Faculty Development for Student Achievement: The QUE Project (review)

There is a growing consensus that transformation is needed in higher education so that America can stay competitive in the global system. For many stakeholders, undergraduate curriculum reform is a logical place to start. This edited volume by Ronald J. Henry and associates offers a detailed account of the Quality in Undergraduate Education (QUE) project. QUE (1997–2004) was a multi-institutional endeavor that focused on standards and outcomes to improve instruction.

Like the carefully conceived and well-managed project itself, the book presents information concisely, using a straightforward writing style that avoids hyperbole and long-winded explanations. Crisply written chapters are devoted to the overall project's purpose and scope, the conceptual framework, and thorough accounts of each of the discipline-specific faculty groups charged with the arduous task of retooling undergraduate curriculum in chemistry, biology, mathematics, history, and English.

Anyone who has been involved in revising curriculum will tell you it can be a messy business. For example, some readers of this book might be put off at first by the QUE approach because it is rooted in a standards-based methodology familiar in primary and secondary school reform. Skepticism about both the "K12-ification" of higher education and standardization via "no college student left behind" may arise as faculty members bristle at the notion of a one-size-fits-all approach to postsecondary curriculum improvement.

The authors address this concern early in the book by pointing out that QUE did not require total unanimity of learning outcomes by the faculty participants or the partner institutions they represented. The word "standard" is craftily exchanged for "outcome" to diffuse any pejorative jargon, and the whole issue is dismissed as unnecessarily diverting attention from the task at hand.

For readers who remain unconvinced about styling collegiate reform efforts on a public school system model that many consider "broken," alternative approaches exist in the literature, including the ELMO project (Hersek, Gross, Mason, & Bansil, 2006), use of learning communities (Smith, MacGregor, Matthews, & Gabelnick, 2004), and other interdisciplinary approaches (Jones, 2002). In the interest of institutional diversity, different methods for revising the curriculum are most welcome, including the QUE project chronicled in this compilation.

A bright spot in the book concerned cooperation between two- and four-year institutions for coordinating curriculum. The teamwork described extends well beyond the traditional articulation agreement between schools to include the subtleties of transfer patterns, remediation issues, and administrative collaboration. Faculty leaders and administrators searching for an exemplar of possible healthy relationships between community colleges and public universities may want to read this book, particularly the section on the Georgia system.

Moreover, for those specifically interested in undergraduate curriculum reform in one of the featured academic disciplines—chemistry, biology, mathematics, history, and English—this book is a must-read, complete with examples of learning outcomes and subject-specific rubric samples. The appendix of resources is lengthy and valuable, even for those who do not embrace a standards-based schema for reform.

While the words "faculty development" get top billing in the book's title, detailed discussion about faculty development is absent. In a process that can be best described as osmosis through page turning, readers will sense that faculty members were indeed "developing" in various ways as they struggled through committee work, consensus building, and curriculum improvement with their colleagues, but few if any references to the emerging body of scholarly literature on faculty development exist within this work. Although this book would likely come up in a library search query, I would not recommend it for a dissertator compiling a literature review of core readings about faculty development.

The lessons-learned analysis provided in the conclusion is useful; but empirical findings assessing the QUE process itself, perhaps from participant and stakeholder surveys using Likert scales or rank ordering, were conspicuously absent. Instead, the project implemented a reflective critique approach as sole source for assessment and feedback, when a mixed-methods design would have been...