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Wednesday, November 23, 2011
Gobble Gobble
This Thanksgiving, we're thankful for evidence-based practices:
Enjoy the holiday!
Friday, November 18, 2011
Linkums!
- On Monday, the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching published an update on their Pathways work. There are 1,200 students enrolled in 60 sections of Statway™ across the country, and Quantway goes live in classroom beginning in January. Early student focus group results show that Statway™ is transforming the student experience.
… We actually read an article about how we can learn math, in the statistics class—like how to grow your brain and stuff like that. … It kind of gave me hope. It was something that we did at the beginning of this quarter. … I was like, ‘Okay, I can grow my brain.'
- The November issue of AAC&U News features Queensborough Community College’s Freshman Academies, a new enrollment strategy that integrates academics and student affairs to ensure new students get plenty of individual advising and attention.
- This week, EdWeek ran an article about overhauling the GED to make it a more effective pathway to postsecondary education. Another EdWeek article this week focused on how Kentucky is using data systems to align K-12 with postsecondary.
- Jack Rotman blogged over the weekend about his session at the AMATYC conference on the New Life Project, complete with slides comparing the New Life curriculum with the math emporium model.
- CNN has a new education blog.
From pre-kindergarten through college, for parents, teachers, students—and anyone who has ever been a student—Schools of Thought offers food for thought in the national conversation on education.
Join the conversation and make sure they include community colleges and developmental education in the mix!
- Earlier this month, The Quick & the Ed blogged about California’s priority registration proposal. (And they included a clip from Community, which makes it an A+ post for some folks around here.)
Wednesday, November 16, 2011
Guest Post: Getting the Message Right
It’s time for the second installment of “SCALERS: Round 2.” Originally created by Paul Bloom at the Duke University Fuqua School of Business Center for the Advancement of Social Entrepreneurship, the SCALERS model identifies seven organizational capacities that support the successful scaling of a social enterprise: Staffing, Communicating, Alliance-building, Lobbying, Earnings Generation, Replicating Impact, and Stimulating Market Forces. (You can read an introduction to each driver in our first SCALERS series.)
Now, we’re asking DEI colleges about how particular SCALERS drivers have contributed to their scaling efforts. Last month, we looked at staffing. Today, Becky Samberg of Housatonic Community College in Bridgeport, CT, shows what HCC is learning about how changing the message can change behavior.
Remember playing the childhood game of telephone? As the message was whispered from one child’s ear to another, one thing was certain: the game always ended with peals of laughter when the message whispered by the first child never was the same message repeated by the last in the chain. From this childhood game, we learn a very valuable lesson: communication needs to be deliberate and precise.
In our DEI work, we strive to be deliberate and precise in communicating with our HCC community about the initiatives on which we are working. Over the last year, however, lower-than-expected success rates in self-paced courses led us to change how we communicate to our students the nature of the self-paced program and the unique expectations of students enrolled in these courses.
Our self-paced program began in 2007 with developmental math courses. Originally, students could enroll in self-paced math courses—what we then called “Open Entry/Open Exit”—at any time in the semester and exit whenever they finished the course. Students also could start the next course in the same semester. We learned, however, that “Open Entry/Open Exit” was a misnomer. Students were not accelerating as quickly or as successfully as we anticipated, and students’ financial aid obligations and status as a full- or part-time impeded their ability to move from one course to the next during a semester. As we considered these challenges, we concluded that the individualized instructional format and our expectations of students in these courses were not made explicit by the Open Entry/Open Exit title, so we made the following changes:
Becky Samberg is the chair of developmental studies and DEI director at Housatonic Community College.
Now, we’re asking DEI colleges about how particular SCALERS drivers have contributed to their scaling efforts. Last month, we looked at staffing. Today, Becky Samberg of Housatonic Community College in Bridgeport, CT, shows what HCC is learning about how changing the message can change behavior.
Remember playing the childhood game of telephone? As the message was whispered from one child’s ear to another, one thing was certain: the game always ended with peals of laughter when the message whispered by the first child never was the same message repeated by the last in the chain. From this childhood game, we learn a very valuable lesson: communication needs to be deliberate and precise.
In our DEI work, we strive to be deliberate and precise in communicating with our HCC community about the initiatives on which we are working. Over the last year, however, lower-than-expected success rates in self-paced courses led us to change how we communicate to our students the nature of the self-paced program and the unique expectations of students enrolled in these courses.
Our self-paced program began in 2007 with developmental math courses. Originally, students could enroll in self-paced math courses—what we then called “Open Entry/Open Exit”—at any time in the semester and exit whenever they finished the course. Students also could start the next course in the same semester. We learned, however, that “Open Entry/Open Exit” was a misnomer. Students were not accelerating as quickly or as successfully as we anticipated, and students’ financial aid obligations and status as a full- or part-time impeded their ability to move from one course to the next during a semester. As we considered these challenges, we concluded that the individualized instructional format and our expectations of students in these courses were not made explicit by the Open Entry/Open Exit title, so we made the following changes:
- We adopted the name “Self-Paced,” emphasizing the focus on individualized mathematics and English instruction. This new course name more explicitly communicates that students enrolling in these courses will have individualized instruction at a self-determined pace.
- We defined our expectations of students and developed an orientation so students hear a consistent message from their instructors and the Self-Paced studies lab coordinator, who conducts the in-class orientation and oversees students’ visits to the lab.
- We made lab visits mandatory, deliberately delivering the message that self-paced does not mean no pace, and regular engagement with the course material is essential to student success.
- We re-designed the courses, communicating to students their obligation to make consistent progress throughout the semester and establishing the expectation that students work toward the goal of successfully completing the course within or in less than a traditional semester.
- We created a schedule for completing the self-paced courses in a single semester, sharing it with students, and embedding it in the course software. Students are told the pace at which they need to work and the benchmarks they need to reach to successfully complete the course in one semester.
Becky Samberg is the chair of developmental studies and DEI director at Housatonic Community College.
Thursday, November 10, 2011
A Little of This; A Little of That
The Institute for the Study of Knowledge Management in Higher Education (ISKME) is offering scholarships for their 2011 Big Ideas Fest. The conference is scheduled for December 4-7 in Half Moon Bay, California. The website describes the event as “a unique three-day immersion into collaboration and design with a focus on modeling cutting-edge thinking in K-20 education.” Last year, there were a few DEI folks in the house; Kathleen Cleary from Sinclair Community College described some of her experiences here on the DEI blog.
Registration for the conference is $695 (not including hotel and travel), but ISKME scholarships can cover some or all of that amount. Applications are due next Tuesday, November 15. You can link to the scholarship form here. ISKME encourages faculty, staff, and students to apply.
***
We’ve featured the Chaffey College Opening Doors to Excellence (ODE) program a couple of times on Accelerating Achievement. ODE is a program designed to help probationary students get back in good standing and increase their chances for college success. This month, MDRC released four-year findings from their study of the program. While we were particularly interested in how Chaffey had scaled the program to reach their entire target population, now you can read more about program outcomes and cost-effectiveness. You can link to the full report here.
***
Last week, Bruce Vandal from ECS and Brad Phillips of the Institute for Evidence-Based Change commented on the importance of aligning K-12 and postsecondary education at the state-level, especially as states tackle common core standards implementation. You can read a little more about—and link to—their Education Week article here on the Getting Past Go blog.
Registration for the conference is $695 (not including hotel and travel), but ISKME scholarships can cover some or all of that amount. Applications are due next Tuesday, November 15. You can link to the scholarship form here. ISKME encourages faculty, staff, and students to apply.
***
We’ve featured the Chaffey College Opening Doors to Excellence (ODE) program a couple of times on Accelerating Achievement. ODE is a program designed to help probationary students get back in good standing and increase their chances for college success. This month, MDRC released four-year findings from their study of the program. While we were particularly interested in how Chaffey had scaled the program to reach their entire target population, now you can read more about program outcomes and cost-effectiveness. You can link to the full report here.
***
Last week, Bruce Vandal from ECS and Brad Phillips of the Institute for Evidence-Based Change commented on the importance of aligning K-12 and postsecondary education at the state-level, especially as states tackle common core standards implementation. You can read a little more about—and link to—their Education Week article here on the Getting Past Go blog.
Thursday, November 3, 2011
Guest Post: Making Space for Good Decisions
Rob Johnstone made a presentation at the July ATD/DEI State Policy meeting in Florida; we thought Rob’s work with the RP Group, and specifically a project called BRIC (Bridging Research, Information & Culture), would be of interest to the Accelerating Achievement crowd, so we asked him to guest post today. Below, Rob reflects on the importance of carving out time for crucial exploratory conversations—and introduces some tools to help you do the same.
Greetings from sunny California, where I sit in my office at Skyline College just south of San Francisco, with what the hotel industry would term a “partial ocean view.” This means, on the 45 days a year it’s not shrouded in fog, if I squint, I can see a sliver of blue between some trees.
The RP Group is a nonprofit organization that strengthens community colleges’ ability to gather, analyze, and act on information to improve student success. We provide research, evaluation, professional development, and technical assistance services that support evidence-based decision-making and inquiry. Because our work is defined and conducted by community college practitioners, the RP Group provides a unique, on-the ground perspective on complex issues within the California community college system, and, through our work on Completion by Design and the Aspen Prize, across the country.
The unifying thread is a desire to engage all of the groups working on a campus—faculty, staff, administrators, and IR professionals—in developing deep cultures of inquiry that serve as the foundation for improving student outcomes. We define “culture of inquiry” as the institutional capacity to support open, honest, and collaborative dialogue that strengthens the institution and student outcomes. In practice, this means we encourage a variety of people across the campus to ask a wider collection of questions, and then use the evidence gathered to inform campus decision-making.
As I reflect on these projects, I’m struck both by the similarities in the issues we face and the vast array of structures and approaches colleges have put in place to address these issues. The problems we wrestle with in the community college sector are complex and challenging, and there are no silver bullets (at least none that we’ve found!). The analyses we conduct don’t speak for themselves, and there are no self-evident answers. Given this, the strongest take-away from our work is how critical it is to structurally create the time and space for deep conversations, to explore the available data and evidence, and to extract insight and meaning that forms the foundation for action. These conversations work best when a wide range of participants from different parts of the college are brought to the table to explore the data.
As important as it is, in our work, we’ve found that creating that time and space for critical inquiry and data exploration conversations is challenging. Colleges are already strapped for their most precious resource—time!—and creating yet another committee for this work can be difficult. We’ve seen colleges be more successful when they re-purpose existing venues for these types of discussions, such as department and division meetings; committees devoted to developmental education, college success, first-year experience, or institutional planning; academic senates, and even the President’s cabinet.
In each of these venues, we’ve found that many participants actually welcome the shift, as these meetings tend to be bureaucratic and process-driven; re-focusing on research, evidence of student success, and outcomes is often energizing and engages the participants’ passion. This also has the benefit of weaving the work into the fiber of the college, rather than encapsulating it in one committee. Clearly, college leadership has to prioritize the importance of such a change in these meetings or committees, but we have seen it work in practice.
For ideas on the kinds of questions to ask and ways to translate the answers into decisions, take a look at some of the resources we’ve put together on our website. I’d start with the BRIC Inquiry Guides or the “Evidenced-based Decision-making” section of our resources page. Colleges have used the discussion questions from the Inquiry Guides in department meetings and other campus committees to start conversations that open the door to future inquiry into practices, structures, and student success data.
In the end, we have to translate the results of our collective inquiry into action. The type of research and inquiry in which we engage is directional. At some point, in the words of Elphaba from the musical Wicked, we have to “trust our instincts, close our eyes, and leap.” In our world, “instinct” refers to the collective and deep subject-matter expertise that we have amassed at the colleges, married with a deep process of inquiry into the data and evidence. In taking the leap, we add to our collective knowledge-base—and quite often, we learn more when our initiatives relatively fail than when they succeed.
Please feel free to contact me directly at rjohnstone@rpgroup.org with any comments or questions.
Rob Johnstone is senior research fellow, Research & Planning Group for California Community Colleges and dean of research and planning, Skyline College
Greetings from sunny California, where I sit in my office at Skyline College just south of San Francisco, with what the hotel industry would term a “partial ocean view.” This means, on the 45 days a year it’s not shrouded in fog, if I squint, I can see a sliver of blue between some trees.
The RP Group is a nonprofit organization that strengthens community colleges’ ability to gather, analyze, and act on information to improve student success. We provide research, evaluation, professional development, and technical assistance services that support evidence-based decision-making and inquiry. Because our work is defined and conducted by community college practitioners, the RP Group provides a unique, on-the ground perspective on complex issues within the California community college system, and, through our work on Completion by Design and the Aspen Prize, across the country.
The unifying thread is a desire to engage all of the groups working on a campus—faculty, staff, administrators, and IR professionals—in developing deep cultures of inquiry that serve as the foundation for improving student outcomes. We define “culture of inquiry” as the institutional capacity to support open, honest, and collaborative dialogue that strengthens the institution and student outcomes. In practice, this means we encourage a variety of people across the campus to ask a wider collection of questions, and then use the evidence gathered to inform campus decision-making.
As I reflect on these projects, I’m struck both by the similarities in the issues we face and the vast array of structures and approaches colleges have put in place to address these issues. The problems we wrestle with in the community college sector are complex and challenging, and there are no silver bullets (at least none that we’ve found!). The analyses we conduct don’t speak for themselves, and there are no self-evident answers. Given this, the strongest take-away from our work is how critical it is to structurally create the time and space for deep conversations, to explore the available data and evidence, and to extract insight and meaning that forms the foundation for action. These conversations work best when a wide range of participants from different parts of the college are brought to the table to explore the data.
As important as it is, in our work, we’ve found that creating that time and space for critical inquiry and data exploration conversations is challenging. Colleges are already strapped for their most precious resource—time!—and creating yet another committee for this work can be difficult. We’ve seen colleges be more successful when they re-purpose existing venues for these types of discussions, such as department and division meetings; committees devoted to developmental education, college success, first-year experience, or institutional planning; academic senates, and even the President’s cabinet.
In each of these venues, we’ve found that many participants actually welcome the shift, as these meetings tend to be bureaucratic and process-driven; re-focusing on research, evidence of student success, and outcomes is often energizing and engages the participants’ passion. This also has the benefit of weaving the work into the fiber of the college, rather than encapsulating it in one committee. Clearly, college leadership has to prioritize the importance of such a change in these meetings or committees, but we have seen it work in practice.
For ideas on the kinds of questions to ask and ways to translate the answers into decisions, take a look at some of the resources we’ve put together on our website. I’d start with the BRIC Inquiry Guides or the “Evidenced-based Decision-making” section of our resources page. Colleges have used the discussion questions from the Inquiry Guides in department meetings and other campus committees to start conversations that open the door to future inquiry into practices, structures, and student success data.
In the end, we have to translate the results of our collective inquiry into action. The type of research and inquiry in which we engage is directional. At some point, in the words of Elphaba from the musical Wicked, we have to “trust our instincts, close our eyes, and leap.” In our world, “instinct” refers to the collective and deep subject-matter expertise that we have amassed at the colleges, married with a deep process of inquiry into the data and evidence. In taking the leap, we add to our collective knowledge-base—and quite often, we learn more when our initiatives relatively fail than when they succeed.
Please feel free to contact me directly at rjohnstone@rpgroup.org with any comments or questions.
Rob Johnstone is senior research fellow, Research & Planning Group for California Community Colleges and dean of research and planning, Skyline College
Tuesday, November 1, 2011
Adding It Up
In yesterday’s Community College Week, Paul Bradley’s cover story was all about developmental math. Bradley highlights a number of Achieving the Dream colleges that are working hard to solve the developmental math puzzle—and seeing promising results. Of particular interest is the description of the Montgomery County Community College redesign of the lowest-level developmental math course curriculum. Rather than the traditional topical approach to arithmetic instruction, MCCC’s new course, “Concepts of Numbers,” begins with an introduction to the history of math; students then focus more on understanding concepts (addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division), rather than memorizing and doing drills (the dreaded “plug and chug!”) Students solve problems together—and they’re succeeding at much higher rates. In spring 2010, seven faculty taught the new course; their students’ success rate was 60 percent, compared with 40 percent in the traditional course. This year at MCCC all introductory courses are using the new curriculum. While there are still challenges, like aligning the new curriculum with subsequent courses, it looks like this new approach to instruction is going to stick at MCCC.
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