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In looking at program review, one of the important things that departments need to consider are "What are your goals?"
To help you think about these goals, we want you to think about them as being "SMART".
That's an acronym for Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Results-focused and Time-bound.
Let's start with the first one, "specific". Don't be too nebulous in your goals,
and make sure they are things that you have control over, as a department.
It's not going to be approrpriate to say that you want the college to do X, Y and Z, because that's outside of your purview.
But, it is appropriate for you to talk about revising your curriculum over the next two years,
and working more closely with advisory groups or other people within the higher education community to revise your curriculum.
That's a specific goal.
One of our goals that we selected in Interior Design
was to integrate appropriate technology into the interior design program offerings.
Technology for interior design is rapidly changing, with the development of apps that are sometimes working as well as some of the
major CAD programs, and are far less expensive for future interior designers to have access to.
Keeping up with this development is a challenge for us as faculty, because they're being developed by everyone, at the moment.
Under this particular goal, the "S" of the SMART acronym was that technology integration was identified as important
by several interior design program advisory board members.
Make sure they're measurable.
It's important that you don't choose something that's going for you to say that you've achieved it or accomplished it.
When you think about "measurable", also think about whethere or not you need to break this up into chunks.
Maybe a short-term goal that's one to two years, and a longer term goal like three to five years that's measurable over that time frame.
The "M" of the SMART acronym - the way to measure technology integration
might be to add a question to student evaluations or exit interviews, then and tabulate and compare responses.
We also could explain the technology integration changes to the interior design advisory board,
and then poll the board members for their thoughts.
We have had some interior design students choose this as a project in various classes to look at what is available out there,
and one of our faculty members sensed that goal-setting was taken care of, here .
She has integrated use of apps in one of the projects in her class.
The students are able to choose whichever apps they want, and hopefully we'll find a way to successfully use that.
We have actually done this in our curriculum, maybe not exactly the way that we were planning to when we set the goal,
but the goal has been achieved.
Make sure they're something that is achievable.
We've had a few goals come through in the last couple of years that were beyond the purview and the resources of the department.
Make sure they're things that you can actually achieve.
Talk with your colleagues about what skills, resources and abilities that your faculty may may need to make things happen.
The "A" of the acronym is "Is it achievable?"
I wrote down here that there is a process for this goal, and that there is a lot of opportunity for growth and change, here,
but we don't understand what all the changes going to be.
Make sure they're results-focused. At the end of the day, we want to make sure that the results are all about student learning.
Students in your department need to benefit from these goals.
Some goals may be administrative in nature, but they really need to focus on students.
Under the "R", the students will develop additional skills needed for future careers.
In other words this is something that our students need, and it is of value to our students.
And finally, they need to be timed down. These are not things that are going to take a decade.
These are things that will take one or two years for the short term, or maybe three to five years for the long term.
So, don't choose goals that are twenty years out. You may have at your back pocket someplace,
something you want to consider long-term and make these goals really smart ones.
The "T" for this particular acronym for this goal is that this would be a long-term item
We don't expect to accomplish it, because the apps are going to continue to change.
The computer field and the technology that's available to us is going to continue to change,
and we need to continually look at what's new out there, and what the industry is doing.
That was an example of one of the goals that was set by the Interior Design department.
I think that the "SMART" acronym was really useful, because we had the ideas of the goals.
We had faculty discussions in our program meetings about what kinds of goals to set,
but the SMART acronym was helpful in editing the goals and making sense out of them.
When you think about curriculum development, a very different topic, but we have to use action verbs.
When you're writing your SMART goals, these needs to be action verbs, things that can actually be accomplished and measured.
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