An ambitious work team of faculty are strategically curating solutions to set up an environment of student success in areas of coursework, learning material, and grade outcomes.
The team’s efforts are part of the Strategic Doing for Student Success initiative introduced in September 2024.
With the leadership of co-chairs Christina Downey and Marie Brown, the team is using their collective influence to create an academic environment that illustrates a consistent pattern of growth in student success. A primary focus for the group is increasing course completion rates.
“The ‘course completion rate’ refers to the proportion of students who finish a course with a grade that indicates success and promotes progress to graduation,” Downey, vice provost for undergraduate education and dean of University College, said. “This is a term that conventionally refers to the percentage of students who earn grades of A, B, or C in courses.”
Among the teams most active members are faculty from several schools:
To ensure change in learning and heightened academic confidence for students, the team is dedicated to building an inclusive team. Additional sitting members from other university units provide consultation and support as needed, fostering a collaborative environment.
The team has experienced exceptional progress. Brown, director of the Center for Teaching and Learning (CTL), attributes that to Downey’s impressive methodology selection.
“The Strategic Doing process that Christina introduced for tackling this work has borne fruit in unexpected and exciting ways, including two national presentations and a piece in Inside HigherEd,” Brown said.
To ensure a trusting space for members to share their ideas, the duo created a step-by-step guide led by reviews of course completion data and discussions on past and future course action. With the guide, the hope is to provide campus leaders a path for helping faculty to engage in a conversational structure that encourages innovation, focus, and collective productivity for all.
The team prioritizes promoting a research-informed framework for effective teaching—synonymously known as The Culture of Care in Teaching model and initially developed by CTL staff.
The Culture of Care in Teaching’s main purpose works to document, elevate, and highlight evidence-based teaching practices that are known to improve student success and course completion rates, with a goal to advance a scholarly approach in teaching that values relationships, care, and evidence-based practice.
The team has been assisting Brown in producing greater awareness regarding the framework and how its teaching techniques have been proven in literature to reap higher levels of student belonging and overall course success. The team’s distributed faculty survey, which scoped the varied teaching techniques across campus, also yielded productive conversations about student and faculty experience and how the two factors cohesively work to build success.
“The project is centered around a self-assessment that seeks to document instructors’ current teaching practices,” Brown said. “At the same time, the project invites respondents to consider modifications and enhancements that demonstrate care with the goal of enhancing satisfaction (of both faculty and students) and student success.”
Downey underlined the team’s recent conversations on how student engagement rates have changed since the campus’s return from the pandemic.
“Anecdotally, many faculty have seen students facing a more challenging constellation of issues (both academic and personal) that have created roadblocks to students fully engaging with their courses in the way that is necessary for learning—and necessary for preparing for career and life after college,” Downey said.
With a student-centered mind, the team hopes to assess the area further and even potentially offer focus groups for students to share their views on what encompasses classroom engagement.
“Ideally, we want for students to help us create an approach to student engagement that clarifies expectations and level-sets the classroom in a reasonable, respectful way,” Downey said.
Brown noted the university’s wide range of passionate individuals and its collective impact on the process.
“IU Indianapolis is a special place with so many dedicated faculty, staff, administrators, and students,” Brown said. “I love it when we are able to collaborate and bring our best selves to solving difficult problems in the interest of promoting student learning and success.”
For Downey, being able to collaborate closely with Brown and the team’s remarkable members has been a rewarding experience.
“Our work team is full of outstanding faculty, and I love it when we come together to plan change,” Downey said. “However, my very favorite aspect of this particular initiative has been getting the chance to work side-by-side with a fellow faculty leader who is amazing and unfailing in her principles, knowledge, advocacy, and interpersonal skill. This partnership has yielded spinoff projects and potential future opportunities that are just starting to bud on the vine, all of which are really exciting to me.”
The work team will formally present its findings in May of this year.
For more information, contact the Division of Undergraduate Education Office of Communications at duecomm@iu.edu.
