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.
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