MINUTES OF THE MEETING

COLLEGE OF EDUCATION

EXECUTIVE COMMITTEE

The College of Education Executive Committee met on Thursday, June 22, 2006, at 8:30 a.m. in Room 255 in the Education Center with Dean Gunter presiding. Members present were: Drs. McGahee, Hilgert, Martinez, Lee, Hull, Judd (for Reffel), Bauer, Zahner, Leech, Gerber, Griffin, and Ms. Roberts. Guests: Dr. Brian Adler and Mark Swift.

Dean Gunter had invited Dr. Brian Adler, Dean of the Graduate School, to discuss graduate enrollment trends in the College of Education. Dr. Adler noted that the COE had, by far, the largest graduate enrollment of any college at the university. Some other points that Dr. Adler made included: numbers do not equal quality output, graduate education is extremely labor and resource intensive, small numbers may be indicative of strong quality, and declining enrollment numbers will have multiple factors behind them. Overall, Dr. Adler noted that graduate enrollment numbers are trending slightly upward.

Dean Gunter announced that he had met with the architects yesterday who are doing the initial planning for the new Health Science and Business Administration Center. The architects will be on campus on July 26-28 and want to meet with the programs which will be located in this new building. Dean Gunter asked Drs. Griffin and Hull to please be available on July 26 for this meeting. The plans currently are for Communication Disorders, Sports Medicine, and Exercise Physiology to be located in this new building.

Mark Swift discussed the meeting he had attended yesterday about the new look planned for VSU web pages. A company in Tallahassee is designing the template for the new look. Departmental representatives will be able to log into this template and easily make changes. Plans call for the template to be completed and ready to use by July 10. Mark will attend training on using the template on July 10; he will then train departmental representatives to use the template. Each department must have a website content manager and a website content approver who will be responsible for a department's web pages. Dean Gunter asked department heads to send him the names of the people they wanted to assume these roles.

Dean Gunter distributed a memo he had received at yesterday's deans' council meeting. The memo was from Chancellor Davis and dealt with classification of students for tuition purposes and the major provisions of the new guaranteed tuition policy. Dean Gunter asked department heads to send him the programs in their departments which require more than 120 hours for completion, as students in these programs will be impacted by this new policy.

Dean Gunter announced that he, Dr. Lee, and Dr. McGahee had completed an initial revision of Standard 1 of the Institutional Report. Dr. McGahee has made the changes and will send the standard to Dr. Lee, who will disseminate it to department heads by tomorrow. Dean Gunter asked each department heads to review enrollment trends in their departmental programs over the last five years and bring this data to the retreat this weekend.

Dean Gunter announced that Dr. Levy had again provided $15,000 to the COE for professional development. Dean Gunter would like input on how to use these funds. Dr. Lee mentioned that some of the COE survey data indicated that faculty need development in teaching classroom management skills and in teaching differentiated instruction to our students. Dr. Bauer suggested a workshop/symposium on outcomes-based instruction and value-added instruction. The next meeting of Executive Committee will be July 13; Dean Gunter asked department heads to get input from faculty on the use of the development funds by that date.

Dean Gunter announced that Dr. Zaccari had given each college $5,000 for the President's Fall Lecture Series. Dean Gunter would like to involve the COE public school partners in this series. Suggestions were made to possibly invite Doug Fisher or Linda Darling-Hammond. Again, department heads were asked to get input from their departmental faculty by the July 13 meeting.

Dr. Lee and Ms. Roberts reported that the primary focus of the school improvement workshop they had attended in Jekyll Island last week was on alternative preparation for teachers.

Dr. Bauer presented slides of the Study Abroad Program which was held May 9 through June 1 in the Czech Republic. Twenty-four VSU students attended.

Dean Gunter talked with department heads about the need to make sure that day-to-day operations of the COE are handled, such as ensuring that proof rolls are submitted on time, faculty office hours are maintained, assigned faculty are at orientations, etc. Dean Gunter made the point that summer teaching involves more than just teaching.

There being no further business, the meeting was adjourned at 10:40 a.m.

Respectfully submitted,