Quality Enhancement Plan

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What is a QEP?

A Quality Enhancement Plan (QEP) is a 5-year project that challenges the College to improve student learning outcomes and/or student success.

Santa Fe College’s QEP is EME!

SF’s 2023-2028 QEP, Equity-Minded Education (EME): Uniting for Student Success, advances a comprehensive professional development program for faculty through the Center for Teaching and Learning Excellence (CTLE). This program will emphasize equity-minded teaching strategies and faculty-developed departmental action research plans to improve overall student success and overall retention rates of First-Time-in-College students while reducing equity gaps.

EME will:

Provide faculty with support and resources to help all students succeed academically and progress toward educational goals.
Engage students to inform equity-minded teaching practices and increase student success.

How will EME work?

EME’s comprehensive professional development program will support equity-minded teaching and encourage cross-college collaborations to enhance student success through three initiatives:

Introduce and Reinforce Equity-Minded Teaching Themes. This initiative focuses on providing coordinated, foundational learning to support faculty in adopting shared equity-minded teaching practices that create more equitable learning environments. SF will use proven professional development programs including the Association of College and University Educators (ACUE), the Student Experience Project (SEP), and Transparency in Learning and Teaching (TiLT), in addition to designing custom professional learning opportunities through the SF Center for Teaching and Learning Excellence (CTLE).
Implement and Assess Departmental Action Research Plans with an EME Focus. Once faculty strengthen their equity-minded teaching strategies, they will collaborate within and across departments to review student success data, apply theme-based strategies to courses, and assess the impact of various approaches. The resulting departmental action research plans will be implemented and modified through an annual cycle to surface effective approaches, which will be shared across the College.
Partner with EME-Sponsored Student Fellows for Equity-Minded Education. Learning from students and collaborating with them to promote success are important features of equity-minded teaching. This initiative employs students as partner consultants. Student fellows will serve as a focus and advisory group, providing formative feedback about professional development, departmental action research plans, and faculty artifacts. These fellows will also lead campus panel discussions and forums, raising greater awareness of equity challenges and student experiences.

What is the timeline for EME?

EME is a five-year project extending from Summer 2023 - Spring 2028 and has three phases.

Phase I: Pre-Implementation Preparation and Capacity Building- Summer 2023 – Fall 2023
- Conduct action-research training for Department Chairs, staff, and related personnel.
- Prepare professional development programming.
- Launch equity-minded faculty professional development.
Phase II: Implementation – Spring 2024 – Fall 2027
- Develop Departmental Action Research Plans.
- Conduct student panels, focus groups, and feedback campaigns.
Phase III: Project Assessment - Spring 2028
Although project assessment will be ongoing throughout the project cycle, in Year 5 project personnel will:
- Review and analyze institutional data.
- Discuss lessons learned.
- Develop plan to institutionalize.
- Identify next steps.

How will EME improve student success?

Evidence suggests that equity minded teaching practices improve course success and retention rates for all students while narrowing equity gaps for Black and other diverse student populations.

How will EME strengthen SF?

Equity-Minded Education

Advances equitable outcomes for SF students.
Supports excellence in teaching by providing faculty targeted, ongoing professional development programs.
Fosters increased collaboration among faculty and staff in supporting student success.
Empowers students by giving them a voice in classroom pedagogy and practice.
Improves our understanding of inequities among students and in the communities that SF serves.

Additionally, EME advances key objectives of Santa Fe College’s 2021-2024 Strategic Plan:

“Work as a singularly focused, cohesive college to ignite and reinforce a love of learning.”
“Create professional development to support a culture that meets students where they are and inspires them to thrive.”
Create an “equitable experience” and foster a “growth mindset” to “close performance gaps.”

Why are we doing a QEP?

The QEP is part of the College’s accreditation process. The regional accrediting body, The Southern Association of Colleges and Schools Commission on Colleges (SACSCOC), requires its member to identify, develop, and implement, over a five-year period, a detailed, carefully designed, comprehensive action plan that addresses an institution-specific aspect of student learning/student success that can be improved.

The QEP supports Santa Fe College’s mission as a higher-education institution that “adds value to the lives of our students and enriches our community through excellence in teaching and learning.” The QEP further supports the College’s values and commitment to:

Draw on our culture of diversity, inclusion, and equity.
Be a student-ready college.
Advance student success through assessment and continuous improvement of programs.
Employ professional development to enable faculty and staff to contribute fully to achievement of mission.

How was SF's QEP topic selected?

In spring 2021, SF leadership initiated a process for the College community to identify potential QEP topics. Responding to this call, faculty and staff submitted five proposals for SF to consider for its 2023-2028 QEP:

A Center for Teaching and Learning Excellence that would create a culture of professional learning and use evidence-based practices to improve student learning and success.
A Model for Inclusive Excellence, which advocated adopting the AAC&U inclusive excellence framework to link diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts across the College.
An e-Portfolio project designed to advance integrative learning, helping students to link coursework to their larger purpose and to increase their self-direction, persistence, growth mindset, and metacognitive skills.
A Freshman Experience Course to allow students to map coursework to their future career and to integrate academic support skills to increase student persistence and overall success.
Cyber Saints: Online Teaching and Learning at Santa Fe, a proposal to make the online learning experience more accessible for students and promote a greater sense of community.

The SF community identified equity as a unifying theme across these topics. Following consideration of all proposals, faculty and staff identified college-wide interest in the creation of a Center for Teaching and Learning Excellence that would create a culture of professional learning to improve equitable outcomes for all students.

How will SF's QEP, Equity-Minded Education, be evaluated?

Biannually, QEP personnel, including the QEP Director, CTLE Director, SF Office of Institutional Research, Liberal Arts and Sciences Associate Vice President and Department Chairs, and other administrators, will monitor and review with the QEP Advisory Workgroup direct and indirect measures of EME student impact.

Direct measures include:

Improved course success in liberal arts and sciences courses in aggregate and by department.
Narrowed gaps in LAS course success rates between Black students and the overall LAS course-taking population.
Improved FTIC student retention overall (fall-to-fall enrollment)
Narrowed gaps between Black FTIC student retention and overall FTIC student retention (fall-to-fall enrollment)

Indirect measures include:

Faculty participation in EME initiatives
Student engagement with the College as measured by SENSE benchmark scores and end-of-course feedback completion rates
Other faculty and student qualitative assessments and reflections

Additionally, the QEP Advisory Workgroup will consider the operational effectiveness of EME to help keep the project on track and adjust as needed to meet student success goals.

To promote ongoing, campus-wide conversation about EME, annual QEP reports will be made to the college community, to the District Board of Trustees, and to the Resource Planning Council.

In year five, the College will submit a QEP Impact Report to the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools Commission on Colleges (SACSCOC), detailing:

Initial goals and intended outcomes of the QEP.
Discussion of changes made to the QEP and their rationale.
Description of the QEP’s impact on student learning and/or student success, as appropriate to the design of the QEP, including the achievement of identified goals and outcomes and any unanticipated outcomes.
Reflection on what the institution has learned as a result of the QEP experience

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