Dr. Abdel-Karim Daragmeh, Presentation at Best Practice Forum, Ramallah, May 2015
My presentation has to do with guiding policies that we have adopted at the An-Najah National University Center of Excellence in Learning and Teaching (CELT). Some of them are ours, and some of them we learned along the way from other centers—from partners in the US and from partners in Cairo at the American University Cairo.
These are our two major activities: we are trying to turn the learner-centered practices into a dominant culture at the institution. Second, we are trying to introduce applied learning methodologies into the courses and programs. So it’s applied learning at the learning center since these two goals go together, and we have succeeded in making many courses have a quite similar percentage of these two components: 50% of applied learning and 50% of theoretical modeling in the syllabus.
Our philosophy at the Center of Excellence is to think. I mean, we are thinking about the impossible: it’s students, teachers, policies, changing culture, quality practices, and the whole thing sounds daunting to do over a year, or two years or three years or four years or even ten years. So our strategy was basically this: think small, stay focused, work on selected courses and pilot initiatives that would at the end lead to reflection and improvement. So we are thinking the Prometheus model, not the Sisyphus model: we are pushing a rock up a mountain, but we are trying to think that we are pushing a small stone up a hill—more Promethean oriented than Sisyphusian oriented—and, of course, with a smile, not without one.
The first policy [of nine] that we adopted at the Center of Excellence was to provide ourselves a neutral environment for faculty so they can meet and exchange ideas and practices at the Center without any sense of accountability, just a free environment where people can get together, people who are interested, people who want to practice new methods of education. They get together, they exchange ideas, they share ideas, so we get ideas coming and going in channels among faculties in the university. However, in order to sustain that, you need to build a reputation for yourselves as providers of high quality professional development services, these go together, and are reflected in the following:
Now, if these numbers tell us anything, they tell us that neutrality can work and is essential for the centers of excellence. And that’s the thin line that divides centers of excellence from quality assurance; neutrality is an essential policy for the centers of excellence.
Neutrality of environment also comes with voluntary participation. We want them to come to the Center because they want to come, because they have the motivation, because they want to develop their own courses, and because they want to benefit from the services that we offer. So that’s our guiding policy number two‒voluntary participation in all our workshops.
That was the beginning; we had to learn from that. We did by adopting the second policy of voluntary participation. What we do now we do electronically: we announce the workshop (see Figure 5.1); it goes to all faculty, across disciplines, and that’s a total of 1000 faculty receiving the advertisement for the registration—auto registration. So we auto-advertise, and we auto-register and then get participants voluntarily because they need, indeed are required to have ILOs because they need technology integration and because they want to do CBL (community based learning).
Figure 5.1 [slide from his presentation?]
The third guiding policy is the trainer practitioner model for every trainer at the Center, and we have ten. Every trainer is a practicioner in his or her own area. By adopting this model, we can give real examples from our own experiences; we do address real challenges that we have faced ourselves. So, for example, I have a workshop on CBL, but I’m not going to run it myself. I can assign it to somebody who has done CBL many times, and he leads the training on that workshop. So every challenge he will address is not theoretically based: it is practical, its hands-on, and it’s geared towards designing the final course syllabus. So that is basically the trainer-practicioner model.
Our forth policy is closely monitoring progress, which we do voluntarily and through our practioner-trainers, then follow this with our close monitoring process because we worry about the quality of the courses. It is not only “counting beans”; it is counting beans and checking the quality of the beans.
Here is how we do the monitoring process. Let me use CBL as the example because this is our most recent initiative. So we introduce CBL in a workshop for people who are interested in applying CBL in their courses, and then this workshop is followed by a one-on-one consultation; it is a very tight program designed by Emad Dawwas. In this close monitoring of the CBL courses he sits in a consultation to review the suggested CBL courses with every single faculty who wants to apply community based learning. In the consultation they discuss the project’s scope, the partners, the feasibility of the project, and the integration of the syllabus. Then this is followed by a second workshop to introduce assessment because if you want to change a method, you should change assessment also with it. Finally, we get the students who are applying CBL to present their projects in front of each other. So students from civil engineering present their projects in front of students from the art faculty who are working on school design or interior school design; they share experiences, they share challenges, and they learn from each other. Thus the process moves on and at this point, a mid-point, we can tell if it’s working or not working. It becomes clear which projects are coming out; we can tell that this project is going to be successful or this project is not going to be successful.
As you can see, there is a close monitoring process for the progress of the courses, and this is a “shot” from your book, Greg4‒we liked the spiral term in this model. It exactly fits with what we are doing, and I matched what we do with this model: action, observe, reflect and plan again. So as I’ve explained our process for the CBL workshop, we do a lot of advanced planning, then a course selection; we received fifteen applications for CBL, selected the five most promising courses for development, then observed in one-on-one conferencing and consultation with the faculty member proposing the course, and then we reflected on the challenges. We get the students together and reflect on the challenges. Then a community survey also is useful for the reflection; then we plan again, and we start over. The CBL has been going for three years now.
Our fifth guiding policy is “Excellence is a shared responsibility.” I cannot make my class excellent; it has to be me and the environment and the students. It has to be a shared responsibility; otherwise it won’t work. This is how we make it a shared responsibility: we introduce new teaching strategies. That is what we do for project-based learning or community- based learning: we provide innovative faculty with support as they implement and refine their own strategies. So faculties who are interested now come to the Center for support to implement their own courses, which makes it a shared responsibility among all stakeholders who are involved in the course. As you can see, we are giving the student a key role in the game.
Our sixth guiding policy is building a network of practitioners. When started in 2012, we had practitioners in five faculties only. In 2015, we have almost penetrated the entire institution; we have representatives in almost every faculty. But in 2011, we had only the humanities, medicine, health sciences and the sciences. These are the faculties that had representatives in the Center. Actually I would say they were more messengers and ambassadors. Today we have reached everywhere in the institution.
Our seventh guiding policy is dissemination of new trends, and we have done that effectively at our annual symposium; we organized an annual symposium at the end of every term. Through this Center of Excellence initiative we spread our successful experiences everywhere, and we invite people in a selective audience (see figure 5.2); this audience that you see here was selected from all over campus and from our partner Palestinian universities. We are following the model of ideas worth sharing: for example, a good idea in the IT Department is shared with Education; for a good assessment practices in Education, we share it with Engineering. So this is the driving momentum for the annual symposium for CELT: ideas are worth sharing.
Figure 5.2 [slide from his presentation]
Along the same lines we have the community connecter where we surveyed three sectors for future connections; this is a part of looking forward—acting after reflection. We surveyed three sectors to identify their project needs: education, engineering and women’s empowerment. In doing so, in Education we identified 25 potential projects for community courses, and in Engineering we identified 25 projects, and also in the Women’s Empowerment sector we identified 25 projects. So 75 projects are enough to run for five years in the CBL program.
Guiding policy number eight is thinking long term, and I am quoting PFDP’s external evaluators who write, “The final and most important point to be made about sustainability is not about continuation of CELT itself but rather the ongoing sustainability of the important ideas it is disseminating about the quality of learning and teaching and about the student learning.” 5 So it is not an issue of sustaining CELT; it is an issue of sustaining the momentum that CELT has built over the five years, and so we are thinking beyond sustainability, more towards building and sustaining a culture of excellence in the institution. This is the challenge: building an institutional culture of excellence.
And the final guiding policy is institutionalizing the process. As I explained earlier, we look for institutionalization; we don’t want initiatives to remain isolated; we want the institution to adopt CELT’s initiatives. So we now have a CBL coordinator, a project-based coordinator, a CELT director, and an associate director. In addition, assessment policies have changed so that we target also policy level-policy making initiatives. Step one is the workshops; step two is recruiting the potential practitioners; step three is the implementation and follow-up; and step four is new ideas for new workshops. That’s the cycle we are working with.
We have managed at the Center of Excellence to trigger high-level discussions among a new community. Every time people meet at CELT, there are very nice and interesting discussions about what is possible, and what is not possible at Al-Najah National University. For example, our institutional assessment policy is first, second, and final exams. Do we need to change it? So we are triggering this kind of interesting discussion, which was not there before CELT gathered all these people together. We have also introduced these issues to various departments and programs, in many cases for the first time. And our presence has certainly made an impact on the number and quality of the learner-centered environments and the alternative assessment methods that are used in many disciplines.
Thank you.