Guest Post: Tutoring Solutions

Today, we’d like to shine a light on the Tutor Resource Center at North Central State College in Mansfield, Ohio. The Tutor Resource Center is a central part of NC State’s Solutions program, a pre-enrollment program that is designed to help adult basic education and developmental education students move through dev ed and on to college-level courses more quickly. The college began with a logic model and evaluation plan, data collection, and a clear program for training and engaging tutors and faculty—all actions that demonstrate commitment to the Achieving the Dream core principles that DEI colleges are building on as they innovate. The description below comes from Barb Keener, NC State’s coordinator of tutoring services.

The Tutoring Resource Center has been a positive addition to North Central State College. The Tutor Resource Center is located in two adjoining classrooms; there are u-shaped tutor stations with one tutor at each station.  Students sit around the tutor, allowing the tutor to work with multiple students at the same time.  We have 24 tutors with strengths in a variety of areas. We employ students, faculty, and individuals from the community that hold various degrees. Peer tutors, or students, must be referred by a faculty member and must have earned a B or better in the course(s) they would like to tutor.

The development of a logic model, evaluation plan, and data template was useful in planning strategies to meet our goals. Using TutorTrac, a RedRock Software Corporation product, we are able to track and analyze traffic patterns for scheduling purposes, as well as planning the budget.  We are able to analyze student grades and attendance patterns to determine which areas we have been most successful and areas in which we need to improve.  We also use the software to communicate with faculty and the advising department.

A tutor training program is essential for an effective tutoring center. We have implemented a tiered program with three levels of certification: professional, advanced, and master tutor.  Tutors attend quarterly trainings, working toward the master tutor certification. When tutors work their way through the certification levels, they are rewarded with an increase in pay, motivating them to participate in trainings and improve tutoring methods. The development of a policies and procedures manual has helped us make consistent decisions and train new tutors. The manual is an easily accessible and very useful resource for tutors. 

While student success is our main focus, we have worked diligently to support the objectives of the faculty within the classroom. We have worked with faculty to determine how we can meet their needs as well as the needs of their students. We have open communication with faculty and frequently get both positive and negative feedback, allowing us the opportunity to grow and develop as a team and center. This collaboration is paying off. The following table shows that the Fall 2009 Solutions cohort had higher completion and persistence outcomes than a 2008 comparison cohort.



Solutions Data: Fall 2009 to Fall 2010

*Includes those testing out of a DevEd class while in Solutions

Guest Post: ATD/DEI State Policy Meeting Recap

Greetings from the Jobs for the Future ATD/DEI team! On February 8-9, 2011, we convened our state policy leaders and advocates in Indianapolis for our semi-annual ATD/DEI State Policy Meeting. During our two days together – and with an eye on student success – we applauded our recent achievements, revisited our initiative goals, and discussed how best to make progress given the current state policy environment.

As conversations with our states unfolded, we took care to recognize that the ongoing fiscal crisis and limited evidence on effective interventions pose serious challenges. We created a space in which our state policy leads could learn and share – and we worked with them to be well positioned to make smart choices over the next year and a half of work.

Highlights included:

• Engaging and spirited dialogue during our plenary sessions on data-driven improvement, investments in innovation, and policy supports – followed by concurrent breakout sessions led by guest presenters, state policy team leaders, and JFF staff.
• Presentations from higher education experts such as Kevin Dougherty and Shanna Smith Jaggars of the Community College Research Center, providing us with insight on the latest research evidence and its implications for policy.
• A rousing lunchtime keynote from Uri Treisman of The University of Texas at Austin in which he targeted faculty development, well-executed modularization, and student surveys as proactive methods for improving student completion. 
• Participation in a hands-on data exercise hosted by JFF’s Keith Brown, and Florida Department of Education’s John Hughes, spurring such questions as: How and why are some institutions more successful than others? How can we train staff and faculty to better understand and analyze data? And finally, how do we create a common language around data?
• The emergence of topics that warrant increased attention at the state and institutional levels – including new approaches to performance funding, methods of better engaging faculty, and taking the data-use conversation to the next level.

Over the next 18 months, the DEI states are poised and ready to continue making great strides. We look forward to continuing these discussions at our summer convening in Miami from July 26-27, 2011. See you there!

Katrina Reichert is a project manager at Jobs for the Future.

GSCC's Jam on Teaching Dev Ed

If you’re a developmental ed practitioner and you haven’t checked out Global Skills for College Completion’s “Jam” on pedagogy, you should head over there right now!

The most active discussion is about using data and evidence to assess pedagogy (in contrast to assessing student learning). You can still contribute to the threads that began yesterday about institutional strategies, student context, and faculty attributes. The GSCC blog is keeping track of the highlights, which include ideas on curriculum contextualization, faculty adaptability, peer engagement, and creating a sense of community in the classroom.

The Jam ends tomorrow, so get into the conversation while you still can!

Alyson Zandt is a Program Associate at MDC.

Green Light, Red Light

We discussed the February 8 DEI Pre-Conference Convening on the blog last week, but we wanted to lift up some reflections from the meeting participants. At the end of an intense day of problem solving, sharing, and collaboration, David Dodson, president of MDC, led the group through a red, yellow, and green light exercise. He asked participants to talk about:

• what they learned that they’d like to immediately proceed with-- green light!
• what things they’d like to examine with some caution--yellow light!
• and anything they’d like to stop and reexamine--red light!

Participants gave the green light observations to creating more incentives for faculty to innovate in developmental education; high-stakes testing got a yellow light, and one-stop, non-systemic faculty development that is not part of long-term staff development got the red light signal for reexamination.

But let’s back the car up a bit. As the group was pulling up to the yellow light, one significant note of uncertainty arose: the absence of a working theory of what works for students at the lowest level of development. One meeting participant said, “we have opinions, biases, but not a working theory, and until then we’re shooting in the dark.”  The glaring caution here: an emphasis on scaling can provide an unintended disincentive to help students at the lowest levels, and focusing on students that have a shorter road to successful completion. 

This same issue got a red light of reexamination in today’s Inside Higher Ed. Arizona’s Pima Community College Chancellor, Roy Flores, discusses one response to this conundrum: his college is changing admissions policies. Students that test into the lowest level of developmental education will not be allowed to enroll, but will instead be referred to other adult education services in the college and community. Though budget constraints are part of the impetus, Chancellor Flores is chiefly concerned by data that show that “students testing into the lowest levels of developmental education have virtually no chance of ever moving beyond remedial work and achieving their educational goals.” 

Here again is the tension between the access mission and the student-success mission of community colleges. What do we need to learn and where do we need to innovate in order to build pathways to valuable credentials that meet the varied needs of individuals on that path?



Abby Parcell is MDC's Program Manager for the Developmental Education Initiative.

What Time is it? It's Valentimes!

xkcd

Just a reminder on this holiday to always remember the human side of data.

If you've had experiences like this one, check out these 7 Basic Rules for Making Charts and Graphs from FlowingData. 

Happy Valentine's Day from the DEI Team at MDC!

CODIFY TEST STRATEGIZE MANAGE

Scaling up is a hot topic at the 2011 Achieving the Dream Strategy Institute. As we've said here before, expanding the reach of successful policies and programs is an integral part of institutional improvement and increasing positive outcomes for community college students. But managing the cultural shifts, design challenges, and resource development for scaling up requires creativity and persistence. In such situations, it's always good to hear from someone that's already been through the ringer. In one of today's Strategy Institute spotlight sessions, I met Dr. Jim Knickerbocker--a survivor of that scaling ringer and managing director of the Academy for College Excellence. ACE is an integrated, project-based program for developmental education students that accelerates student progress by focusing on both the students' cognitive and affective experience. Jim, with experience scaling in the corporate and the community college sectors, introduced us to ACE and what they've learned about scaling up. Here's a few headlines:

• CODIFY: use products to formalize key insights and promote fidelity
• TEST: Verify that the program can be delivered by someone other than the orignator and run tests that push the limits of the design
• STRATEGIZE: look for economies of scale, identify the roles that are critical for success, and clarify the difference between required and recommended  
• MANAGE THE CHANGE: secure shared sponsorship, pay attention to the necessary systemic change, and adapt rewards for early and mainstream adopters of the program.

I'll definitely be inviting Jim to share more of his insights here on Accelerating Achievement, but until then, you can check out his presentation and handouts on the ATD Strategy Institute presentation website. Jim's materials are first in the list under the "Thursday" heading.

Abby Parcell is MDC's Program Manager for the Developmental Education Initiative.

Read All About It!

We can always count on our colleagues at Jobs for the Future for the latest news. At yesterday's ATD/DEI State Policy Meeting, I learned about a few recent publications that might interest you:

• Michael Collins, Program Director at JFF, contributed to the Fall 2010 issue of the Journal of Developmental Education. Michael's piece, "Bridging the Evidence Gap in Developmental Education," looks at conflicting perspectives on current developmental education research, examines the rigor of that research, and proposes an expanded research agenda. You can download the issue table of contents and the full abstract. The Journal of Developmental Education is published by the National Center for Developmental Education at Appalachian State University and is the official publication of the National Association of Developmental Education. 
• The Community College Research Center released two new pieces in their Assessment of Evidence Series: "Assessing Developmental Assessment in Community Colleges" by Kathrine Hughes and Judith Scott-Clayton and "Reforming Mathematics Pedagogy: Evidence-Based Findings and Recommendations for the Developmental Math Classroom" by Michelle Hodara. You can read an introduction to this series here.

We'll be diving deeper into these publications--and some of the other great information shared at the ATD/DEI State Policy Meeting--in the coming weeks.


Abby Parcell is MDC's Program Manager for the Developmental Education Initiative.

DEI College Convening Recap, Part 2

After a lunchtime update on our communications strategy update by yours truly (the blog!), we moved into a panel on integrating college and state policy work. Barbara Endel of Jobs for the Future joined Janet Laughlin of Danville Community College, Gretchen Schmidt of Virginia Community College System, and Cynthia Ferrell, coordinator of the Texas state policy work. They described their work as looking for a way to pull it all together into a strategic plan for dev ed.

Endel told the story of how the five ATD colleges in Ohio pushed to get all the state’s community college presidents on board with a plan to use data to improve dev ed. “It took four years” to get it going, she said, “but in four months we had amazing progress.”

Schmidt and Laughlin described how the Virginia system has inculcated use of data in all its decision making by tracking data monthly, putting it on the agenda at presidents’ meetings and in front of Institutional Research and other college groups, and as a result will come out soon with its first annual report. As the system moves toward new models for dev ed (modules for math, others for reading and writing), the data will be portable. Laughlin emphasized, too, the importance of identifying exactly the kinds of math students need to be successful in various programs and careers, and adapting dev ed courses accordingly.

We ended the day with a panel on sustaining institutional improvement, featuring Shirley Gilbert of El Paso Community College and Becky Ament of Zane State College. The question: What can we do to create a culture in which scaling up can be sustained?

Gilbert didn’t hesitate a moment to answer the question: “What’s necessary to sustain anything is leadership. And it has to be leadership at all levels. So that’s what we’ve been focusing on.  Faculty, staff, students—not just involved, but to accept roles of responsibility at all levels. It’s not just the job of a few people, but for all people.” She described the importance of creating “a million committees” that make sure to involve lots of people.

Ament said that much the same thing was true at Zane State. Leadership there has “made a deliberate attempt to engage faculty and staff in work,” much of that building on the college’s work with Achieving the Dream.  To embed the change, Zane State’s leadership articulated their vision and worked with faculty and staff to restructure its academic services moving dev ed—which had been more of a student support area—fully into the academic program, she said. “It was an acknowledgement of the contribution that developmental education does make to the successful progress of our students.”

Other issues discussed included the importance of making dev ed and student success courses mandatory and requiring them before entry into regular courses—and then resolving the critical space and staffing problems that raises (Gilbert); and having an academic advisor aggressively monitor whether students were taking courses for which they weren’t prepared—and then meeting with them to fix their schedules (Ament). She said most students appreciated the effort.

That’s all for now; keep checking back for updates. We’ll be here all week!


Richard Hart is MDC's Communications Director.

DEI College Convening Recap, Part 1

Hello again from Indianapolis! With temperatures dipping below zero, we’re all happy we had a full program that prevented any need to venture outside.

Yesterday, the DEI colleges, technical assistance providers, and partners met to discuss the initiative’s progress and future. As we reported yesterday, the day included a panel on effective implementation and scaling up with Maria Straus of Houston Community College and Lisa Dresdner of Norwalk Community College. But there was so much more.

The day began with Byron McClenney of the Community College Leadership Program at the University of Texas questioning the group to find out how many had taken some key steps he believes are important to improve the retention of students in dev ed (or to help them bypass it altogether). He asked questions like: How many colleges have eliminated late registration? Are doing individual assessments for every new student? Are doing in-depth diagnostic testing for each student? Are taking special steps for students who just miss the dev ed cutoff? Offer student orientations? Require student success courses? Are tracking retention of dev ed students after they start regular coursework? At most, half of the hands in the room went up to each question. “If you didn’t raise your hand, be thinking about that conversation you’ve been having at home,” McClenney said. “Are we doing all that we need to do, especially for those students who don’t have a history of success in school—which is most of our students?”

The rest of the morning was spent discussing professional development design, with a panel featuring Carolyn Byrd of Patrick Henry Community College and Nick Bekas of Valencia Community College. Bekas talked about the importance of having a strong faculty development program in place—and not taking grants without having plans to institutionalize the work. Byrd emphasized the importance of engaging all stakeholders, looking at the data—but always working closely with the faculty because “they’ve got to be the ones to lead this charge.” She went into detail about Patrick Henry’s cooperative learning model—which was a faculty idea. Faculty were sent to training to implement it, and were trained to train more faculty. The hardest part: training all the adjunct faculty. But now, some adjuncts are being trained as trainers. Bekas cited the way Valencia developed its supplemental learning program by starting with a pilot on one campus, proving its effectiveness, then recruiting more faculty to participate, with faculty then taking the lead on recruiting students to help. There are now 300 sections serving around 8,000 students in the program, he said.

Other key insights: Have faculty development covered in the accreditation process; use technology and faculty blogs to keep track of what’s going on; provide incentives to faculty and adjuncts who participate (at Valencia they use some student activity money); have faculty who go to conferences report back on what they’ve learned; integrate the programs into budget planning; math faculty are sometimes the hardest to bring on board, but they’ll usually come around; cooperative learning has the additional benefit of teaching social skills, which is important to employers; and never have a program that’s dependent on one person (who might leave).

Check back in a bit for a recap of the afternoon.


Richard Hart is MDC's Communications Director.

Artsy H-town

Which course would students rather take: one that takes field trips to art galleries around Houston in a course called "Artsy H-town" or remedial English? A remedial reading course or "Critical Thinking About Social Atrocities"? 


At Houston Community Colleges, those interesting classes are developmental courses. It's a way the college combines learning communities and contextual teaching to make developmental courses more effective, helping boost student completion and retention. Taking innovations like learning communities to scale and making them successful was a session Tuesday morning at the Developmental Education Initiative Conference at the Achieving the Dream Strategy Institute in Indianapolis with Maria Straus of Houston Community College and Lisa Dresdner of Norwalk Community College. The keys: getting buy-in across the institution, making technology work for you, making the courses attractive with interesting themes and perks for students like preferred registration, addressing the needs of adjunct faculty, compensating faculty for the extra work with money and/or smaller classes, making key courses mandatory, and continuously beating the drum on campus for making innovative changes.


Richard Hart is MDC's Communications Director.

Update: The panel on effective implementation and scaling up led to some interesting conclusions by groups that discussed them afterward. They included points such as: knowing what’s feasible, but also knowing you can always afford to do what’s important to get done; knowing what kind of evidence is needed to decide whether to go to scale; having interventions that reflect a college’s core values and are covered by its mission, strategic plan and accreditation priorities; aligning with high school and adult basic education partners; removing loopholes that keep mandatory programs from really being mandatory; and capturing the return on investment of retaining students.

Equity and Excellence in Indy

This week is the 2011 Achieving the Dream Strategy Institute in Indianapolis. This year's conference theme is equity and excellence; both facets of that theme will be discussed at today's convening of the DEI colleges. With plenaries and discussion groups on institutionalizing innovation, designing professional development, and integrating college and state policy efforts. State policy teams will be learning together on Tuesday and Wednesday, too, on topics ranging from state data systems to ABE/dev ed integration to other national initiatives committed to the college completion agenda. We’ll be live tweeting from Indy, and we’ll post a full recap of the DEI college convening tomorrow morning. If you aren’t at the Strategy Institute, or if you can’t make it to every session on dev ed, then be sure to check the blog all week to hear what ideas and learnings ATD colleges are sharing.


Richard Hart is MDC's Communications Director.

Dev Ed is Good for Business

In the community college world, the connection between education and economic security is obvious. But that doesn’t mean it is always easy to gain the support of policy makers and business leaders. Sometimes, don’t you just want to slap these numbers up on a billboard? 

We haven’t got a billboard, but we have done some thinking about the economic imperative of getting more students to complete a college credential. In the “Communications” section of the Resources page, you’ll find “Dev Ed is Good for Business,” a brief piece that can help you become a walking billboard. Think of this document as a set of talking points to use in conversations with people who want to know why developmental education is good for our communities and workforce, not just individuals.

The good news: we certainly aren’t the only ones calling attention to this. In mid-January, Jamie Merisotis, president of Lumina Foundation for Education, spoke at the Economic Club of Indiana (you can read the full transcript or watch the video on Lumina’s website):

“It has become clear, not just to economists, but to millions of Americans, that completing some form of higher education is the best unemployment insurance you can find. Now, a college degree is a prerequisite. There’s no guarantee that a student who obtains a college degree is going to get a good job and have a middle-class life. But in the future, you almost certainly will be poor without some kind of postsecondary credential.”

As private companies begin reinvesting and rehiring, community college students can fill those slots, but they’ve got to be ready with credentials and additional skills—like the ones Jeffrey Jorres, CEO of Manpower Inc, outlines:

“Employers have gotten more specific about the combination of skill sets that they are looking for, not only seeking technical capabilities in a job match, but holding out for the person that possesses the additional qualities above and beyond that will help drive their organization forward. This conundrum is upsetting to the ubiquitous job seeker, who will need to take more responsibility for his/her skills development in order to find ways to remain relevant to the market.”

Well-designed training and college-readiness support can give students the foundation and these “additional qualities” that are required in the 21st century workforce. College students who have managed their time in self-paced math emporiums, have simultaneously improved writing skills while in a college-level course, or learned to work as part of a team in learning communities will be better prepared for this workforce. How do you make this case for the business leaders in your community? Tell us what your billboard would say in the comments section!

Alyson Zandt is a Program Associate at MDC.

2 X 2

According to Jeff Bradach, 2 x 2 actually equals 100. A recent article from Bradach in the Stanford Social Innovation Review investigates strategies that expand the impact of organizations well beyond what you’d expect from their size. Rather than just duplicating a program’s structure, high-impact organizations use approaches that allow them to realize their objectives in less conventional ways. Bradach identifies eight concepts that organizations can employ to increase impact without greatly increasing organization size. Here are a few examples of Bradach’s suggested approaches as they play out in DEI colleges:

• Build Networks. Valencia Community College is engaging students and faculty in new ways through learning communities and supplemental instruction. And DEI’s learning network of 15 colleges creates opportunities for idea and resource sharing, which can enhance our effectiveness.
• Develop talent. Patrick Henry Community College is providing faculty professional development focused on cooperative learning. With 95 percent of developmental faculty, both full-time and adjunct, receiving this professional development, PHCC is pollinating the college with active learning strategies. They’ve also opened the Southern Center for Active Learning Excellence to offer similar training to faculty from other institutions.
• Change the Perception of What is Possible. That’s what DEI is all about. We are proving that investing in students that need dev ed is important, and that students can successfully move on to college-level work and a degree. As more decision makers, community leaders, citizens, and potential students see the progress that DEI institutions are making, we’re hopeful that more resources and support will flow to colleges and communities, generating developmental education innovations at non-DEI schools.
• Strengthen the Sector. Remember, the 15 DEI institutions also are part of Achieving the Dream: Community Colleges Count. For the last five years and more, these colleges have been working at the institutional and state level to eliminate policy barriers, improve institutional research capacity, and engage leaders at every level of the college and community. Achieving the Dream’s model of continuous institutional improvement creates an environment that encourages the scaling of evidence-based strategies focused on student success.

One aim of the Developmental Education Initiative is to bring more effective programs to more students that need a jumpstart or a refresh as they tackle college. But like Bradach’s new math, we’re also interested in multiplying student success across the campus and community. The focus of scaling at the community college is to have a sustainable impact on students, faculty, and systems. We’ll be using this blog to share our continued thinking with you on what scaling means and what resources you can use to realize it.


Abby Parcell is MDC's Program Manager for the Developmental Education Initiative.