December 5, 2013 | SharkAdmin President's Message Contributed by Julie Pace, Vice President of College Services Northwest Vista College conducted its 16th annual strategic planning session on Monday and Tuesday of the week of Nov. 18. The E-Team, Leadership Team and representatives from our partner groups met on campus for a two-day session of reflection and conversation to develop our strategies for the last year of our 2010 – 2015 plan. I think the team did a fabulous job at both analyzing the environmental scan of data and identifying areas of action that we will take in order to move NVC into a successful future. Through the analysis of data, we identified weaknesses and threats that are or may become barriers to our vision of student success and long-term sustainability for the college. The team determined that the college should continue to focus on our three key organizational objectives – Completion, Learning, and Sustainability – and that within these three areas we should turn our attention as a college to these five specific strategies: Completion: We have some opportunity to improve how students apply and register for courses at NVC. We also have opportunities to provide more students with degree plans and to give them better direction as they make their way to degree and certificate completion. Therefore our first action area is: Ensure that all students have a path to completion by providing strong academic advising processes and by removing barriers that impact students who are entering and registering at NVC for the first time. Learning: While NVC has a strong culture of providing hands-on learning through active and collaborative teaching techniques, data show that there has been some decline in students’ perception that this activity is occurring in the classroom. Since NVC is committed to this form of instructional delivery, our next action is: To improve the understanding and use of active and collaborative teaching techniques. Learning: There are many new mandates from the state and district impacting students required to take developmental education. It is likely that these mandates are not well-coordinated and that there are potentially many unintended consequences whose results will be to impact student learning in a negative manner. Therefore, it is important that leaders, including developmental education leaders, obtain a better understanding of the “system” that impacts these students. This system goes beyond the classroom and begins before the student enrolls. Therefore, our next action area is: To evaluate the impact of developmental education changes and provide procedures to mitigate mandates that may negatively impact student learning. This includes a focus on developmental education advising. Sustainability: NVC has long practiced data-informed continuous improvement to promote student success. We have put in practice for many years the knowledge obtained from adhering to the standards of the Southern Association of Schools and Colleges (SACS) and to the Baldrige Criteria. In fact, NVC was nationally recognized this year by winning Baldrige awards in two of the seven categories: for our excellence in Leadership and for our strong Student Focus. We will continue in our quality journey by continuing our practice of data-informed decision-making. Therefore, our next action area is: To continue our quality journey by improving and systematizing unit assessment across the college (including academic program assessment) and by developing plans for reporting to the Southern Association as we begin our next SACS accreditation cycle. Sustainability: Our environmental scan of data have revealed internal and external threats and challenges to our ability to support student success. Some of these threats are directly related to availability of financial and human resources to support our processes. Therefore, our last action area is: Promote systematic innovation at Northwest Vista College. The team had determined that we would narrow even further the number of strategic action plans by focusing on key items that could truly leverage success. As a result the 2014-2015 strategic plan has only 5 key action areas. This focus is going to help us as a college to accomplish more than we ever could if we put many items on our strategic plate, but accomplished little. I hope that you NVC employees agree that these five areas selected for focus are crucial for our success as an organization. Please look over this list and decide how you can make this difference on this literally handful of items. Our next steps in the strategic planning process are to appoint leads and teams to carry out action planning and deployment for these action areas. I will continue to let you know of our progress and I hope you will consider serving and supporting to accomplish these goals. Julie
