that are a mix of professional and pre program students. One suggestion would be for each program to establish a maximum number of advisees per faculty/staff who could be effectively advised. Additional students might warrant additional workload credit.

3 B. Competency based teaching Unlike traditional academic programs, instructional staff in professional education programs cannot award D and F grades to students who have not mastered content or skills. Rather, these programs are characterized by competency based teaching, whereby students must demonstrate knowledge and ability to the level defined by the professional association and/or accrediting agency. This creates an additional burden for faculty and IAS, because they are required to develop remediation/intervention plans for struggling students, work with them to overcome deficits, and re test them to measure ongoing progress. Despite these efforts, a student might still be dismissed from the program if s/he is unable to progress. Consistent with competency based teaching, teacher education students must maintain a minimum 2.75 CCGPA for student teaching (DES programs maintain a 3.0 CCGPA). Furthermore, candidates must pass several high stakes tests prior to earning licensure: Pre Professional Skills Test (PPST) entrance exam for any SoE teacher education program Praxis II Content Exam prior to licensure for all those who have completed the SoE teacher education program Wisconsin Reading Foundations Test prior to licensure for special education candidates, early childhood middle childhood, and middle childhood early adolescence program completers edtpa (teacher performance assessment) prior to licensure for all SoE teacher education program completers (commences Fall 2015) One specific example of competency based teaching in practice is the use of practical examinations in the Health Professions. In most Health Professions programs, courses are lab/seminar based where psychomotor/problem solving skills are assessed. Typically these examinations (practical examinations) occur 2 3 times per semester. In the Physical Therapy Program, practical exams take approximately 5 8 hours usually with multiple instructors where each student is individually assessed. Course syllabi indicate a threshold for passing each practical examination. When the threshold is not met, a remedial action plan is put in place. If the retest is not successful, the student fails the exam, leading to failure of the course and the subsequent dismissal from the program. Extra effort is made in developing detailed rubrics so multiple instructors are assessing student performance with the highest level of reliability. Often there are multiple stations where student must demonstrate skill based learning. All students must demonstrate competency in all skills in a controlled academic laboratory setting prior to performing the skill on patients per agreements made with clinical sites. C. Licensed professional and education expectations The vast majority of faculty in professional education programs are required to be licensed in the state of Wisconsin in order to teach. They must maintain this licensure to satisfy professional association and/or accreditation agency standards, which requires continuing education, and in some professions, clinical practice. For example, in Athletic Training, licensed professionals must take 50 hours of continuing education ongoing within a two year cycle, in addition to their

4 regular duties as a faculty member. For Physical Therapy, it is 30 hours of continuing education over the same two year time period. It is worth noting that these efforts expended to maintain licensure do not take the place of scholarly activity requirements for the university or accrediting agency. Rather, Professional Education programs maintain high expectations for scholarship, too. For example, accreditation documents and assessment reports monitor scholarly output such as publications, grant activity, conference presentations, etc. D. Professional program service In addition to service at the department, college, and university levels, faculty in professional education programs are also responsible for program related service. This type of service can take many forms, including some that are similar to service in traditional academic programs. For instance, professional programs have curricular committees like departments. However, unlike departments, the curricular committees of professional education programs have to routinely address new standards from external organizations leading to more frequent modifications of course content, curricular mapping of goals and objectives to meet accreditation standards and concomitant evaluation measures. A service role that is novel to professional education programs is that of the Director of Admissions and the rest of the Admissions Committee. The Director of Admissions for a program is required to read and review all the applications (e.g. ~500 applications each year for the Physical Therapy and SoE programs) and to field questions about the program and the application process from prospective students. The remaining members of the admissions committee help review application files and make recommendations for program admittance. Two other positions in professional education programs are exceptionally demanding and require special consideration when assigning workload the Program Director and Fieldwork Supervisor/Coordinator. These positions have already been listed as activities for which teaching load variance might be provided in the June 2012 update of the Workload Task Force. We describe these positions here to promote a clearer understanding of their duties. (1) Program Director: The responsibilities of the program director are largely the same as a typical department chair. Although the specific list of duties will vary between directors of different programs, some shared responsibilities include: determining faculty teaching assignments and other workload commitments, leading programmatic initiatives, managing program budgets, monitoring programs to ensure that curriculum and outcomes are aligned with mandated state and national standards, serving as the program s representative on committees/boards at all levels, and generating annual reports that include extensive data analysis. Accreditation is at the heart of the director s role, and while each accreditation standard cannot be met personally by the program director, it is that person s responsibility to make sure that each accreditation standard is met in the program. Accreditation standards change every 5 6 years, and the terminal certification examination changes every 5 7 years. The program director makes certain that the curriculum stays in compliance with the standards, meets program goals, and ultimately prepares students to pass the certification exam. Clearly, this only affects one person per professional education program, but that person will require a fair and equitable workload reduction in order to meet her/his responsibilities. In some programs

5 (e.g. Physical Therapy), the director currently has reassigned time to accomplish these tasks, but in other programs (e.g. SoE) they do not. (2) Fieldwork Coordinator: A defining characteristic of a professional education program is a significant internship/apprenticeship. These field experiences require someone to establish fieldwork sites, continually monitor and evaluate performance at these sites, assess student progress at these sites, assess the quality of the preceptors (those teaching/mentoring in the field), etc. Programs have specific standards from their professional organization or accrediting body that are explicitly the responsibility of the fieldwork coordinator to implement (e.g. Occupational Therapy has 18 fieldwork standards, Teacher Education has 10). In addition, there are standards regarding the specific qualifications that the fieldwork coordinator must meet, including having current licensure and/or years of experience prior to performing these supervisory responsibilities. All of the accreditation agencies require the quality of the fieldwork experience to be the responsibility of the academic program even though it is provided by outside professionals (preceptors). These preceptors are not employed by the university and are not paid to provide these mentored internships. In some programs (e.g. those in Health Professions), the oversight of fieldwork experiences falls on the shoulders of one or a small number of faculty/staff within a program, so this represents a significant workload commitment for only a few individuals. However, in other programs (e.g. SoE) there is a Director of Field Experience who coordinates the efforts and serves as the ultimate authority for fieldwork issues, but a good percentage of the faculty are engaged in fieldwork supervision. These teacher education faculty serve as university supervisors, and they are directly responsible for supervision of student teachers which includes a number of hour long observations of each candidate in action, conferences with the candidate and the cooperating teacher, mentoring, and conflict resolution. Although university supervisors typically received workload credit for their efforts, there is concern that it has not been adequate for the time actually spent in the field. IV. RECOMMENDATIONS The faculty/staff of professional education programs have some responsibilities that are unique and beyond those of traditional academic faculty/staff. To ensure that we have equitable workload assignments across campus, our committee recommends that those duties be accurately and consistently reflected in the workload of those individuals. The extra responsibilities of faculty/staff in professional education programs are largely the result of standards and expectations demanded by external agencies. This is similar to the situation in the College of Business Administration, where departments have specific curricular standards and stringent scholarship expectations that must be met in order to maintain their accreditation status. To allow the CBA faculty/staff to meet those external demands, they have a reduction of three (3) contact hours for group instruction workload (e.g. nine (9) contact hours instead of 12 for faculty). To provide workload credit for the professional education activities detailed in this report, we propose that the group instruction workload be reduced by approximately three contact hours for all faculty/staff in professional education programs. Those who teach

6 exclusively graduate students might be considered for a greater workload reduction, as graduate level teaching was distinguished from undergraduate level teaching in the June 2012 Workload Task Force update. Furthermore, those individuals who serve in special roles, such as Program Director or Fieldwork Coordinator, should likely have additional reductions in teaching workload. We recognize that these types of workload adjustments require resources, and therefore, might take time to fully implement. Faculty/staff who did not fulfill their assigned program workload responsibilities would risk having their workload raised back to the full group instruction workload equivalency at the discretion of their Program Director and /or Department Chair. Professional education programs on our campus are housed in colleges with traditional academic programs, and this can present significant challenges for Deans and upper administration as they strive to develop and implement workload policy in a fair and consistent manner. Our findings do not suggest that faculty and staff in professional education programs work harder than individuals in traditional departments, but rather they have different obligations that should be honestly acknowledged. It is the sincere hope of the committee that these types of discussions lead to a better recognition of all professional activities that can be considered in workload assignment. One possibility is that a different structural organization be adopted in the future. For instance, we observed that the vast majority of professional education programs at other institutions were housed in their own College or School, distinct from Colleges with traditional academic departments. Although this type of reorganization would require new resources and is not feasible at this time, this structure ultimately might allow for more flexibility in workload policy for both professional education programs and traditional academic departments alike.

7 APPENDIX A DIRECTIONS FOR FILLING IN TABLE: Please write the name of the Profession Education program and put an X in the boxes if the corresponding item in the definition is a characteristic of your program. I. UNDERGRADUATE PROGRAMS NUMBERED ITEMS FROM DEFINITION College: Program Name SAH (School of Education): Teacher Education Programs CLS (School of Education): Teacher Education Programs SAH (Health Professions): Radiation Therapy SAH (Health Professions): Nuclear Medicine Technology SAH (Health Education & Health Promotion): Community Health (BS) X X X X SAH (Exercise and Sport Science): Athletic Training SAH (Microbiology) Clinical Laboratory Science SAH (RMTR) Recreation Management * X X X * X SAH (RMTR) Therapeutic Recreation * means preferred, but not required. II. GRADUATE PROGRAMS NUMBERED ITEMS FROM DEFINITION College: Program Name SAH (School of Education): Teacher Education Programs

8 CLS (School of Education): Teacher Education Programs SAH (Health Professions): Physical Therapy SAH (Health Professions): Occupational Therapy SAH (Health Professions): Physician Assistant SAH (Health Professions): Medical Dosimetry SAH (Health Education & Health Promotion): Community Health (MPH) SAH (Exercise and Sport Science): Clinical Exercise Physiology X X X X X X X X CLS (School of Education): School Psychology SAH (RMTR) Recreation Management * X X X * X SAH (RMTR) Therapeutic Recreation * means preferred, but not required.