Our Guiding Purpose: We are guided by the academic success of all students. Ultimately, the measures of our success are improvements in students’ persistence, achievement, and graduation rates—particularly students who are the first in their families to go to college and those from groups historically under‐served in higher education. 

Dear colleagues and friends,

It's a busy time at the Washington Center!  We just wrapped up a thoughtful webinar series, Operationalizing DEI: a deep dive, with our partner Donna Buchanan from Crucial Shift Consulting.  Over the course of four conversations we invited 12 panelists to engage in "real talk" about DEI work from their vantage points.  The conversations were powerful! Those of you that registered to attend any of these sessions will be receiving an email in the next few days with an invitation to continue this work along with a bonus self-assessment tool that Donna developed. 

We've also been doing a fair amount of conference travel.  I've had the great fortune to see some of you in person at Imagining America and the National Learning Communities Conference.  I'm looking forward to catching up with more of you at the POD conference this weekend.

All this traveling has me thinking about rest. At Imagining America, I had the great joy of attending a session expertly facilitated by Dresden June Frazier & Karin M. Cotterman from the University of San Francisco.  The session, Considering Rest as Resistance, was a restfully facilitated experience where we were given ample time to think about how we integrate (or don't) rest in our professional lives.  

All this has me reflecting on my internal narrative about being busy and having too much to do. When someone asks me how I am, more often than not, I say "busy" - but if I'm honest much of this busy-ness is performance.   So, I am asking myself (and you), how would our work lives look different if we performed rest instead??  Could my response be "rested" or something else that communicates the satisfaction I find in my work? 

With that food for thought, enjoy this month's short newsletter. I'm delighted that we will be joined by Jen Whetham and Mike Tamada for a free virtual workshop on December 1st.  They'll be sharing about their experience with our new offering, campus-based action planning institutes.

In Community,

JuliA Metzker
Director
Washington Center for Improving Undergraduate Education

The Washington Center Collaborative is a space for higher education faculty, scholars, practitioners, and administrators to come together and discuss emergent issues of importance to our collective work educating and supporting students. The Collaborative consists of free virtual workshops, a newsletter, and a slack space.

Friday, December 1 | 2pm ET, 11am PT | Zoom

This summer, our team at Reed had the good fortune of experiencing our own in-person Institute on our beautiful campus. While we were originally disappointed to miss out on the camaraderie of being in community with other like-minded change agents in higher education (and of course the super comfortable dorm beds), this version of the Institute was deeply transformative. As our facilitator, Dr. JuliA Metzker, gracefully held our team through a deep and full process of participatory decision-making to create our two year plan, we experienced deep learning while we worked. During this session, we will share highlights that are transferable to other institutions of higher education, including the gradients of agreement as an elegant and equitable alternative to Robert’s Rules when making decisions as a group.

Jennifer Whetham, Reed College

Mike Tamada, Reed College