The Faculty has a long history of shared governance and of collaboration with the Administration, including working carefully and thoughtfully on establishing policies and on articulating procedures and practices for use of classroom space. However, innovative pedagogies, “competing” priorities for instructional space, student needs, and budget realities and fiscal constraints require us to re-think and re-envision our shared philosophy, norms, and expectations surrounding classroom scheduling.
Our current approach to scheduling is decentralized. The class schedule is created in each academic unit and at each campus following broad guidelines. As units develop the schedule for each semester, they work to balance three priorities.
- Maximize students’ abilities to create a full-time course schedule that achieves their academic goals and maintains progress toward their degree.
- Maximize faculty preferences for spaces that enable innovative pedagogy and for meeting days, times, and locations that permit the performance of teaching responsibilities while also allowing faculty adequate time for other responsibilities such as advising, research, and committee work, etc.
- Maximize and optimize utilization of our finite classroom space and resources.
While these priorities are not mutually exclusive, and they may be in competition, we believe it is impossible to simultaneously optimize all three goals. Therefore, it is necessary to establish a priority structure to guide our decision making.
The Instructional Space Task Force is charged with articulating principles and policies for classroom space allocation and for scheduling at Penn State. Embracing the power of reflective, iterative, inclusive processes (Malmgren & Themanson, 2006), we will work diligently to carry out our charge in a way that will not only meet short and long term classroom space allocation needs, but will also further enhance Penn State’s status as a global institution committed to teaching excellence. Your help in the process is invaluable.