I am completing my first year as Ocotillo Faculty Chair and it is time to reflect. I began this odyssey with a nagging suspicion that Ocotillo committees and Dialog Days, in their current incarnation, are not best meeting the needs of Maricopa. It seems, that although serving a very useful function, Ocotillo is eliciting participation from a relatively small group of folks. Alfredo has long talked about how teaching innovations seemed to initially reach a minority of our staff and he/we is/are concerned by that.
We decided to use this year to focus on: "What should Ocotillo be when it grows up?" After many hours of dialog with Ocotillo committees and chairs as well as many of you in our "Vittles with Visionaries," it is clear that we all want to be an organization that treasures learning for our students and our employees. However, it is equally clear we're not sure how we should get there from here.
This realization spawned the agenda for our annual retreat. To spark our dialog, we videotaped students and faculty responses to questions about learning. In addition, since we heard that the bulk of benefit from retreats comes from what happens between and outside of scheduled activities, we hope this retreat will provide the structure (or lack thereof) for great conversations on superlative learning.
At the end of the retreat, we will chart a course for next year that will enable us to become an advocate for quality learning. Undoubtedly, some vestiges of the current Ocotillo will be included in that plan. But, we hope to emulate the actual desert plant which sends out shoots so new clumps of Ocotillo can grow. Maricopa has very rich soil for instructional innovation and I'm sure Ocotillo will thrive wherever it crops up.