How SPIG Got Started

Each October, I submit a planning document to Xavier's Office of Planning and Institutional Research for the upcoming academic year. In most years, I have anticipated the deadline and worked with the Center staff in developing the plan. But this past year, I was caught sleeping and scrambled to pull a plan together. After this awakening, such as it was, I began to rethink our planning process.

There was further impetus to rethink the planning process when I met for the first time in the Fall 2003 semester with the Center's newly formed Grant Writing Corps. It was painfully obvious that the ability of the faculty involved in the Corps to successfully identify possible funding opportunities and write grant proposals was hindered by the lack of a long-range, comprehensive strategic plan for the Center.

And so the Strategic Planning and Implementation Group was born.

As its name implies, the group has set out to develop a comprehensive strategic plan and means to both implement and assess it. As you might guess, at times we'll take the long view of things, e.g., What should the Center for the Advancement of Teaching be in 2010? At other times, we'll consider the short-term, e.g., How can we showcase faculty members' work next year?

We invite your participation in this process; to facilitate that, we created this website. The website will be a place where you can observe both the process we're following and the progress we're making. The latter, in particular, will depend at times on your input. We will post documents here with ideas, recommendations, and plans about which we will invite your comments.

If you are interested in doing more than providing comments, I certainly invite you to join our meetings. Feel free to contact me at ext. 7692 or through this website.

I look forward to the work ahead of us. I hope it ultimately results in a Center for the Advancement of Teaching that reflects and furthers both the mission of Xavier and your passion for teaching and profound student learning.

— Todd Stanislav
February 2004

See also: SPIG