Hines co-authors book about program evaluation
Saint Mary’s vice president Sue Hines M’01, D’07 will tell you that life isn’t a straight path, and careers sometimes have starts, stops, and some dizzying curves.
Sometimes it’s the detour that ends up being the destination.
Prior to coming to Saint Mary’s, Dr. Hines earned her bachelor’s degree as a non-traditional student at age 39.
Now serving as vice president for academic affairs for Minneapolis/Rochester/Online, Dr. Hines once walked in the shoes of her bachelor completion students — and those who would like to finish their degrees but are hesitating to apply. She’s quick to counsel students not to hesitate to get that degree. “I would ask a student, ‘What is it that you want to do in life and what is getting in your way? And if it’s a degree, that’s an easy obstacle to remove. How can we get you there?’, ” she said.
Dr. Hines’ career path started with becoming a veterinary technician. Later she was accepted into veterinary school, with a goal of wanting to teach veterinary medicine at the University of Minnesota. At the time, she had left the field and was teaching veterinary technology at Argosy University, so she asked herself if she wanted to spend $80,000 to do the same thing at a different place, and the answer was, “No.”
Instead, she chose to get her graduate degree at Saint Mary’s (earning both a Master’s in Education in 2001 and an Ed.D. in Leadership in 2007). Her career at Saint Mary’s began when she left her teaching position to assist Brother Louis DeThomasis, FSC, president emeritus, write his book, “Doing Right in a Shrinking World.” Next, she was asked to take a position at Saint Mary’s to do program development and faculty development. Altogether, she’s worked at Saint Mary’s now for 20 years in a number of roles.
It was at Saint Mary’s that she learned about the Twelve Virtues of a Good Teacher as listed by Saint John Baptist de La Salle, the patron saint of teachers and the Founder of the De La Salle Christian Brothers. “I discovered that those virtues reflected what I tried to embody every day as a teacher. Of course you can’t live them all perfectly, but I tried. The virtues spoke to me and were one of the main reasons why I stayed at Saint Mary’s. I felt I was meant to be here — it was serendipitous. I’ve held those virtues close to my heart and have worked to help other faculty learn them and grow as educators.”
Dr. Hines said her focus on faculty development started during her bachelor’s completion program and continued throughout her academic career, tying all her degrees together. “People are often hired to teach in higher education without any background in teaching,” she said. “That’s a problem. I wanted to be a faculty developer to have the opportunity to help college faculty learn how to teach.”
It starts, she said, by helping faculty understand they’re creating learning experiences, not lessons or teaching plans. “You are creating learning experiences with an effort to see through the students’ eyes. That’s what I would help faculty do,” she said. “I would ask questions about what it’s like to be a student in a class. It’s about student-sightedness. I helped faculty be more student-sighted to find the areas they’re doing well and areas they could improve when designing a learning experience for their students. For example, we would take a syllabus and code it with a smiley face, a neutral face, or a sad face, based on the student engagement they were seeing and then make changes based on their discoveries. All teachers are good one way or another, yet all teachers can grow.”
Other roles Dr. Hines has held at Saint Mary’s include interim director for curriculum and instruction and director for the Center for Excellence in Learning and Teaching. She was a professor in the Doctor of Education in Leadership program for several years and has also served as a program director for the program.
Joining together with another Ed.D. graduate, Dr. Catherine Ford (one of her former students and a course-contracted Ed.D. Saint Mary’s faculty member), Dr. Hines co-authored a book, published in January titled “Designing and Implementing Program Evaluation for Teaching and Learning Centers.”
The book draws on 10 years of Dr. Hines’ in-depth research. She did her dissertation on how faculty development centers evaluate their faculty development and narrowed her focus on the state of Minnesota. She discovered that centers were small and understaffed, so she widened her focus nationally and repeated her study to find that only three of 33 centers were doing program evaluation relatively well.
“It was a significant need, so I kept studying and publishing, and EDUCAUSE approached me and said, ‘You should do a webinar on it, but we want an evaluation model.’ So I created one and presented it, but quickly realized it needed to be validated. I conducted a three-year validation study with 10 universities across North America and found the model to be both applicable and feasible in a variety of faculty development centers. I published the model in an article, but then recognized that, for it to gain broader visibility and become more user-friendly, it needed to be a book. I started the book three times and failed twice. Still, I was convinced it was needed in the faculty development community. Partnering with Dr. Ford was the key to finally getting it done,” she said.
As Dr. Hines reflects on her many years of teaching in Saint Mary’s Ed.D. program, she shares how she often describes the experience to her students as “academic birth.” She explains, “The academic gestation will be about four or five years, during which time I’ll accompany you on your academic journey. If I’m advising you on your dissertation, we’ll be even more connected and eventually cross the academic finish line together. It’s a long gestation, but when your commencement comes, it’s such a joy to watch you cross the stage. It’s just like giving birth. I have two children — nothing compares to that, absolutely nothing — but I’ve given academic birth 45 times, and as a professor, it’s the best feeling in the world.”
