Teagle-Spencer Conference

How Can Student Learning Best Be Advanced?
Achieving Systematic Improvement in Liberal Education

October 9 - 11, 2008

The Washington Duke Inn
Durham, North Carolina

co-sponsored by The Teagle Foundation and The Spencer Foundation

On October 9-11, 2008, The Teagle and Spencer Foundations co-sponsored a conference on how student learning can best be advanced. The event took place at the Washington Duke Inn, in Durham, North Carolina, and over the 3 days of the meeting, the over 120 people there—a mix of national higher education leaders, senior campus administrators, faculty members, and others—reported on and sought to advance efforts to improve student learning. We have made available on this website some of the key documents and presentations from the meeting. We hope you find them useful.

Conference Information

• Agenda
• Break Out Group Sessions
• List of Conference Participants

News Coverage

• New National Alliance Plans to Promote Measurement of Student Learning by Peter Schmidt in The Chronicle of Higher Education, October 13, 2008.
• "Harvard's Derek Bok: Professors, Study Thine Own Teaching" by Peter Schmidt in The Chronicle of Higher Education, October 13, 2008.
• "Spreading the Gospel on Student Learning" by Doug Lederman in Inside Higher Ed, October 13, 2008.

Documents

• "Leadership for Learning" by Ed Welch, President, University of Charleston (WV).
• "'Systematic'...what do you mean?"

• Keynote: Advancing Student Learning, Derek Bok, President Emeritus, Harvard University (abridged)
  Listen (19m 35s) | Download (9MB)
• Talk: The Institution-Accreditor Partnership: Assessment and Quality Improvement, Judith Eaton, President, Council for Higher Education Accreditation
  Listen (18m 20s) | Download (8.4MB)
• Talk: A Well-Rounded Education for a Flat World, Richard Hersh, Senior Fellow, Council for Aid to Education
  Listen (22m 53s) | Download (10.5MB)

• Response: Gerald Graff, Professor of English, University of Illinois at Chicago
  Listen (11m 1s) | Download (5.1MB)
• Response: Andrew Delbanco, Julian Clarence Levi Professor in the Humanities, Columbia University
  Listen (14m 15s) | Download (6.6MB)

• Panel: From "Systematic" to "Systemic"

• George Kuh, Chancellor's Professor of Higher Education, Indiana University Bloomington
  Listen (6m 24s) | Download (3MB) | Handout (PDF; 143KB)

• Panel: The Accreditors are Coming; The Accreditors are Coming! Making Re-Accreditation into Systematic Improvement

• Iain Crawford, Vice President for Academic Affairs, The College of Wooster
  Listen (4m) | Download (1.9MB)
• Laura Palucki Blake, Director of Assessment, Agnes Scott College
  Listen (8m 59s) | Download (4.2MB)
• Sylvia Manning, President, Higher Learning Commission of the North Central Association of Colleges and Schools
  Listen (12m 22s) | Download (5.7MB)

• Panel: To the Tipping Point

• A Call for a National Alliance, David Paris, Leonard C. Ferguson Professor of Government, Hamilton College
  Listen (3m 40s) | Download (1.7MB)
• What Makes Change Hard, Peter Ewell, Vice President, National Center for Higher Education Management Systems
  Listen (6m 59s) | Download (3.2MB)
• A Pro-active Vision for Excellence in Higher Education, Carol Geary Schneider, President, The Association of American Colleges & Universities
  Listen (5m 3s) | Download (2.4MB)
• To the Tipping Point, Molly Corbett Broad, President, The American Council on Education
  Listen (5m 31s) | Download (2.6MB)