| Appendix
A. Report of the internal audit of the quality control system
Every institution and program has a set of procedures
and structures—reporting lines, committees, offices, positions,
policies—to ensure quality in hiring, admissions, courses,
program design, facilities, and the like. Together, these procedures
and structures—people and the actions they take—function
de facto as a quality control system.
For example, Figure 1,
describes graphically some of the components of a teacher education
program’s quality control system: the research committee,
workload policies, faculty and administrative positions, evaluation
procedures.
Ideally, each component in the quality control
system is intentionally connected in a meaningful way, each informing
or reinforcing the others. The people and actions they take result
in program quality, and specifically, improved student learning.
However, in most programs (and institutions), the
components of the quality control system are not articulated, or
fully articulated. Look again at Figure
1: notice the arrows linking the elements. Are the parts of
the system sufficiently linked? Does one element inform the other?
The degree to which the institution thinks about
the elements as a system and evaluates their individual and collective
effectiveness varies enormously from institution to institution,
program to program. Nonetheless, there is a system, and it should
affect the quality of the program and student learning.
TEAC requires that the program faculty members
understand the quality control system that affects their program.
In addition, the faculty should understand how the program’s
quality control system affects the program’s capacity for
quality (TEAC subcomponents 4.1
– 4.7: the curriculum, faculty, facilities, resources,
student support, student recruitment and admissions, and student
feedback) and how they affect student learning.
TEAC requires evidence that the faculty members
of the program seeking accreditation describe and query their quality
control system, asking if the individual components and the whole
system function as intended. TEAC requires that the program faculty
seek to understand how the quality control system affects program
quality and, specifically, how it leads to student learning.
To meet this requirement, the faculty conducts
an internal audit of the program’s quality control system.
Through the internal audit, the faculty investigates whether the
quality control system’s mechanisms have any influence on
program capacity and on student learning and accomplishment.
The faculty represents the internal audit—the
process and the results—in Appendix A of the Inquiry Brief.
Appendix A includes the following sections:
- Description of the quality control system
(in both graphic and narrative form)
- A description of the procedure followed in conducting the
audit (also in both graphic and narrative form)
- Presentation of the findings, the conclusions that faculty
draws from the findings, and a discussion of the implications for
the program.
It is important to keep in mind that the internal
audit is a description of what is, not a presentation of what the
program faculty thinks should be, or thinks that TEAC wants. The
internal audit captures the quality control system at the moment—its
strengths and weaknesses alike.
What is an internal
audit?
Getting started
and conducting the internal audit
Entering
the quality control system
Entering
the audit at points of suspected weakness
Audit probes
Understanding
the audit findings
Writing
the internal audit report
The
quality control system and Quality Principle III
Linking
the quality control system and student learning
Return to Inquiry Brief
Appendices
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