I had a day-long interaction with over 70 faculty members of the Nasik-based K. K. Wagh Education Institutions last week. The academic leaders in the room included faculty members, heads of departments, and senior management of an institution thinking hard about its academic future.
I walked them through an application I have been building: a diagnostic of the academic processes, the ten interlocking activities through which an institution turns its promises into graduates who are genuinely prepared. This diagnostic tool is available at academicos.co.in/diagnostics.
The app looks at a programme, or a school, from above. It asks how strong the academic processes are and how the system is doing. It was a satisfying experience taking the enthusiastic faculty members through the concept of academic processes, and the role that culture (संस्कृति) plays. The instrument examined the academic processes at the School or Department level.
At the end, I was highly impressed when a faculty member asked the question that has stayed with me since.
“This tells the institution how its processes are doing,” he said. “Is there something that tells me how I am doing — whether I, personally, am going in the right direction?”
It is a generous question, and an important one. Because the honest answer is that the institutional view, however useful, can be a place to hide. It is easy to look at a dashboard of the whole and never ask what part of that whole is mine.
So I went back and built a companion instrument — one that looks not down from the system, but inward, from the individual faculty member.
This edition of RB’s AcademicOS Chronicle is about what it measures, what it deliberately does not, and why I think the act of using it matters more than any result it produces.
When I started creating this instrument, the task turned out to be challenging. The risk was that it should not create any misunderstanding or misinterpretation. The first thing was to define the scope: the instrument measures one thing — your contribution to the shared academic processes — the work of designing courses, shaping how students learn, assessing fairly, giving feedback that can be acted on, coordinating with colleagues, and reflecting honestly afterwards.
Let me clearly say that it does not measure whether you are a good teacher. It cannot. Your effectiveness in a classroom is shaped by your warmth, your judgement, your presence, your relationships with students, and a hundred things no questionnaire will ever be able to capture. The diagnostic looks at one slice of a much larger life.
Within that slice, it walks you through six domains.
The first is course design — whether your learning outcomes are written in observable terms, mapped to the programme’s objectives, and built on current material rather than carried forward by habit.
The second is the teacher’s zone of influence — the seven dimensions of the learning environment that research tells us actually shape whether students learn, from surfacing what they already wrongly believe, to making practice safe, to building their capacity to learn without you.
The third is assessment and rubrics.
The fourth, feedback and mentoring.
The fifth, coordination and the quality loop — your part in making the same course mean the same thing across sections and ensuring consistency, and in closing the loop when the data says a learning outcome was not met.
The sixth is reflection, planning, and scholarship — including the five questions of the Individual Faculty Academic Plan, which ask what, specifically, you will be able to point to at year’s end as evidence that you are a better academic than you were at its start.
A word now about reflection, because the word is worn smooth from overuse.
Reflection is not self-judgement, and it is certainly not a scorecard. It is the discipline that makes experience educative — the difference between teaching a course twenty times and teaching it once.
This is why the instrument gives you no score and no grade. A number would have been easy to build and would have ruined the thing. A number invites you to defend it, to game it, to feel either complacent or crushed. A mirror asks only that you look.
Therefore I chose the output as a developmental profile: what you are already anchoring well, where your growth edges lie, and one or two deliberate next steps. Nothing more, and nothing is stored or sent anywhere. It is a conversation with yourself.
There is one layer that surprises people. Alongside questions about what you do, the instrument asks what you believe, what you sense your colleagues expect, and how much control you feel you have. This draws on a theoretical framework which holds that what we actually do follows from our intention — and that intention rests on three things: believing the work is worthwhile, sensing that those around us value it, and feeling able to do it. The gap between intending to give rubric-referenced feedback and actually doing it is rarely a failure of will. It is usually one of those three.
So, before you begin: be honest, be gentle, and do not mistake the mirror for a verdict.
And when you have your profile, resist the urge to fix everything. Change one thing. Fold it into your academic plan and revisit it at mid-year, not as a review but as a collegial conversation. Better still, work through it alongside a colleague — because the surest way to shift the quiet norms around this work is to practise it together.
Which brings me to the idea underneath all of this, the one I most want you to carry away.
Always remember: processes do not produce learning. Faculty do.
The system comes alive only when the individual teacher takes ownership of their part in it, from the heart.
To take charge is to move from compliance to authorship — to stop asking what the system requires of me, and to start asking what the learning in front of me requires, and what is mine to shape.
The teacher’s zone of influence is real, and it is wider than we usually admit. Taking charge is simply the decision to claim it.
The faculty member in Nasik was not asking for a tool. They were asking for permission to take themselves seriously as the author of their own practice. They always had it. The instrument just hands them a mirror while they do.
Spend twenty honest minutes with it before the next semester begins. Then change one thing — and write to me at rameshbhat@academicos.co.in to tell me what it was.
Access the tool here: The Reflective Faculty →