Community college administrators are responsible for many areas of the institutions they serve. Presidents, directors of student services, those in academic support, and deans and chairs of academic units are all charged with managing institution resources, administrating mandates from legislation, and responding to internal and external constituencies. Much of the scholarly literature that discusses community college administration focuses on those elements.
Higher education and community college administrators are also faced with the tedious and delicate challenges of managing difficult students with effective policy and protocol that are also sensitive to the needs of the students while creating a safe scholarly environment. Whatever student difficulty is exhibited, the administration is tasked with creating and evolving policies that address and serve the needs of the students. Although working with difficult students is one of those many areas that administrators are assigned as a responsibility, a definitive role for administrators appears to be elusive in the scholarly literature. What the literature does reveal are some broad categories of difficulty and suggestions to administrators for how to work with students who exhibit difficulty in those areas. The following is a summary of those findings and our suggestions of the administrative roles we found to be most prevalent.
More than a decade ago, Thomas Tobin, coauthor of the new book, Evaluating Online Teaching: Implementing Best Practices, was hired to teach a business English and communications class in a hybrid format. When the time came for evaluation, he received a very thorough evaluation based on the chair’s observation of the face-to-face portion of his class, but the section of the evaluation instrument meant for the online component was left completely blank. “The department chair eventually confessed that because he had not himself taught using the institution’s LMS, he didn’t feel qualified to rate Tom’s use of its tools,” the book explains. Evaluation of the online component of the class was not something the administrator was equipped to do.
The problems inherent in evaluating online teaching arise understandably. “Deans, department chairs, faculty members, and students rate and evaluate teaching at their institutions mostly through home-grown processes and forms,” write the authors. “Although these are often constructed to help observers and raters to provide meaningful information, it is often the case that even now [years after Tobin’s experience], little training is provided for those using the evaluation instruments.” Many institutions find that one size cannot fit all.
