Bi-weekly ASC science student worker reflections

Submitted by Kristopher Rothermal on
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What is the Purpose of the Assessment?

Reflections provide insight for improvement.  Continuous quality improvement comes from recognizing individuals needs.  Please see attached.

Describe the necessity for this assessment

Through conversation with the student workers, a desire for some kind of professional development was brought to my attention.  Please see attached

Describe how the practice will be implemented

A bi-weekly reflection assignment has been/will be continue to be given to all tutors in which they will have to tell me what they feel worked well and not well.  A strategy has been/will continue to be put into place to ensure growth happens as a result of their thoughts on the reflection.  The answer is individual to the tutor to supplement what they feel they need.  

Interpret, compare, and describe the results

This is still ongoing.  The work in progress has shown that the tutors have gained confidence in their abilities.  This has led them to being more proactive in their attempts to help students and they have begun to find more challenging problems to work on so they more prepared when the students arrive.  I cannot find a causal relationship but I would like to believe in one, this has also caused a more optimistic and happier environment. 

After analyzing, and reflecting on the outcome, what are the next steps?

The process of CQI (continuous quality improvement) is never ending by its very nature.  The next steps are to continue the process as it brings results in its implementation.  As time progress, new tutors will be hired and new students will come to visit us.  Course curriculum is bound to change as well.  The benefits of this process is that it keeps a framework to be as efficient as possible when the environment you work in is always changing.

Abstract

Through conversations with the tutors, a desire was discovered to be better.  The tutors know their material very well but wanted to see if there was a way to improve on their delivery style and customer service.  I introduced the concept of continuous quality improvement (CQI) which is a culture of never-ending improvement.  The assumption is that unless we learn something about what we are doing, we are unlikely to know how to improve it.

With this information, I instituted bi-weekly reflections where the tutors had to tell me based on their opinions what is going well and what is not.  The questions were asked individually.

            The work in progress has shown that the tutors have gained confidence in their abilities.  This has led them to being more proactive in their attempts to help students and they have begun to find more challenging problems to work on so they more prepared when the students arrive.  I cannot find a causal relationship but I would like to believe in one in that this has also caused a more optimistic and happier environment. 

Division/Department
Life Sciences
Completed Full Cycle
No
Attachment Size
continuousqualityimprovementcqi.docx 75.93 KB
reflection-implementation-plan-and-observations.docx 13.78 KB
weekly-reflection.docx 14.25 KB