This article will appear in a 1999 report by the Alabama Task Force on Teaching and Student Achievement. Samford University is a private, Baptist-supported liberal arts university in Birmingham, Alabama.
Improvement flows from a growth in understanding.
Advanced-degree students also underscore Samford's emphasis on practical knowledge and skills. For those who require more empirical evidence, the employment rate of Samford's new teacher graduates has increased from 80 percent to over 96 percent in the six years since the university first made its commitment to total quality improvement. This is an extraordinary program. You gather good data from your customers, and you use that data to make all your decisions. And second, we needed to talk to our students when they graduated and went on to teach and ask them what was most helpful and what they needed that we had not provided them.