Accreditation is a stamp of approval declaring that your program meets the rigorous standards of a respected accrediting body in your field. Earning accreditation improves program quality, attracts students, and elevates your institution’s standing. Gaining and maintaining accreditation is a multifaceted process that requires collaboration with faculty members.
If you’re a leader in your institution overseeing this process, this guide will help you get your faculty on board for success in earning and maintaining accreditation.
8 Benefits of faculty involvement in accreditation
Faculty make vital contributions to your program’s quality and the student experience. So, it’s natural that accreditation bodies consider faculty qualifications and performance when compiling standards. Faculty can help improve accreditation outcomes in many ways:
Contributing to self-studies: Faculty can help collect and interpret data to strengthen self-study reports for accreditation. When faculty participate in data collection, you’ll gain deeper and more accurate insights.
Driving improvement: Continual improvement is critical for maintaining accreditation. Faculty are well-positioned to identify and work on improvement opportunity areas. When the entire faculty is invited to look for these areas and propose solutions, your self-study report will have fewer blind spots.
Maintaining accountability: Faculty members can agree to hold themselves and one another accountable to the accreditation standards your institution is pursuing. This mutual accountability and transparency helps create a positive culture of excellence and maximizes accreditation readiness.
Attending accreditor sessions: Accreditors host webinars, workshops, and meetings that faculty can attend to become more informed contributors to the process. The perspective they gain from attending these sessions can improve your program’s alignment with accreditation criteria and elevate your institution’s reputation among academic peers as they expand their professional networks.
Developing curricula: As subject matter experts, faculty members can provide insights to help keep curricula up to date and in line with accreditation standards. Their research expertise and awareness of new developments in the field are invaluable for maintaining an effective curriculum.
Advancing research: By conducting and publishing research, faculty can enhance your institution’s standing, enrich the learning experience, and reflect the high standards of expertise accreditors are looking for.
Growing as professionals: Advanced degrees and other professional development opportunities build credibility and demonstrate commitment to ongoing improvement. This helps maintain accreditation while opening opportunities for your faculty to advance in their careers.
Committing to teaching excellence: High-quality teaching is essential to any program earning and maintaining accreditation. Faculty can commit to growing in their use of varied teaching methods to help diverse students excel and may explore training in new pedagogical techniques and technologies. Passionate teachers are a vital asset to any institution seeking to uphold accreditation standards.
How to get faculty involved in accreditation
Here are eight of the most important faculty roles in the accreditation process.
1. Self-study participation
Although the accreditation process is long and multifaceted, many accreditors decide to award or withhold accreditation based on two main components — the self-study and the site visit. The self-study is foundational to your application, while the site visit aims to verify the evidence from your self-study and gain deeper insights. A well-crafted self-study explains how your program fulfills each dimension of every standard for this accreditation, with accompanying evidence.
Faculty can make valuable contributions to the self-study because of their position at the front line of program implementation. They have a rich, direct experience of the curriculum in practice and important insights into student performance and teaching approaches. Provided with the resources to understand accreditation standards, they are in the optimal position to share evidence of your program’s alignment with these standards. They can also help recognize areas for improvement and devise solutions.
A self-study can be an extensive project lasting 18 months or more, so faculty contributions are as needed as they are valuable. Preparing a self-study becomes quicker and easier when faculty assist with tasks like:
Collecting data, including assessment samples and student results.
Conducting surveys to understand student experiences of the program.
Proposing solutions when areas of the program require improvement.
Organizing focus groups to engage with students, communities, and stakeholders.
2. Accreditation meetings and workshop attendance
One of the primary obstacles to faculty participation in the accreditation process is a lack of understanding. The process can seem complex and mystifying, deterring proactive involvement. Many accreditors offer helpful workshops, webinars, and annual meetings that benefit faculty members in several ways:
Clarifying the process: Engaging with accreditors and peers who are also pursuing accreditation provides a great opportunity to learn and ask questions about aspects of the process that may be unclear.
Building relationships: Networking with peers and accreditors can lead to new opportunities for collaborative scholarship and institutional partnerships.
Boosting motivation: Building supportive relationships between faculty, peers, and accreditors can create networks of mutual encouragement, boosting motivation to successfully reach the next stage of the process.
3. Curriculum development
Curriculum quality is one of the primary focus areas of any accreditation standards. The curriculum needs to be current and relevant to professional demands. Many accreditations also place a strong focus on continuous improvement. Since faculty are more familiar with program content and the state of the field than anyone else, they can help ensure the curriculum aligns with accreditation standards.
They can also help to set up mechanisms to promote continuous improvement. For example, they could form a curriculum development committee that can ask and address curriculum development questions:
Are we covering this key topic?
Is that topic still relevant to today’s professional contexts?
Does the curriculum meet our accreditation standards?
Do all students have access to the resources needed to achieve our objectives?
Faculty also have more direct contact with students than administrators, so they can more easily gather student feedback about the content, such as:
How well lectures prepare students for the assessments.
How relevant this program’s content is to their degree.
How understandable the content presentation is.
How accessible the curriculum is to students of diverse backgrounds and abilities.
4. Education quality improvement
Along with improving the curriculum content, faculty can spearhead the effort to enhance instruction quality. This could involve:
Exploring innovative teaching methodologies and technologies to improve the student experience.
Many accreditors will eagerly welcome faculty to join their evaluation teams to conduct site visits to other higher education institutions seeking accreditation. This may require your institution to have already obtained the accreditation for at least one of your programs. But in your effort to maintain and pursue further accreditations, your institution can benefit enormously from having your faculty serve on these evaluation teams. Benefits include:
Gaining a deeper practical understanding of accreditation criteria.
Broadening their perspective on the world of education.
Applying examples of what to implement and avoid for success.
6. Accreditation interviews
Faculty interviews are a key facet of accreditation site visits. Accreditation evaluation teams use these interviews to verify faculty credentials, education quality, and other aspects of compliance with their standards. The onus is on your institution to provide the visiting team with a schedule indicating when various faculty members are available for these interviews. Faculty can help by prioritizing availability for interviews, participating enthusiastically, and providing truthful and detailed responses that:
Support the self-study report’s case that the program aligns with accreditation standards.
Acknowledge areas for improvement.
Articulate concrete plans and commitments to address improvement areas.
7. New faculty mentorship
However gradual, turnover of both adjunct faculty and full-time faculty is a fact of institutional life in higher education. That creates a risk that the present faculty’s knowledge, experience, and enthusiasm for the accreditation process will dilute as new recruits join your ranks. It’s essential to counteract this risk by instilling a culture of commitment to upholding accreditation standards and continuously improving. Sustaining this culture at an institutional level starts by encouraging it at the individual level, and the most powerful way of doing this is through mentorship.
Recognize the value of accreditation as part of their commitment to excellence in their career path.
Understand accreditation standards and what meeting them entails in practice.
Feel confident in contributing to the accreditation process and making it a part of regular academic life.
Form relationships with peers and accreditors by introducing them at meetings and workshops.
Identify opportunities for personal and professional development.
8. Advocacy for change
Because many accreditations require continuous improvement, faculty must contribute their unique insights and dynamism to drive positive change. Even thriving institutions hit periodic thresholds where present resources are insufficient to reach the next level of improvement for the program. Faculty members have a front-line perspective that often lets them anticipate needs and propose effective solutions sooner than administrators can. Some of these changes that may become necessary include:
Introducing new curriculum topics.
Revisiting assessment approaches.
Acquiring new educational technologies.
Training in new pedagogical methods.
Hiring new faculty with expertise in particular curriculum areas.
Embracing new software systems to streamline workflows.
8 Tips to get faculty involved in accreditation
Even when administrators clearly understand where faculty can contribute to accreditation, it can feel challenging to inspire involvement. Try these eight tips to get them on board:
Discuss accreditation often: Frequent conversations about accreditation help demystify the process and terminology while sending the message that this is a vital part of regular academic life at your institution. Convey that accreditation is just a formal system for evaluating the standards of excellence in education that they are committed to.
Celebrate their contributions: One of the obstacles to faculty involvement is when they feel their contributions are not meaningful. It’s important to acknowledge the work they do toward achieving and maintaining accreditation as a valuable aspect of their role along with their research output and teaching.
Welcome their opinions: Faculty insights can be extremely valuable for improving a program and enhancing accreditation outcomes. Faculty may feel reluctant to share these insights unless they know their opinions are sought and valued. Let them know that you want their input, and demonstrate your sincerity by trying to implement suggestions where possible, even if this requires taking a few educated risks.
Incorporate standards into orientation: Your orientation program for new faculty can include an introduction to accreditation standards and workflows. Better yet, accreditation standards can form the framework for an orientation to what professional excellence looks like at your institution.
Connect involvement to career goals: From the beginning of each new faculty member’s journey, provide consistent messaging about how their contributions to accreditation processes align with their career goals. Striving to continuously improve program curriculum, teaching quality, and credentials are aspects of accreditation standards that are synonymous with career success in academia. Proactively contributing to accreditation workflows also allows them to add more value to the department and open doors for career advancement.
Promote accountability: Empower faculty at every level to hold themselves and one another accountable for accreditation readiness. The program should be prepared for a site visit at any time if it runs consistently according to accreditation standards.
Encourage peer evaluation: Encourage and, where possible, incentivize faculty to join peer evaluator groups for accreditation site visits. Rather than distracting from their academic duties, the insights they gain can make them more effective contributors to your program.
Support session attendance: Like joining peer evaluation teams for site visits, attending accreditor events like webinars and workshops can give your faculty greater insight into how they can support your program in maintaining accreditation. These events are also a networking opportunity for them to enhance their professional reputations and elevate your institution’s standing as a result.
Streamline accreditation preparation with Watermark
To get the most from faculty collaboration on accreditation preparation, you need a centralized accreditation management system. Watermark Planning & Self-Study software is your purpose-built solution to:
Streamline data collection and reporting, eliminating redundant work for maximal efficiency.
Facilitate seamless collaboration between faculty and other stakeholders across your institution.
Leverage intelligent curriculum mapping to align curriculum structure, assessment plans, and accreditation standards.
Integrate with your LMS to pull and analyze student data for accelerated self-study workflows.
Request a free demo today to discover how our software can support faculty involvement in your accreditation process.
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