Guest Post: School of One in 26,000?

Yesterday, Mickey Muldoon introduced us to New York City Public Schools’ School of One program. Today, Dr. Kathleen Cleary, Dean and DEI Project Director at Sinclair Community College, explores how this concept might be applied to developmental education at the community college.

I attended the Big Ideas Fest at Half Moon Bay in December and heard an inspiring presentation on the School of One in New York City.  According to its website, “the mission of School of One is to provide students with personalized, effective, and dynamic classroom instruction so that teachers have more time to focus on the quality of their instruction.”  Each student receives a different schedule each day to allow them opportunities to learn in different modalities and to maximize the ways he or she learns best.

I left the festival pondering how the School of One mission might play out in a community college setting, particularly with developmental education students.  I was immediately struck by the challenges of scaling an individualized approach to instruction.  At Sinclair Community College, a 26,000-student campus, we currently offer developmental mathematics in multiple modalities: classroom-based instruction that heavily emphasizes inquiry-based and group learning; online classes to reach students who are unable to come to campus; an intensive boot camp experience for students who only need a quick refresher to catch up on their math readiness; and finally, a technologically-rich lab setting where students learn the material at their own pace, with an instructor and tutors to guide them along the way.  At first glance, the lab setting would seem to be the closest fit with the School of One philosophy, and, in fact, 80% of students surveyed would take a class again in this format.  Their success rates are higher than those for the traditional classroom or online formats, but not all students are able to learn this way, either because they are home-bound, or because they are social learners who benefit from the peer and instructor interaction of the traditional, group-based classroom.  How do we find the best fit for each individual student and scale that for the 7,000 developmental education students we serve?

My current thinking is that we need to become much more sophisticated in our ability to use predictive analytics: a student who places into developmental education after passing Algebra II in high school has completely different needs than a displaced worker who may never have gotten through Algebra in the first place.  We need technology to help us organize the sheer logistics of more individualized instruction, but we also need to take advantage of peer and social learning through processes such as block scheduling, learning communities, and far more robust orientation programs.  Finally, we need to figure out how to build more flexibility into our system, so that if a student discovers he or she is not a good fit with a learning modality, we can quickly move the student to a different type of class and not make him or her sit through an entire term in a form that compromises the student’s ability to succeed.

It would take champions from student services, information technology, and instruction to figure out what it would take for a School of One model to work in a large community college, but the benefits for developmental education students could be substantial.

Kathleen Cleary is Project Director of DEI at Sinclair Community College.