New Workshop Helps Peer Leaders Keep Students On Course!

Today’s post comes from Ruth Silon, executive director of the Ohio Association of Community Colleges’ Student Success Center and former DEI director and English faculty member at Cuyahoga Community College (CCC). Ruth describes how CCC combined what they learned from two of their DEI initiatives to increase the impact of student leaders on their campuses.

As Cuyahoga Community College’s Developmental Education Initiative (DEI) grant came to an end, making good use of the remaining funds was not a challenge. The College’s grant used peer leaders in two of its major initiatives: Supplemental Instruction (SI) and Peer Mentoring. For another initiative, a redesign of Math 0850, Skip Downing’s On Course principles were a major part of the course. Most math faculty who taught the course attended On Course Level I and II workshops during the college’s involvement with Achieving the Dream and DEI. During DEI, the workshops were offered to all faculty.

Two occurrences led us to the decision to hold an On Course workshop for student peer leaders. First, during the second year of DEI, English professor Mary Ward, who used On Course in her class, asked if her SI leader, Tiffany, could be trained. Having Tiffany in the workshop with the faculty was a real benefit as her presence added a valuable perspective to the training. Instead of just talking about On Course in an abstract setting, we talked about its principles and their value for students with a student. Tiffany then went on to promote On Course as an SI Leader with students in her English class. Then, during the third year of DEI, Robin Middleton from Jamestown Community College (JCC) facilitated the Level II workshop. From her we learned about a new workshop “Creating a Culture of Success: On Course for Front Line Staff.” In order to promote culture change across the college, front-line staff who work in admissions and financial aid were trained in On Course principles and techniques. Although a workshop for front-line peer student leaders had not been tested, Skip and Robin agreed to put it together.

On September 7, 2012, over forty student leaders from multiple Cuyahoga Community College (CCC) campuses attended the one-day workshop. The students were supplemental instruction leaders, student ambassadors, peer advocates with the C2C program, student coaches with Cleveland Transfer Connection, and an AmeriCorps coach. The students dove deep into discussions about the following topics: “Eight Choices of Successful Students,” “On Course Core Beliefs,” “The Language of Responsibility,” “Victim versus Creator Language,” and “Staying On Course When at a Fork in the Road of Life.” They practiced working with each other on the wise choice process and the problem resolution process. One of the students told me that she worries about students who are very belligerent: “They don’t know how to react to anything except by getting angry and using their street behavior.”  Student leaders quickly saw that using the wise choice process would slow down students’ reaction process and get them to think more critically. Another student said, “I think On Course will help me save my marriage!” 

The group activity that impressed many attendees was “Creating a Mission Statement for Front Line Staff.”  The task was to create a statement of “purpose you would be proud to post in your work space for all to see…. a Mission Statement that will guide your important work with students.”  Below are a few statements from the student collaboration:

• To serve as a support system with students to help them get their Associate’s Degree and achieve a rewarding career
• To provide an environment where students feel that they are part of a community
• Help students to learn and achieve the tools to be successful students and citizens

Giving these leaders the opportunity to put into words what their goals are and recognize how important their position is was quite moving. They felt empowered and then would go off to empower students. Clearly, this is a workshop that other colleges should think about bringing to their institution.

It is also important to mention that staff who work with these student leaders attended the workshop and many have attended On Course Level I and II training. If this program for student leaders is to work, trained staff will have to continue the conversation with them and encourage the use of On Course principles and methods.

Often as a grant ends, you find yourself saying, “We wish we knew then what we know now; we could have done some things differently or sooner.”  Blending together two of our initiatives, using student leaders and On Course training, was a great example of the culmination of our learning. I am so pleased that we were able to make it happen.

A President's Reflection: Scaling with Fidelity

Last week, we discussed different ways to describe the return on investment from a particular program. A convincing ROI can go a long way in generating support for a scaling strategy. In today’s post, Sanford C. “Sandy” Shugart, president of Valencia College, reminds us of how important it is to keep testing that ROI. The returns from a pilot might change dramatically when you expand to more people and disciplines. Maintaining fidelity to the proven model is essential if you want to maintain (and continuing improving) results.

Valencia College entered DEI with a history of innovation and a clear sense of areas to scale for effect in developmental programs. Specifically, the college planned to:

• expand dramatically the use of supplemental instruction (SI) in developmental mathematics and other gateway courses 
• grow the number of paired courses designed to function as learning communities 
• expand the offering of student success courses while embedding the success strategies in other first-year courses 
• expand a transition program for certain at-risk students called Bridges to Success

In the early going, we believed the initial stages of scaling—clarifying the model, recruiting adopters from the faculty and students, training the implementers, and having the will and support to reallocate scarce resources—would present the greatest challenges. We were wrong. Early stages of implementation were marked by enthusiasm, collaboration, and high expectations for success. The performance data were eagerly anticipated each term and became important levers in the conversations and revisions to the programs that followed.

Scaling went rather well, with each treatment showing positive early results and the general trend in student performance moving toward accelerated success—more credit hours earned in fewer academic terms by each succeeding cohort of students. With this success and the word of mouth among both students and faculty about the work, recruiting adopters became much easier. In fact, demand for SI-supported sections quickly grew beyond the initial disciplines and courses selected. (Valencia served more than 11,000 students in SI-supported course sections last year.) These were generally positive signs. However, as we scaled to greater and greater numbers of course sections, faculty, and students, we began to discover a new set of challenges.

SI will serve as an example, though we had similar challenges in other innovations. As we reviewed data from the SI sections versus “non-SI” sections, we began to find significant differences in the effect on indicators like student persistence to the end of course and grade distribution. Some of these seemed almost random, while others clearly showed a pattern (by campus, by discipline, etc.). Deeper inquiry revealed that the effect for students who actually participated in the supplemental activities that make SI effective were almost uniformly high for all students. What the discrepancy in the data revealed were major differences in implementation. It seems some faculty had found ways to encourage, perhaps even require, active student engagement in supplemental learning activities, while others had managed to achieve very little of this engagement. These differences existed in spite of aggressive training efforts prior to implementation.

Similarly, we found that while SI was especially effective in many of the mathematics gateway courses, the effect was much less striking in many of the courses to which it was added in the later years of our work (economics, political science, etc.) Again, we inquired more deeply and discovered not only differences in methods, but very different understandings among the faculty (and students) about the purposes of SI and the outcomes we were seeking.

We had, as our projects reached maturity, encountered the problem of scaling with fidelity to the model. It seems that our discipline of innovation needs to include ongoing evaluation of the purposes and steps to implementation, continuing staff training, and rigorous data analysis to assure that the treatment in which we are investing doesn’t take on a life of its own after institutionalization. A useful lesson!

Come and Get It!

Hey blog readers! There's some new material in the Resources section of the Developmental Education Initiative website. The DEI team at Cuyahoga Community College has agreed to share three pieces that they've developed as part of their DEI work. In the "Curricular and Instructional Revisions" category you'll find:

• two manuals chock full of cooperative learning activities for developmental English courses. There are exercises to get students talking about reading and writing, as well as ideas for forming groups and evaluating group dynamics--and much more!

• a supplemental instruction leader training manual. This one covers student-to-student interactions, session planning, session activities, and case studies

 Many thanks to Cuyahoga for being willing to share this great work. Remember, if you use the manuals, please give the authors credit for their effort.

Guest Post: Supplemental Instruction Leaders Don't Do Optional Either

In the first of our in-depth look at each of the seven SCALERS drivers, staffing, Ruth Silon of Cuyahoga Community College (Tri-C) delves into staffing a supplemental instruction (SI) program. The SCALERS staffing driver calls for effective use of resources to meet personnel needs, from administration to faculty to student services to student employees. In this candid post, Ruth describes the ups and downs of Tri-C’s approach to training student SI leaders in a one-credit special topics course.

 “Students don’t do optional.”

Where have we heard this before? It certainly applies to many developmental students’ use of the tutoring labs, optional orientations, and attendance at Supplemental Instruction (SI) sessions.

But what about the SI leaders themselves? Although we at Cuyahoga Community College (Tri-C), have a well thought out hiring and training process, I have found that if we do not have a very concrete way to manage and observe our SI leaders, they, too, will not do optional.

In June 2010, I attended the International Conference on Supplemental Instruction, and listened to Joyce Zaritsky from LaGuardia Community College discuss her one credit class for SI leaders. This approach seemed to make sense. The students could not be leaders unless they attended a weekly SI course. Here was the place where leaders could share and debrief and experience ongoing training.

During fall 2010, faculty and SI staff met to design the course and it was first implemented in spring 2011 as a special topics course – one session at each campus. The course would meet once a week for one credit.

• First Problem: The students had to pay for the course, which at that time cost $84.00.

         Solution: Pay SI leaders for an extra hour and hope that is enough to offset the
         cost of the course. 

• Second Problem: One of our leaders had already graduated.

         Solution: She still had to attend the class in order to be an SI leader. 

• Third Problem: There was not a common time available for all the leaders to take the course.

         No good solution here: Not all the leaders attended, but about 80 percent
         did participate.

Meeting every week was a great experience, both for me, the teacher, and the leaders. I got to know almost everything that was going on in the SI-supported classes and the related sessions. I learned firsthand about the struggles leaders were having with their students and also with the classroom teachers. The class was more like a support group for the leaders than an academic class. This learning is really important as we are asking students to perform tasks that may be well out of their comfort zone. If we talk to each other about our students and our pedagogy, shouldn’t SI leaders be afforded that same experience?

This was a course, so the students had to complete certain tasks to get a grade. I asked them to turn in weekly journals, telling me what happened in their sessions. (This could be the basis of our conversations each week.) They also had to visit each other’s classes and write up an observation. At the end of the semester, they wrote an essay to a new SI leader, explaining the high and low points of the job and offering the new leader advice. The end result was twofold: a deeper understanding of what goes on in SI for both me and the leaders, and a very supportive environment to help the leaders do a better job.

Even though the course went well, we decided not to offer it this semester. Why not? I did not want to make SI leaders pay for the course again. I did not want to ask for more money for the SI leaders. And I thought “Last semester’s meetings went well. Of course this semester’s leaders will come to a weekly session, even if it’s not for credit!”

I was wrong. Sadly, I forgot that students, SI leaders included, may not do optional! Just like in any other class, some student leaders come every week, some attend occasionally, and others never show up at all. I am sorry to have to have learned the same lesson again: accountability is everything. But I have learned the lesson, so next semester we’ll be offering the course for our SI leaders again.

Ruth Silon is an associate professor of English and DEI project director at Cuyahoga Community College.