"Knowledge is a valuable asset, but not if you can't find it when you need it.  Increasingly, high performance organizations are creating "maps" of their intellectual assets and letting them guide the way."  Carol Hildebrand

From AQIP and Accreditation to

Strategic Priority Initiatives for Improvement

Assumptions

~   Riverland Community College’s primary focus is on teaching and learning.  Accordingly, our students and our faculty members who teach them have the primary roles.  Everyone works to support our students, so Riverland may achieve the best in teaching and learning.

~   We do not have a hierarchy at Riverland.  Everyone–faculty, staff, and administrators, full time or part time–has an important role either to deliver direct services or to provide services that support excellence in teaching and learning.  If we fail to work together to achieve our vision for a preferred future, we risk losing sight of our purpose.  Ultimately, our students will suffer from our inability to meet their needs.

~   Continuous improvement is a process, not an event.  All efforts to improve quality at Riverland should align with the common goal of improved teaching and learning, not merely to satisfy accreditation standards.

~   Everyone at Riverland understands and embraces the first three assumptions.  If anyone does not, the rest of us must help him or her understand and support improved teaching and learning.

~    We must empower as many people as possible at our college if we are to achieve improvements in teaching and learning.  “Empowerment” means that we involve as many people as possible in our quality improvement initiatives.

~    To empower people, we must communicate effectively.  Effective communication helps people understand the challenges our students and faculty members face, so we may improve services in support of teaching and learning.  Thus, planning and budgeting processes must be transparent, data driven, and conducted with an eye on the continuous improvement of teaching and learning.

~   Continuous improvement demands that we focus on the future, not dwell on the past.  While we can benefit from the lessons of the past, we cannot allow our past to restrain us from achieving our preferred future.

~   AQIP gives us tools with which to conduct our quality improvement initiatives.  We need to instill a culture of inquiry at our college in order to employ AQIP’s tools effectively.

~  Each Riverland employee comes to work daily wanting to do his or her best for our college and our students.