Stockton University: Sonia Gonsalves
Channel: Collaborative on Academic Careers in Higher Education (COACHE)
Date: 2016-02-02

Dr. Sonia Gonsalves, Director of Academic Assessment and Professor of Psychology, offers her take on how participation in COACHE has transformed Stockton University's approach to faculty--and her own sense of community there. Gonsalves
has previously served Stockton as Director of the Institute for the Study of College Teaching and as Director of the Institute for Faculty Development.

"So, Stockton has a really strong tradition of using assessment. We have a strong assessment culture at Stockton, using assessment data to drive our decision-making. Prior to our doing this COACHE survey in 2013, we really did not empirical basis for a lot of the work we were doing with faculty. So we were really theoretical in our approach to dealing faculty. We were trying to institute best practices. We were doing what was supposed to be done but had no concrete feedback as to how that was working for the faculty. Our faculty profile has been changing gradually over the years and then dramatically recently with a lot of retirements. We really didn’t know how well our faculty interventions were being received and COACHE gave us the empirical basis for the decision-making we would do as a result of what we found out from COACHE. It was really supportive of the Stockton tradition of getting data and then acting on it. We certainly made full use of that since we’ve gotten the data back.

"COACHE gave us the empirical data to make the changes that we wanted to make to support faculty life and work at Stockton. It was really that foundation that we were seeking to a database intervention for faculty.


"The way in which Stockton managed our co-report was to put together a year-long review by a team of faculty of the report. Over the course of that year there were 15 faculty members who worked monthly on analyzing the data, on seeing what it meant for us within the institution. That was a strong personal and professional benefit. It created for me a new community of colleagues. The core of our community was faculty satisfaction, faculty work life, so it gave me a whole new community of colleagues and a new focal point for my work at Stockton.

"The work that COACHE does is important because we cannot generalize, we cannot get reliable information from talking one to one another. We really have to sample a large enough group of faculty to find out what makes faculty happy, what makes them productive, what makes them do their best work. That is the core of COACHE. There are lots of sort of in-group stories about the work and life of faculty. But when we do an across-the-board survey of faculty life and work, we actually have actionable, reliable, generalizable data from which to build new changes in the faculty life. That is extremely important because faculty is in fact the most valuable resource of the university.