You Can't Handle the Links

• College strategic plans for increasing student success are by nature long-term efforts, so concrete measures of progress often take years to appear. What do you do when your work to “move the needle” is slow going, or when initiative fatigue sets in at your institution? According to Inside Higher Ed, Monroe Community College has “started a series of modest but tangible 100-day projects to improve the college.” These projects are intended as small steps toward larger goals, but they also foster broad engagement and keep motivation high. Their first project is to “streamline the application and enrollment process so that prospective students have to create one password instead of three.” As blogger Dean Dad points out, this idea requires widespread institutional buy-in. If people don’t take it seriously, it won’t work. Wondering how to get that buy-in? Nick Bekas of Valencia Colleges offers his advice on building alliances in an Accelerating Achievement post earlier this year. 
• A substantial portion of our nation’s workforce is unemployed or underemployed, but many companies can’t find the workers they need to fill high-skill jobs. Why are we struggling to train workers for existing positions when so many are in need of work? Maureen Conway of the Aspen Institute says that workforce training and education programs don’t do enough to address the real-world challenges adult students face. She sees a need for increased funding and budgetary flexibility for integrated student support services. Check out Colin Austin’s guest post on an approach that weaves together education and training, income supports, and financial services. Another reason that we can’t fill those open positions? It isn’t readily apparent to students or colleges what employers are looking for. Jobs for the Future’s Credentials that Work initiative uses real-time labor market information to help students choose credentials that will get them jobs, and to help institutions craft programs with local labor market value.  
• Last week in The Chronicle of Higher Ed, developmental English professor Brian Hall of Cuyahoga Community College (a DEI Institution) shared some insight into “What Really Matters to Working Students.” Frustrated by students’ seemingly constant absence and inattention, Hall asked one of his developmental English classes to explain why so few students are successful. The biggest reason his students gave: the difficulty of balancing academics with life. Between work schedules and family responsibilities, many students feel that their motivation to do well in class is eclipsed by unforeseen hurdles. While developmental educators can’t eliminate these hurdles (see the previous bullet for what colleges can do), Hall and his students recommend ways professors can keep students on track, and caution against behavior that could knock them off course permanently. They propose that professors should make expectations and rules apparent from the start, treat students with the respect they require in return, make class work relevant and engaging, and show students that it is ok to make mistakes if you learn from them. 
• The College Board has released a new “web based tool that provides quick and easy access to national, state and initiative-level data that describe the progress and success of community college students.” The Completion Arch establishes indicators for five areas: enrollment, developmental education placement, progress, transfer and completion, and workforce preparation and employment outcomes. You can filter the indicators by data source, state, and student characteristics. The site is easy to navigate, so check it out for yourself! 
• The Hartford Courant ran an op-ed from the Community College Research Center at Columbia University last week on Connecticut’s recent developmental education legislation. Tom Bailey, Katherine Hughes, and Shana Smith Jaggers expressed their concerns over the potential negative impact that the legislation could have on students in need of significant skill development before they are ready for college-level coursework. They also noted their concerns about buy-in from college faculty and staff: “A policy that gives community college practitioners flexibility and support to try out new models — and that includes accountability measures to accelerate real change — would make them far more likely to embrace reforms on an institutional and state level.”

Guest Post: Allied Forces

Today’s post is our third installment of “SCALERS: Round 2.” Originally created by Paul Bloom at the Duke University Fuqua School of Business’s 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. So far, we’ve covered staffing and communicating. Below, Nick Bekas of Valencia College in Orlando, Florida, shares what he’s learned about successful alliance-building over the years.

Ten years ago, we had an initiative at Valencia focused on developmental math. It failed. However, it did not fail because of its ineffectiveness in improving student learning. It failed because of people, and no one person could be blamed. It was really an organizational failure. I watched from the sidelines as a promising initiative that showed real learning gains for students unraveled because the key players never developed working relationships. (Note: Watching from the sidelines makes you part of the failure. Had I stepped on the field and tripped someone, I might have made a difference.) One would think that professors who are committed to learning could put aside philosophical differences or perceived slights for the sake of improving student learning. This one failure taught me a very important lesson about the importance of building alliances. All relationships are personal even if they are professional. In my checkered past at Valencia directing a variety of initiatives both successful and not so successful, here is what I have learned about building alliances.

1. Find the acid drippers.
We use this term for people at our institution who will criticize everything even if they proposed it. By seeking their advice and participation, I head off issues down the road. This is not to say that we will agree on the direction and scope of the project or that they will actively participate, but it does make them part of the conversation and validates their voice. I don’t try and convert them; I listen to them, hear what they have to say, and tell them how they can help. If they choose not to, it’s on them, but at least I tried. I have found that I get less interference and more cooperation even though it is mostly passive. And maybe on the next project, they will participate.

2. Engage people on the ideas, not just the process or the product.
If I want an initiative to get off the ground, I don’t talk just about the initiative. I focus on the ideas informing the initiative and get people to have conversation about the ideas. When you give someone a finished product and ask them to comment on it, you have already divested them from it. Educational initiatives are not new products; you are not showing them the latest version of a Snickers bar and asking for comment. You are asking their opinion on something they are experts on, so they want to be part of the process, not just the product. Ideas excite people.

3. Build on natural alliances.
You have to know your institution and your people. Find people of like mind and purpose and put them at the core of your work. I am not advocating for a “clone” army, but for a group of people who are philosophically aligned with the goals of your project. This group should be the “true believers” who help you shape the scope and direction of your work. You can then use them as “subversive” agents to help build support for your project. The director of a project or the lead on a project is often at a disadvantage when it comes to getting buy-in simply because he or she is the face of the project and not a person. I am not “Nick” but DEI. However, someone else talking about DEI is perceived differently and may get more of a response. A project director is perceived as having an agenda, which is true, but sometimes this perception precludes engagement with different groups, especially if it is not immediately clear how the goals of the initiative align with their everyday work.

4. Tap the “newbies” and “oldies.”
New faculty are always willing to participate and bring fresh ideas to the game. They see things through a different lens because they have not been part of the organization long enough to have been assimilated into its culture. They are also willing to be “exploited” for a small stipend and food because they are excited to be part of something, and if they are adjuncts, they need the small stipend and food. Also, veteran faculty are sometimes not involved because they are not asked to be. You can’t assume that they just don’t want to participate because they don’t respond to an all call. You have to give a personal invitation and tell them why you need their experience and expertise.

5. Be persistent and consistent.
I learned this from my kids. It applies to other forms of life as well. People crave consistency and reward persistence. I don’t stalk, but I do suddenly show up at an office to say, “Hi.”  You have to work at building relationships, and you have to be consistent in your message. This is the only way to change behaviors and to get wider participation. I have failed at this with my kids up to this point, but I have been pretty good with my colleagues.

Nick Bekas is DEI project director and professor of English at Valencia College.

SCALERS Series: A is for Alliance-Building

Welcome to the third week of our series exploring the seven drivers of the SCALERS model, a framework of organizational capacities that are essential for successfully scaling up effective programs. If you’re joining us for the first time, check out the series intro and the posts on the first two drivers, Staffing and Communicating.

We all need somebody to lean on. Alliance-building, the third driver of the SCALERS model, focuses on the importance of a network of individuals and groups that will support your scaling effort. As defined by Paul Bloom and Aaron Chatterji, the model’s creators from the Fuqua School of Business at Duke University, alliance-building is “the effectiveness with which the organization has forged partnerships, coalitions, joint ventures, and other linkages to bring about desired social changes.” Colleges need the same ability to create partnerships and coalitions, engaging the necessary parties to support the expansion of a particular strategy.

Start by conducting an analysis of potential alliances that you could build to increase the likelihood of successful scaling up. These can be existing or new relationships, and can include individuals or groups representing faculty, staff, students, and departments. It might be people outside of the college, too. Consider parties that will be a champion for the work, as well as ones that are likely to resist change. If you invite those who could present roadblocks to participate in the planning process early on, you may prevent them from turning into opposition.

Once you have identified the necessary parties, develop a plan for engaging each group or individual. Secure commitments of implementation support from as many as possible. To do this, you’ll need to have an individual on your team who has the necessary positional authority to convene and invite new allies to participate. As the program expansion begins, put a system in place to provide for regular convenings to keep allies informed about program progress and changes. Your alliance-building plan should be informed by your plan for the other SCALERS drivers, especially communicating, demonstrating impact, and sustaining engagement.

We’ve blogged previously about an example of effective alliance-building. In April, Karen Scheid, director of the Developmental Education Initiative for the Ohio Board of Regents, described Ohio’s efforts to align adult basic and literacy education (ABLE) programs with developmental education. This effort has required the integration of the state policy team, the colleges, and the local basic education providers. As Karen told us, this alliance has already started to bear fruit: “Since the launch of the pilot at the end of July 2010, 22 of Ohio’s 23 community colleges and their ABLE partners have submitted agreements for colleges to make ABLE referrals for students who score below an agreed level on a placement test.”

Check back tomorrow for a guest post from Gay Clyburn, associate vice president for public affairs at Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, to learn more about how Carnegie is using alliance-building to perfect and scale an initiative to develop a one-year pathway from remedial math to college statistics.