SCALERS Series: C is for Communicating

Last week, we began our series exploring the seven drivers of the SCALERS model, a framework of organizational capacities that are essential for successfully scaling up effective programs. You can read the series intro here, and you can read the post about Staffing, the first driver, here.

When you think communications, it's not just marketing, it's telling the story in a way that will make the value of your work clear to everyone on campus. A compelling message will help students, faculty and staff understand that your change strategy is essential to student success and worth adopting and supporting.

In order to ensure the necessary participation in scaling up your strategy, you’ll need to clearly articulate the rationale, expectations, commitment, and process for the expansion. Once you figure out how to say it, figure out how to share it. What formats are appropriate for getting your information out to faculty, staff, and students? Consider websites and course catalogs, as well as program-specific convenings and marketing materials.

Communication is an ongoing need, so put processes in place to share up-to-date information about the program to responsible faculty and staff as well as students and all departments and individuals responsible for enrolling, counseling, and advising students. Pay close attention to making sure individuals with authority understand the enrollment, registration, and scheduling changes that are required for successful expansion of your program.

When Patrick Henry Community College began the Developmental Education Initiative, they formed a committee to launch and maintain a marketing campaign for their DEI work, known as the Progress Initiative. The Progress Initiative focuses on fast-tracking students through developmental education in the Accelerated Learning Program (ALP), which also incorporates cooperative learning and case-management advising. To create buy-in across the campus for this program, the committee developed an exciting verbal and visual identity for the Progress Initiative. They launched the campaign with a public event featuring a nationally known speaker, and the team made presentations at a variety of campus meetings to acquaint faculty and staff with the initiative. Once PHCC had effectively established an identity for the Progress Initiative, they worked to reinforce it over time. All faculty who present about the initiative are given a thumb drive loaded with the logo and the theme music as well as T-shirts with the logo on it.

You probably don’t need a full marketing campaign for every program you expand, but you do need to create a communications plan that determines the appropriate methods and processes for sharing the necessary information with your campus. PHCC is a stellar example of using communications to persuade faculty, staff, and students to support a strategy. What are your communication success stories? What problems have you encountered in getting the word out?

SCALERS Series: S is for Staffing

Today, we begin our series exploring the seven drivers of the SCALERS model, a framework of organizational capacities that are essential for successfully scaling-up effective programs. You can read the series intro here.

People who need people are, indeed, the luckiest people; but it may not feel that way when you’re trying to find the resources and individuals to expand a program. The SCALERS staffing driver calls for effective use of resources to meet labor needs; in a community college setting, this includes administration, faculty, student services, and student employee positions, as well as individuals responsible for data collection, analysis, and evaluation.

As you look at a program slated for expansion, you must consider how labor-intensive it is and whether it requires skilled services. This necessitates a clear definition of the labor needs and the local labor market. An organization also must look at the existing recruitment pool and the institution’s ability to recruit sufficient staff to sustain expansion. Such efforts are supported by a staffing plan that includes job descriptions for all requisite positions that details the essential knowledge, skills, and abilities. Such a plan should include the required administrative, student services, academic, and student employee positions. It’s also important to review current staffing levels and identify any existing positions that may need to be redeployed or those that will see additional work volume under expansion.

While a team responsible for day-to-day implementation of a particular program can make a good start on a staffing plan, there are broader organizational considerations that may require support from administration. Adding or redeploying positions necessitates discussions about a broader human resources strategy; does the organization have capacity (and will) to recruit, train, retain, and sustain the requisite expertise? You must ensure that HR processes for recruitment and hiring are in place; someone on the “scaling-up team” should be familiar with these processes and have the authority to initiate and execute hiring.

Of course, once individuals are hired, the organization should see to their continued development and training. Another part of the staffing consideration is the organization’s approach to professional development; a sustainable scaled-up solution requires a professional development system that specifically addresses the needs of the faculty and staff implementing the program, as well as the processes and resources to ensure quality delivery and continuous improvement. These concerns are closely related to other SCALERS drivers that will be featured in coming weeks, including communicating, alliance-building, resources, and sustaining engagement.

Chaffey College came up with a unique solution to a staffing issue as they expanded their Opening Doors to Excellence (ODE) program. The goal of ODE is to move students off of probation and back into good standing. Participating students develop an educational plan with an advisor, take a student success course, and complete a series of directed activities in the college’s student success center. The director of the program meets with every student (between 300 and 400 students per semester), but student follow-up is carried out by a cadre of Counselor Apprentices. These Counselor Apprentices are graduate students from a local university who can apply the experience to completing required clinical hours, allowing the college to expand its advising force. For more information about Opening Doors to Excellence, check out the presentation ODE Program Director Ricardo Diaz made at the 2011 Achieving the Dream Strategy Institute pre-institute workshop, “Bringing Innovation to Scale.” You can find the presentation in the Resources section of our website, under the “Scaling Up” category.

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

The Joy of Scaling

The chief aim of the Developmental Education Initiative is to identify the most effective developmental education programming and deliver them to more of the community college students who need them—or find ways for most entering students to bypass those courses all together. In other words, what resources and practices are essential to take something that works to scale? There are a lot of different organizations exploring an apparently elusive definition of “scale”—the feds, foundations, and Fuqua School of Business at Duke University, among many others.  And though there isn’t one definition that will suit every situation, the imperative is undeniable: organizations in the business of social benefit must develop the capacity to expand the reach of their effective programs. Large-scale problems won’t be solved by small-scale programs. A program is not good enough for what we’ve been asked to do (i.e., graduate 5 million more students and double the number of adults with postsecondary credentials). Though the term is certainly more popular these days, the concept is not new; scaling up is an essential part of continuous improvement processes and systems-change because a solution that is not sustainable and available to most of those who need it is not a solution. The required organizational change can be disruptive and likely will necessitate new priorities for the institution.

There are certainly barriers to expanding something that has value. Politics, resources, traditions—the obstacles you always face moving anything new through a human system, especially when that system is under stress. Over the next several weeks, Accelerating Achievement will tackle these obstacles, working step-by-step through a scaling model. In “Scaling Social Entrepreneurial Impact,” Paul Bloom and Aaron Chatterji present a conceptual framework of seven organizational capacities that support successful scaling of a social enterprise, represented by the acronym SCALERS: Staffing, Communicating, Alliance-building, Lobbying, Earnings Generation, Replicating Impact, and Stimulating Market Forces. Given the differences between a typical nonprofit or private sector venture and public institutions, MDC has translated the model for application at community colleges. Here are Bloom & Chatterji’s original definitions of each capacity and our definitions adapted to community colleges:

Each capacity, or driver, can influence the expansion process, though some may be more important than others in any particular situation. The drivers also overlap and interplay during the design and execution of a scaling strategy.  Each Wednesday for the next seven weeks, we’ll dive into one of these drivers, exploring this overlap and interplay, teasing out how the model might play out in the community college. Over the coming weeks, please add your observations and experience to the mix. We’d like to hear about efforts to expand effective programs that have been successful, as well as what you’ve learned from scaling attempts that didn’t go as planned. We hope you’ll join us! 

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

Survey says: Contextualization works!

We’ve covered a lot of territory this week, from South Texas to South Africa. As promised, we’re going to cap off the week by digging into the latest research on contextualization.

This month, the Community College Research Center (CCRC) at Columbia University’s Teachers College released a brief titled “Facilitating Student Learning Through Contextualization.” In the brief, CCRC reviews existing literature for evidence on the effectiveness of contextualized basic skills instruction, While there is promising evidence that contextualization improves students’ basic skills mastery , the results are mixed on whether these practices improve content learning outcomes. The authors also site several studies that tie contextualization with positive influence on developmental education course completion and college-level credit accumulation.

CCRC identifies some practical applications for their findings, including “considerable effort…needed to implement contextualization because instructors need to learn from each other and collaborate across disciplines, a practice that is not common in college settings.” We heard about the importance of interdisciplinary collaboration yesterday from Stevan Schiefelbein, who told us about faculty collaboration between South Texas College’s departments of History, Sociology, Developmental Reading, Developmental Math, and Developmental English.

For more CCRC analysis of contextualization models, check out their report on I-BEST. Developed in Washington state, Integrated Basic Education and Skills Training (I-BEST) integrates basic skills instruction with college-level occupational classes. Guess what? Faculty collaboration is vital for I-BEST, too. Has your college taken the contextualization challenge? What approcaches ease the path to collaboration? What gets in the way?

Guest Post: South Texas in Context

Today’s post comes from Stevan Schiefelbein, DEI project director at South Texas College in McAllen, Texas. Part of the South Texas strategy is to contextualize a significant portion of the developmental education curriculum. They are working with faculty groups to complete the task. Stevan describes the process and early results below.

One of the Developmental Education Initiative strategies at South Texas College (STC) is Intentional Content Integration. The goal during the first year of STC’s DEI grant was to integrate 20 percent of the developmental English and reading curricula; sociology was the subject area chosen by the faculty as the academic subject around which to contextualize the curriculum changes. During the second year of the grant, the goal was to integrate an additional 20 percent of the curricula; history was chosen as the academic subject of contextualization.

From June to August of 2009, eight instructors from the Developmental Reading, Developmental English, and Developmental Math Departments worked together to integrate math, writing, and reading into all three departments’ curricula.  Additionally, they designed a sociology-related project for each of the three levels of developmental reading and writing.

The Process
From January to July of 2010, some of the same instructors, along with some who were not previously involved, designed history-related projects for each of the three levels of developmental reading and writing. Starting in January 2011, instructors have been involved writing new developmental English sociology-related as well as history-related essay prompts, to be used starting fall 2011 semester. The developmental reading projects are also being redesigned.

Some of the requirements on the developmental English essay prompts include one-page summary response journals from a chapter out of the history and sociology textbooks as well as internet sources,  creating and administering surveys, creating graphs, and using APA style for citing references. When working with students on the developmental reading projects, instructors teach the logical format of one chapter from the history and sociology textbooks to strengthen textbook usage skills that maximize the amount of information students retain from reading what many college freshmen consider to be challenging reading assignments.

Collaboration among faculty members has proven to be one of the biggest strengths of the contextualization work, but also one of the greatest challenges. Collaborating with and receiving feedback from faculty members of the STC Sociology and History Departments has also been rewarding.

Outside Support
Two consultants have provided information on contextualization and integration. Dr. Dolores Perin, senior research associate with Columbia University’s Community College Research Center, visited STC in October 2009.  Dr. Emily Lardner, a DEI technical assistance provider and co-director of the Washington Center for Improving Undergraduate Education, visited STC in November 2010. Both consultants also observed some developmental education classrooms and discussed their reports on the curriculum writing efforts with faculty. 

Results
Pre- and post-surveys and focus groups have been used to assess changes in students’ levels of engagement and their growth in understanding of the nature of integration and contextualization of assignments in the different subject areas over the course of the semester. Statistically significant gains were seen in several measures of student engagement at the end of the first year. In addition, success rates (as measured by students who receive a grade of A, B, C, or P) in developmental English and developmental reading courses were compared to course success rates from previous semesters. The success rates from the first year are mixed. However, overall, faculty feel that the contextualized curriculum is very strong when compared to the previous curriculum, and that it teaches underprepared students how to write for academic classes.

You can learn more about the DEI Developmental English curriculum here; you can also check out the DEI Development Reading projects for history and sociology. 

Stevan Schiefelbein is Assistant Professor of Developmental English and DEI Project Director at South Texas College.