Over at PrawfsBlawg, my friend Jennifer Bard, dean of Cincinnati Law School, has a post on “Learning Outcomes as the New Strategic Planning.” She points readers to Professors Shaw and VanZandt’s book, Student Learning Outcomes and Law School Assessment. The book is, to be sure, an excellent resource, although parts of it may be too advanced for schools that are just getting started with assessment.  Still, it’s a great book, one that sits on the corner of my desk and is consulted often.  (Dean Bard also gave a nice shoutout to my blog as a resource.)

Citing an article by Hanover Research, Dean Bard draws a key distinction between strategic planning activities of yesteryear and what’s required under the new ABA standards.

Traditionally, law school strategic plans focused on outcomes other than whether students were learning what schools had determined their students should be learning. These often included things like faculty scholarly production, diversity, student career placement, fundraising, and admissions inputs. Former ABA Standard 203 required a strategic planning process (albeit not a strategic plan per se) to improve all of the goals of a school:

The dean and the faculty of a law school shall conduct ongoing evaluation of the law school’s program of legal education, learning outcomes, and assessment methods; and shall use the results of this evaluation to determine the degree of student attainment of competency in the learning outcomes and to make appropriate changes to improve the curriculum.

This is the “closing the loop” of the assessment process: using the results of programmatic outcomes assessment to improve student learning.

So, what to do with the “old” way of strategic planning? Certainly, a school should still engage in a  strategic planning process that focuses on all of the important outcomes and goals of the school, of which assessment of student learning is just one piece. Paraphrasing a common expression, if you don’t measure it, it doesn’t get done. Indeed, one can interpret Standards 201 and 202 as still requiring a planning process of some kind, particularly to guide resource allocation.

Still, much of the way that some schools engage in strategic planning is wasteful and ineffective. Often, the planning cycle takes years and results in a beautiful, glossy brochure (complete with photos of happy students and faculty) that sits on the shelf. I’m much more a fan of quick-and-dirty strategic planning that involves efficiently setting goals and action items that can be accomplished over a relatively short time-horizon. The importance is not the product (the glossy brochure) but having a process that is nimble, updated often, used to guide allocation of resources, and serves as a self-accountability tool. (Here, I have to confess, my views on this have evolved since serving on the Strategic Priorities Review Team of our University. I now see much more value in the type of efficient planning I have described.)

In this respect, strategic planning and learning outcomes assessment should both have in common an emphasis on process, not product. Some of the assessment reports generated by schools as a result of regional accreditation are truly works of art, but what is being done with the information? That, to me, is the ultimate question of the value of both processes.