STAFF DEVELOPMENT IN HIGHER EDUCATION ADMINISTRATION: A GENERIC MODEL, A PROGRAM FORMAT PROPOSAL AND ILLUSTRATIVE CASE.

Abstract

The subject study identifies some theoretical, methodological and program considerations that set the conditions in which the basic parameters, criteria of adequacy, and methodological rule and instruments are established. The study then sequences and analyzes the content of previous materials related to staff development in the literature as (1) activities, (2) processes, (3) purposes and goals, and (4) concepts and models, beginning with materials most distant from the definitive paradigm being sought and progressing to efforts most closely approaching the ends being pursued in this study. Finally, the study identifies the structural components (the categories) that must be contained in an effective staff development program. Further, it presents a taxonomy for ordering the terms identified to modify the word "development" in common usage; attempts an exhaustive listing of all the functions that must be performed to carry out any organizational mission for an educational institution; develops a format that adequately articulates the subject matter of staff development into the necessary and sufficient content categories; designs a paradigmatic model capable of ordering the variables that must be considered for incorporation into a staff development program while providing a conceptual reference system for relating and integrating the goals of the organizational development and staff development programs, and while identifying the documentation instruments that insure the necessary "paper trail" which make measurement, assessment, evaluation and valuation possible; discusses the various types of evaluation applicable to the paradigmatic model; reviews some extra-program considerations that influence the conditions in which staff development takes place and affects the success or failure of the programming; presents a process model for the design/evaluation of a staff development program; and develops an instrument (of questions to be answered) to be used for deciding whether the program now designed is a "good" program which, when implemented should accomplish the ends toward which the plans were directed.