Guest Post: Choose Your Own Adventure

Today’s post comes from Sharon Miller, professor of transitional English at Lone Star College-CyFair in Cypress, Texas, outside of Houston. The Lone Star Community College District joined Achieving the Dream in 2006. Sharon’s post describes a classroom-focused intervention that has improved student success in CyFair’s transitional (or developmental) English department.

When an Achieving the Dream pilot at Lone Star College’s CyFair campus resulted in a 7 percent increase in overall student success, it got our attention. Applying what we learned, our success rates have continued to improve to above the 90th percentile of national benchmarks because the project is affordable, do-able, scalable, and sustainable to any discipline, anywhere. The secret: target the most important contact a student has with an institution: the classroom.

A Non-Boutique Project
Two years ago, our college system’s Achieving the Dream grant funding was coming to an end just as the Transitional English department was charged with devising a pilot to improve student success. The state legislature was slashing budgets just as our college system was experiencing an “enrollment tsunami” that hit our campus particularly hard. With a 29/71 full-time to adjunct professor ratio, there was no one available to take on a new project and no space to host a boutique student success center. We needed an ATD intervention that would work for us.
    
The Classroom-Embedded Intervention Pilot
Our Classroom-Embedded Intervention Project was “choose your own adventure” style. The concept was deceptively simple:

• Ask the faculty to share what strategies were working to improve student success.
• List the best and distribute them.
• Track out-of-class interventions and withdrawals on student profile cards. 
• Look at the results measured by end-of-course grades and performance on System Common Final Exams. 

Sharing success strategies for our ATD pilot was intense, energizing, and fun. Faculty circulated ideas via e-mail, and adjunct instructors joined the conversation. Soon we had an amazing list of strategies which we distributed at our spring kick-off meeting and posted in our online repository, The Sandbox. We all started the semester focused on good teaching and intensively intervening according to each instructor’s best professional judgment. Interventions were recorded on a student profile card that also included student contact information.

Analyze Results; Build On What Works
When student success rose 7 percent, we knew that we were on the right track. Looking at the student profile cards helped us to see patterns in interventions and withdrawals, and we have used this information to more carefully devise targeted interventions. We continue to share resources on our online learning repository and have added a Saturday work day a month into the semester to focus on pedagogy. Week 11 of each semester is now designated as “Advising Week.” Instructors use a one-page handout to tell students about the next course in their sequence, course delivery options, and answer questions. 

Ongoing professional development is imperative and challenging. Many of us are pursuing the International Alliance for Learning Certification in Accelerated Learning, and we are sharing the program’s researched-based, brain-friendly methods that improve student success and retention.

CyFair’s has expanded the Classroom Embedded Intervention throughout the Transitional English department. The Transitional Math and ESOL Departments are considering implementing the approach in the fall semester, and plans are under way for a presentation at an all-college faculty forum on student success. Faculty will have an opportunity to learn about what the Transitional English department has accomplished and to consider how the approach can be expanded college-wide in appropriate, discipline-specific ways. 

Interested?
You are invited to download our list of interventions, advising handout, and contacts for accelerated learning, which are posted on my faculty webpage. Together, we can achieve the dream one classroom at a time!

Sharon Miller is a professor of transitional English at Lone Star-CyFair. The Classroom-Embedded Intervention has been nominated for a Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board STAR Award.