Today’s post comes from Kyle Smith, dean of academic instruction at Western Texas College in Snyder, Texas. WTC joined Achieving the Dream in 2010 and dug into developmental education right off the bat. Below, Kyle shares how he has incorporated techniques he learned as a community college student into WTC’s developmental and vocational offerings to improve student success—and how WTC is now taking the approach to local junior high and high schools in hopes of having an even larger impact on college readiness.
During my high school years, I never gave much thought about going to college. I actually waited until the spring of my senior year to even take the ACT. Based on the results of the ACT, my high school counselor told me that if I did decide to go to college I would be at best a “C”-level student. Looking back, I am certainly surprised that a counselor would make such a negative prophetic statement. However, she initially turned out to be right. Right after my high school graduation I enrolled in a summer college course and made a C. In many ways, I felt as if I had landed right about where I was supposed to. I then accepted a partial athletic scholarship to a community college and this is where academically things changed dramatically for me.
This particular community college’s counseling office sponsored a series of workshops that dealt with very specific academic skill sets. I had never been exposed to SQ3R; OK4R; Cornell notes; the 80/20 Rule; the LOCI system of memory; and backward planning to name a few. Why had I not heard of any of these approaches before? Where had they been? I was very hungry for them. I began to apply some of them almost immediately and they made all the difference in the world for me. Through repetition and practice, I ultimately developed a very specialized set of academic skills that enabled me to graduate with honors in all of my subsequent academic pursuits. For me, these skill sets represented a message of hope.
As a higher education administrator, I understand the importance of having high expectations for students. However, I also understand just how critical it is to provide students some of the tools necessary to meet those expectations. The development of a college readiness course that includes the aforementioned skill sets has been an important initiative at Western Texas College. We have seen great results in pairing such content with developmental coursework. We began pairing the readiness course with fast-tracked developmental math courses in 2009. The 2009 successful completion rate for traditional developmental math courses was just under 40 percent; the successful completion rate for the fast-track courses in Spring 2011 was 70 percent.
We are also integrating the college readiness content into vocational programs, including our Licensed Vocational Nursing curriculum. We understand that information without application is rather worthless for most students. We also know that they need to apply what they have learned in relevant ways. We are essentially trying to knock out two birds with one stone: for example, a child care major referred to a developmental reading or English course can apply the Cornell note-taking approach to program specific content that s/he will encounter in a later course. Perhaps, the student applies Cornell to an article about Piaget's stages of cognitive reasoning. Such integration requires coordination between program chairs and a developmental faculty member who has completed the academic skill sets training. At WTC, we initially ran the academic skill sets class as a stand-alone class; while that worked well, it was difficult to secure the funding to continue the courses on a long-term basis. We are now diligently working on integrating the content into the vocational curricula, training the respective program chairs and vocational instructors in the academic skills content. Once they’ve been trained, they recommend where the content can be introduced in the existing vocational curricula. We’re still in the early stages, but so far so good!
This summer we will be holding train-the-trainer workshops on the academic skill set content. We will have junior high and high school faculty there as well as our own college faculty. There is a hunger for specifics – items that students can start applying in class the very next day. If our colleagues at the secondary level can introduce these skill sets to students before they come to our doors then we are well on our way to truly changing lives for the better.
Kyle Smith is dean of academic instruction at Western Texas College in Snyder, Texas.
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