Improving Student Success at Sinclair CC: Lessons from Three Initiatives

In today’s post, Kathleen Cleary, associate provost for student success at Sinclair Community College, recaps her presentation from the June 2012 Conference on Developmental Education sponsored by the National Center for Postsecondary Research. Kathleen recounts how Sinclair’s student success efforts have evolved through the institutional change work of Achieving the Dream and the Developmental Education Initiative, setting them up for statewide transformation as part of the Completion By Design network.

When Sinclair began our work with Achieving the Dream (ATD) in 2005, we opted to infuse ATD principles and goals into standing college processes and systems to avoid perceptions that this was an “add-on” to existing work. The strength of this work is that we approached improving student success, particularly for underserved populations, as a way of life at the college, rather than a program that would have a beginning and ending. With the Developmental Education Initiative (DEI), we pushed the envelope of possibility even further and began to make bolder, more aggressive changes in our pedagogy, structures, and curriculum. When we learned that we were granted funding for Completion by Design (CBD), we took a different approach and made the conscious decision to be high profile, even creating a statewide Completion by Design office on campus. The evolution of our student success work is built on the solid, data-driven, culture-changing work of ATD, through groundbreaking efforts in DEI, to a systemic, campus-wide ownership of the need to move the needle on student outcomes in Completion by Design.

The gains for Achieving the Dream centered on use of data, policy changes, and a commitment to enhancing teaching and learning. Faculty began tracking student success in gatekeeper courses in developmental and college-level English, reading, and math. When faculty saw their success rates, they began to experiment with new ways of teaching and structuring courses. Policy changes such as the no late registration policy were watershed moments for the college as we made a cultural shift from an access-centric institution to an access and success focus. Another hallmark of our ATD work was the creation of the Center for Teaching and Learning, which has provided professional development on topics including student engagement, diversity in the classroom, and increasing student success and completion. Through such DEI initiatives as boot camps, math modules, accelerated English, and early support in high school, we began to accelerate students’ progress through developmental education, while continually tracking student success into the next course in the sequence. The work of ATD and DEI became the cornerstone for Completion by Design both at Sinclair and across the state of Ohio. The goal is to create a seamless pathway for students that helps them graduate in higher numbers and more quickly, with fewer excess credits.

The four strategic priorities for the state have their roots in the ATD/DEI colleges of Ohio:

1.    Academic Program Redesign and Contextualization
2.    Accelerating Students through the Pathway
3.    Integrated Student Support and Development
4.    Institutional and State Policies

All four of these priorities have already been addressed through the ATD and DEI colleges in Ohio and are the natural choices for the state’s continuing student success work with the Completion by Design colleges. While Sinclair is the only Ohio CBD college to be involved in all three initiatives, the work reflects the lessons learned by colleges across the state in all three initiatives. It is an exciting time to be working with community colleges as students across Ohio and the nation are poised to graduate in greater numbers as a result of the exciting findings of this work.