Thinking about High Impact Practices

I have been selected to be part of my university's High Impact Practice Implementation and Assessment Task Force. The task force chair has been good about sending agendas along with work for us to do in preparation for the meetings. In preparation for a meeting next week, we were asked to prepare responses to a few questions. I decided to write my responses here on the blog, in the spirit of No Wasted Writing. (Of course, I am doing this after having sent a novella of an email back to a student, so clearly, I need to be more prudent about No Wasted Writing.)

For some context, it's important to know that the university's strategic plan has defined High Impact Practices to include undergraduate research, immersive learning, study abroad or study away, and societal issue or global challenge. This is a subset of those talked about as HIPPs by AAC&U.

I'll typeset the questions in italics and then give my answer to each below it.

What is the purpose of high impact practices to you? To you, what do high impact practices endeavor to accomplish?

High-impact practices engage students in authentic knowledge work. Student learning is strengthened and deepened by having it take place in the context of meaningful work. The credited learning experience becomes focused on an extrinsic, persistent goal rather than an intrinsic, ephemeral one.

The goal of the experience remains learner enrichment rather than community impact. If external audiences benefit from high-impact practices, this is of course beneficial. However, our real focus is on the transformation and enrichment of the learner. This perspective allows us to form partnerships and accept risk, rather than recruiting clients and becoming risk-averse. My experience has been that students often learn more from failure, and that the transformations in the students far exceed any extrinsic benefit.

What are THREE strengths of BSU's high impact practices? (You might have hundreds of ideas—please identify the top three)

1. The Provost's funding for Immersive Learning projects gives faculty support to experiment with new ideas prior to formalization in the course catalog.
2. Many of the faculty involved in high-impact practices are talented and committed scholars who want the best for their students.
3. There are resources devoted to celebrating the success and spreading the word about projects, for example, through the Immersive Learning Awards program, Community Partner Awards program, Immersive Learning Showcase, and other university marketing efforts. These frame this work as important to the university's identity and narrative.

What are the THREE weaknesses of BSU's high impact practices?

1. Creative projects are subject to the tyranny of higher education conventions such as 15-week semesters, scheduling around other courses, letter grades, and the inability to "fire" students from a team. These directly contradict most of what we know about how knowledge work gets done.
2. There is dissonance between the message that we value high-impact practices and the advice that is given to junior faculty.
3. Departmental and college control over the implementation of high impact practices is a disincentive to multidisciplinary collaborations. The de facto standard is to design experiences for your own majors, regardless of the problem being addressed. Anything else requires inordinate, unrewarded effort.

Bonus answer: Failure to hyphenate the adjective phrase "high-impact".

When students (undergraduate and graduate) graduate from BSU with at least one high impact practice...

1. What do we want them to know?
2. What do we want the students to be able to do?
3. What do we want students to value?

I assume the author wants discipline-agnostic answers rather than discipline-specific ones, which makes this a little challenging to address. However, I was able to pull from my notes about my own department's search for a vision, and this gave me a way to frame my answers.

We want them to know:

• Fundamental concepts, vocabulary, and techniques of their academic majors and minors.
• Some advanced topics within their academic majors.

I realize that these items are not clearly related to high-impact practices: they could be said of any student who graduates. It was originally unintentional, but upon reflection, I think it is right. The high-impact practices should strengthen and secure a student's knowledge—even if that is because the experience made them question or doubt it.

We want them to be able to:

• Self-correct
• That is, a student should be able to reflect on what they are making or doing, identify their assumptions, and change direction based on this analysis. This is the competent level of the Dreyfus Model of Skill Acquisition, and it is an indicator of reflective practice.
• Communicate ideas clearly and effectively to different audiences.
• Ask good, clear questions.
• Work respectfully and productively on a multidisciplinary team.

We want them to value:

• The responsibility they have to their team, their employer, and their community
• The dignity of the individual
• Lifetime learning
• Virtuous living: that virtues are habits of the mind developed through intentional practice and self-mastery. Essentially, this is beatitudo, the classic question of what is good in life.

Please feel free to share your own responses or reactions in the comments.