Cowboys and Mavericks and Educators! Oh My!

This week, we’re in Dallas attending D.R.E.A.M., Achieving the Dream’s Annual Meeting on Student Success. We spent Tuesday with the 15 DEI colleges talking about the ideal pathway to completion for students that are underprepared for college-level work. Today, we went to several great sessions—and, sadly, missed some great ones because we haven’t learned how to be in two places at once. Here are some of the highlights:

• This morning, a plenary panel moderated by Eileen Baccus, ATD coach, focused on equity. Steven Murray, Chancellor of Phillips Community College of the University of Arkansas, shared how after several years of engaging the campus in conversations about race and class, Phillips is rolling out a community dialogue about racial reconciliation. Murray said that while the community has some significant tensions, and that there is no other institution as well-suited to start these much needed conversations about how to grow together.  Don Plotts, president of North Central State Community College talked about reaching out to a primarily African American and low-income portion of their community, by opening an Urban Center in a convenient downtown location. With feedback from students and community leaders, they developed the services of the center, which now include a business incubator. Tom Jaynes, executive dean for Student Development and Support of Durham Technical Community College spoke about how DTCC has been pushing for increased equity since they started their ATD journey. Jaynes noted that once you see the data improving, it can be easy to sit back and feel good about a job well done, but there is always more to do. DTCC is working to keep the wind in their sails with a new focus on connecting low-income students to financial aid and benefits. Finally, Millicent Valek, president of Brazosport College, said that because of ATD, her college now treats students as individuals with unique needs. This is a new way of thinking for them, and they are using the equity agenda as a driver for their student success work. Brazosport is sharing that message on campus with a video on equity featuring MDC president David Dodson.

• One of the first concurrent sessions we saw today featured Capital Community College and Housatonic Community College. These Connecticut colleges talked about how implementing the Statway program has given Connecticut community colleges a chance to take the benefits of the ATD core team model into a multi-college team to great effect. They’ve built on ATD data collection, enhancing it by adding additional variables and comparing across colleges; they’ve also seen how direct collaboration between researchers and faculty has enabled them to improve pedagogy.

• We spent part of the afternoon with five Ohio community colleges: Cuyahoga, Eastern Gateway, North Central State, Sinclair, and Zane State. These leader colleges have worked hand-in-hand with the Ohio ATD/DEI state policy and the Ohio Association of Community Colleges to convene regional and statewide meetings of ALL Ohio community colleges. They’re sharing Achieving the Dream core principles, committed leadership, data driven decision making, engagement, and systemic institutional improvement, in hopes that other colleges can realize some of the benefits that ATD colleges have seen. Some of those benefits have been changing the campus conversation, maintaining clarity about a student success agenda, and providing momentum  to pursue that agenda—all of these are particularly important as Ohio adopts a new performance funding system based on specific student achievement points. 

We know you’ll want more details and we’ll be providing them in posts in the coming weeks!

Links we like!

• A new study from CCCSE makes the case for mandatory requirements. Inside Higher Ed has the details: “Community colleges have a growing arsenal of tools that research shows will help students earn credentials—like academic goal-setting, student success courses and tutoring. Yet the study found that relatively few students take advantage of those offerings.”
• Math is a huge barrier to completion for many students. An article from Joanne Jacobs in U.S. News & World Report tackles an important question: are we “overmathing” our students? Jacobs looks at Virginia’s decision to change math requirements for non-STEM students, and she highlights the work of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching to redesign developmental math through Statway and Quantway.
• “I would suggest that it is time to move from a deficit to an asset model of student success. From a model where we keep trying to ‘fix’ our students to one where we turn the mirror on ourselves and consider that we might have to fundamentally transform how we approach the role of math in preparing a competitive workforce.” Check out the full post from Luzelma Canales of the Lone Star College System in Texas.
• Last week, we linked to a few articles on using technology to “flip” the classroom and individualize learning. A new post from Katie McKay on Digital Is reminds us that equal access to technology for students is increasingly important.
• JFF’s response to President Obama’s 2012 State of the Union address reaffirms the principle that “creating integrated, accelerated educational pathways directly tied to the skills needed by regional employers is the best road to success for those struggling to improve their lives.” That’s a statement we can all agree on!

Sir Linksalot

• Have you heard of flipped classrooms? Last week on CNN’s Schools of Thought blog, high school Principal Greg Green explained how his entire school has implemented the flipped class structure:
  

  Teachers record their lectures using screen-capture software (we use Camtasia) and post these lecture videos to a variety of outlets, including our school website, and YouTube. Students watch these videos outside of class on their smartphone, in the school computer lab (which now has extended hours), at home or even in my office if they need to. Now, when students come to class, they’ve already learned about the material and can spend class time working on math problems, writing about the Civil War or working on a science project, with the help of their teacher whenever they need it. This model allows students to seek one-on-one help from their teacher when they have a question, and learn material in an environment that is conducive to their education.

  According to Green, this new structure is really changing the student experience: “Our attendance rate has increased, our discipline rate decreased, and, most importantly, our failure rate—the number of students failing each class—has gone down significantly.” Inside Higher Ed covered a similar style of teaching at Central Michigan University. Would this structure work in a developmental education program?  

• Innovation requires creativity. But when we’re generating new ideas, whether for curriculum design, educational delivery, or strategies for scaling up, how do we identify the good ones? “Taking a break is important,” says the research, “but make sure you do something that makes you happy, as positive moods make us even better at diagnosing the value of our creative work.” 

• How can colleges help students identify credentials with labor-market value? Our friends at Jobs for the Future got a shout-out last week in The New York Times for their Credentials that Work initiative, “which uses new technology that scrapes information from online job postings and provides real-time labor market information.”

• On Tuesday, the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching hosted a webinar with updates on their developmental math work, Statway and Quantway. The presentation slides and webinar recording are available on Carnegie’s website. 

• Diego Navarro, the founder of the Academy for College Excellence, is hosting an interactive webinar on “Supporting the Students of the Future: Retention of Vulnerable & Tentative Students.” You can register now for one of two upcoming sessions: February 29th at 12:30 pm Pacific Time, or March 23rd at 11:00 am Pacific Time.

Mark Your Calendars!

The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching is hosting another free webinar with updates on their developmental math work, Statway and Quantway. The webinar is scheduled for Tuesday, January 24, 2012 at 11am Pacific/2pm Eastern. Here’s a description of the webinar from their website:

During the broadcast, the presenters will: 

• Provide an update on what students and faculty members are experiencing with these new pathways.

• Explain how faculty and others have and can contribute to the development of the materials for these pathways.

• Outline how Carnegie integrates "Productive Persistence" into developmental math courses.

• Reveal how analytics is being used to inform future development.

• Give details on how to get involved with this work in the future.

You can register here.

Guest Post: A Network Approach to Education Improvement

Accelerating Achievement has already featured STATWAY, an effort of Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching to develop a one-year pathway from remedial math to college statistics. Today’s post from Gay Clyburn, associate vice president for public affairs at Carnegie, delves a little deeper into the Foundation’s networked approach to improving developmental math instruction and student outcomes.

The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching is working to help community college students succeed in developmental mathematics. Carnegie aims to double the proportion of students, who, within one year of continuous community college enrollment, are mathematically prepared to succeed in further academic study and/or academic pursuits, regardless of limitations that they may have in language, literacy, and mathematics and their ability, on entry, to navigate college. The $13 million initiative, funded now by six foundations, is building a networked community working on the development of two newly designed mathematics pathways.

The Statistics Pathway (Statway) will move developmental math students to and through transferable college statistics in one year. The Quantitative Literacy Pathway (Quantway) is a one-semester course that will prepare students to take a Quantitative Reasoning or non-STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) college-level course already available at the college, or to enter a vocational specific program requiring mastery of developmental math concepts. Both the Statway and Quantway include an intensive student engagement component within the classroom environment focused on increasing student tenacity, as well as helping students develop tools to navigate college. We are currently working with 30 colleges.

The Network
We are catalyzing and supporting the growth of a Networked Improvement Community (NIC) to develop these two pathways. Specifically, the Carnegie network involves the community college faculty in participating institutions who teach and implement the math pathway, and with Carnegie’s improvement specialists and researchers, tests hypotheses, provide for local adaptations, and over time contribute to the modification of the pathway. The NIC also includes deans, institutional researchers, and others who address the institutional requirements; thinking partners who are those individuals with technical and substantive expertise; Carnegie staff who provide ongoing support and who are documenting the work; and NIC leadership, the formal body that tends to the health and well being of the network itself.

Our major partner in this work is the Dana Center at the University of Texas at Austin, which is developing open access instructional resources organized in a core curriculum with accompanying instructional philosophy. We have also engaged a number of key organizational partners to both guide and help us support the scaling of this work.

The Approach
Carnegie is developing and promoting a Research and Development (R&D) infrastructure that we call Improvement Research that allows us to cull and synthesize the best of what we know from scholarship and practice, rapidly develop and test prospective improvements, deploy what we learn about what works in schools and classrooms, and add to our knowledge to continuously improve the performance of the system.  Beyond leading the co-development of the Statway and Quantway, we are orchestrating a common knowledge development and management system to guide network activity, and make certain that whatever we build and learn becomes a resource to others as these efforts grow to scale. We believe that this approach will not only produce powerful solutions to the challenges of developmental mathematics, but will also offer a prototype of a new infrastructure for research and development. Carnegie’s aim is to support system reforms that will simultaneously impact community college instruction, the field of developmental mathematics and the process of continuous educational improvement.

For more information or to get involved, email Carnegie at pathways@carnegiefoundation.org.

Gay Clyburn is associate vice president, public affairs, at the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. You can download a Carnegie paper about Networked Improvement Communities from the Resources page of the DEI website in the “Curricular and Instructional Revisions” section.

Take a Load Off

We need to sit back and not let the weight of history determine what we’re teaching. The weight of history plays too much of a role in these courses, more than our own best professional judgment, learning sciences, or the needs of the workforce.
--Uri Treisman

Last week, the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching and Learning hosted a webinar about the foundation’s work on Statway and Quantway, two new pathways to help take developmental math students “to and through” transferrable college math in one year. Uri Treisman kicked off the webinar:


Uri Treisman - What's the Problem? from Statway on Vimeo.

The structure of the Carnegie design approach emphasizes the importance of networks that can lift up local innovation and expertise, expand thinking to the systems level, and allow for sharing and building on the ideas of others.

Treisman says, “For the first time in a long time faculty are being asked to innovate, they’re being asked to create new solutions for developmental education, but they’re being asked to do it with what they have in their desk drawers. It is time to actually start using modern improvement science, to give people tools respectfully, so they can learn from each other and work from each other and not everyone has to work in a fog of collective amnesia.”

If we are going to shake off the weight of history and emerge from our collective amnesia, building connections between efforts like Statway and Quantway, DEI, and the desk drawer innovators at other colleges is a must. So, here are a few questions to start the conversation:

• If your college is participating in both DEI and Statway or Quantway, how is your institution linking the initiatives?
• If you’re at a Statway or Quantway college, but not participating in DEI, what’s the most important thing you think the DEI network should know?
• If you’re reimagining developmental education with the tools in your desk drawer, Statway or DEI be damned, what are we missing that we need to know about? There’s a comment section below with plenty of room for your answers!

Abby Parcell is MDC's Program Manager for the Developmental Education Initiative.

Free Statway/Quantway Webinar on Friday, April 1

Don’t forget, the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching is hosting a free webinar this Friday, April 1, to introduce their developmental math work. You can register here. The one hour discussion will cover two new developmental math pathways: Statway and Quantway. Here’s the description from the website:

“Carnegie and its partners are addressing the low success rate of developmental mathematics students by providing alternatives to the current community college mathematical sequence and content. The Statistics Pathway (Statway) is designed to take developmental math students to and through transferable college statistics in one year. Quantway provides an alternate and accelerated pathway with an innovative quantitative literacy focus in which students use mathematics and numerical reasoning to make sense of the world around them.”

We’ll definitely be tuning in!