The Gen Ed Leader’s Playbook

Purpose of the resource
A coach needs a variety of plays to call upon as the game unfolds. There simply is not one right play to run at any given time in any given game against any given team. Similarly, there is no single right response for key general education questions. It depends on who is asking and why and where.

With this playbook, our goal is to provide general education instructors, curriculum committee members, administrators, and any campus academic leader with a variety of tools and perspectives to address the tough questions as they arise. This is meant to be more than a simple FAQ, because how you respond will vary depending on who is asking, where, in what context, and in what tone. Obviously, no resource like this can be comprehensive, so some improvisation, trial-and-error, and live-and-learn will be inevitable.

Each chapter has two parts.

First, the chapter provides a handful of ‘stock’ answers to the chapter’s question. They are short and are meant to be general in nature – so you can customize any one to your program or campus. If nothing else, we hope to provide you with nuanced and informed responses than “so our students will be well-rounded”, “because accreditation says so”, or “because suffering through it builds character.”  These responses can easily be copy/paste into a document or paraphrased when in a meeting or elsewhere as needed.

Secondly, each chapter has a worksheet that poses questions for you to consider when coming up with answers that are specific and detailed to your program or campus. Every year we have members who ask about marketing their gen ed programs. We hope that the worksheet questions will also help you develop text that can be shared with registrars, student advisors, the campus external communications team, etc.

We hope this resource will serve as a great complement to other resources on general education. If you are going through a reform, then Jerry Gaff and Paul Gaston’s (2009) Revising General Education–And Avoiding the Potholes: A Guide for Curriculum Change will prove very handy. If you are a faculty member who wants to wrap your head around general education, then Paul Hanstedt’s General Education Essentials will provide a sturdy foundation of understanding. And simply spending a great deal of time on the Association for American Colleges and Universities (AACU) website will be time well spent.

The responses provided here have been culled from your colleagues and peers through participatory response exercises at the AGLS and AACU national conferences. Attendees were posed a question (e.g., Why do we have gen ed?) and asked to provide as many responses as possible before time expires using post-it notes on large post-it paper. They were then provided with opportunities to build on and discuss other group responses, share-out, and even role-play the scenario to try and embody the context and actors involved. The responses were compiled, coded, and categorized by members of the AGLS Playbook Design Team to build the response playbook for each topic.

So next time you get the tough general education question, how might you respond?

PLAYBOOK CHAPTERS

Chapter 1     Why Do We Need Gen Ed Programs?
now available

Chapter 2     Why Do We Need to Assess Gen Ed?
now available

Chapter 3     Who is a Gen Ed Leader?
now available

Chapter 4     What Resources does a Gen Ed Administrator need for a Successful Program?
now available

The page updated September 12, 2023