A faculty-driven quality initiative at the Colorado School of Mines

Abstract

Although a small group of faculty at the Colorado School of Mines has been actively concerned about quality and continuous improvement issues for years, our involvement increased when we recently received a TQM curriculum implementation grant from Procter and Gamble (P&G). We have learned several valuable lessons through our work over the past two years with this grant: faculty buy in and involvement are essential for a successful program; given the opportunity, faculty will be interested in ways to improve teaching and learning; faculty and students are best qualified to judge the effectiveness of their courses and effect changes; assessment is an essential part of the quality process. When we received the P&G grant, we decided to make our quality efforts curriculum centered and grassroots organized. The paper highlights what we have done and what we have learned over the past three years (1992-5) in the hope that our experience may prove valuable to others, especially teaching faculty, who are interested in incorporating TQM concepts into their classrooms but who have little previous experience.