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.
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