What’s Up with DEI: Housatonic Community College

Over the next several weeks, we’ll be sharing some of the DEI state policy team and college accomplishments from the last year of work. We’re making our way (alphabetically!) through the six DEI states, profiling the DEI colleges in those states as we go. This morning, we introduced Connecticut and their state policy team; now it’s time to learn a bit more about Housatonic Community College in Bridgeport, CT.

Housatonic Community College (HCC) serves more than 6000 students in its 11-town service area in southwestern Connecticut. Housatonic chose to expand an Achieving the Dream (ATD) pilot of a self-paced math course as part of their DEI work. We’ve selected some highlights from their last year of DEI work in three main categories: scaling, institutional policy change, and academic and supportive service innovations.

Scaling

• The college’s Open Entry/Open Exit (OE/OE) math courses now cover 40 percent of sections offered in three developmental math courses. OE/OE English has been added to the curriculum and comprises 63 percent of lower-level developmental English courses and 19 percent of the upper-level developmental English courses. HCC has adopted the name “self-paced” to reduce confusion about the course format!

Institutional Policy Change

• Supportive institutional policies are an integral part of sustaining promising DEI innovations, at all levels of the institution. As part of ATD, the college developed specific strategic plan objectives and outcomes that directly relate to student success goals. College policies related to developmental students, such as mandatory developmental course placement students who score below college-level in English, math, or reading have continued through ATD and DEI.

 Academic and Supportive Service Innovations

• Housatonic is focused on improving student engagement in the self-paced courses, since the model has proven most successful for those students that fully participate. Case managers have been added to sections of self-paced math courses to encourage course attendance and homework completion.

Abby Parcell is a Program Manager at MDC.

What’s Up with DEI: Connecticut

Connecticut State Policy Blog Post
Over the next several weeks, we’ll be sharing some of DEI’s state policy and college accomplishments. We’re making our way (alphabetically!) through the six DEI states, profiling the DEI colleges in those states as we go. We’re leading off with Connecticut, the Constitution State!

The Connecticut Community College (CCC) system Chancellor’s Office serves as the state team lead for Connecticut’s ATD/DEI state policy work. Two of the state’s 12 community colleges participate in DEI (Housatonic and Norwalk), but the system has made great efforts to leverage ATD/DEI data collection, learning, and progress across all twelve institutions. In the last year, Connecticut has moved forward on all three DEI State Policy Framework levers:

Data-Driven Improvement

• A business intelligence tool is in beta testing for state-wide implementation; training is underway for a launch at all 12 Connecticut Community College system institutions.
• The system contributed data collection and analysis in a Connecticut Association for Human Services report: Developmental Education at Connecticut Community Colleges: The Key to Economic Recovery in February 2011.

Investment in Innovation

• A CCC’s Chancellor incentive funding program announced in 2010-2011 included:
• $50,000 per college devoted to developmental education initiatives
• $1.24M in incentive funding for improvements in intermediate benchmarks and developmental education outcomes
• $5,000 per college to support faculty involvement and professional development in curriculum redesign efforts.
• A professional development fund to support faculty participation at developmental education conferences to encourage utilization and dissemination of best practices throughout the system.

All 12 colleges will be invited to submit proposals for participation in the fund. 

Policy Supports

• Further support for longitudinal tracking system has been secured with an agreement between the State Department of Education and higher education units, and new legislation requiring unique identifiers on high school transcripts to facilitate data analysis on student success in college and the state’s workforce.
• The System also led a series of developmental education convenings in the last year:
• A Developmental Education Forum including the chancellor, presidents, academic deans, and deans of students.
• A Developmental Education Task Force; the task force submitted policy recommendations to the Council of Presidents in June 2011.

For more details on DEI state policy accomplishments, check out Jobs For the Future’s latest DEI publication Driving Innovation: How Six States Are Organizing to Improve Outcomes in Developmental Education Outcomes.

Abby Parcell is a Program Manager at MDC.

What’s Up With DEI

With the close of the fiscal year last month, it’s the season of annual reports and compliance documents. And though deadlines and details are sometimes stressful, the process does provide an opportunity to reflect on accomplishments, to remember what worked really well, and to formalize those “I’ll never do THAT again” mental notes. We’ve recently reviewed the annual reports from DEI state policy teams and colleges; it’s exciting to see the progress, the unexpected successes, and the continued commitment to improving outcomes for students in developmental education.

Over the next several weeks, we’ll be sharing some of the accomplishments at the state and college-level. We’ll make our way (alphabetically!) through the six DEI states, profiling the DEI colleges in those states as we go. State profiles will be organized according to the DEI State Policy Framework: data-driven improvement; investment in innovation; and policy supports. College recaps will be organized in three categories: scaling; institutional policy change; and academic and supportive service innovations.

We’ll lead off with Connecticut tomorrow, but today, we’ve got a quick snap shot of the accomplishments and challenges that we’re seeing across the initiative.

DEI State Policy Teams

• Data-Driven Improvement. States are implementing new technology to collect state-wide data, conducting evaluations of developmental education policies and practices, and creating dashboards of ATD/DEI intermediate benchmarks. Some of these efforts have sometimes run up against…the intricacies of establishing agreements for data sharing. States also are navigating the recent proliferation of national efforts to develop community college performance metrics.
• Investment in Innovation. States are providing incentive funding for campus-level innovation, as well as acting as conveners for state-wide curriculum redesign and professional development. Sadly, some of these efforts are threatened by continuing state budget crises.
• Policy Supports. Some states are conducting system-wide developmental education policy reviews; others have seen supportive legislation passed in the last year. The teams have participated in semiannual ATD/DEI state policy meetings, further strengthening the policy learning community. States and colleges are still wrestling with constraints caused by federal financial aid regulations that complicate funding for promising non-course-based and non-semester-based instruction.

DEI Colleges

• Scaling. Ten of the fifteen DEI colleges have met or exceeded their expansion targets on at least one of their interventions; some have exceeded these targets in all of the DEI work. All are planning for continued expansion of the most effective practices. Staff turnover, budget constraints, and increasing enrollment are particularly thorny issues at some colleges when it comes to meeting scaling targets.
• Institutional Policy Change. In the last year, three more colleges have taken the eliminate late-registration plunge; others have made orientation, advising, and enrollment in required dev ed courses and student success courses mandatory. Some colleges are still facing institutional research challenges when it comes to collecting necessary data, but many are putting new practices in place to coordinate student success efforts across the college. 
• Academic and Supportive Service Innovations. Colleges are engaging faculty, staff, and their communities to refine and improve DEI interventions. The individual college profiles will highlight exciting work in cooperative learning, supplementation instruction, modularization, and contextualization. For all of the progress, some colleges still face faculty engagement issues as they expand; others are struggling to get all eligible students to participate in practices and programs that have proven effective for their peers.

So, what’s up with DEI? A whole lot. We look forward to sharing more of it over the coming weeks! 

Abby Parcell is a Program Manager at MDC.

Guest Post: Choose Your Own Adventure

Today’s post comes from Sharon Miller, professor of transitional English at Lone Star College-CyFair in Cypress, Texas, outside of Houston. The Lone Star Community College District joined Achieving the Dream in 2006. Sharon’s post describes a classroom-focused intervention that has improved student success in CyFair’s transitional (or developmental) English department.

When an Achieving the Dream pilot at Lone Star College’s CyFair campus resulted in a 7 percent increase in overall student success, it got our attention. Applying what we learned, our success rates have continued to improve to above the 90th percentile of national benchmarks because the project is affordable, do-able, scalable, and sustainable to any discipline, anywhere. The secret: target the most important contact a student has with an institution: the classroom.

A Non-Boutique Project
Two years ago, our college system’s Achieving the Dream grant funding was coming to an end just as the Transitional English department was charged with devising a pilot to improve student success. The state legislature was slashing budgets just as our college system was experiencing an “enrollment tsunami” that hit our campus particularly hard. With a 29/71 full-time to adjunct professor ratio, there was no one available to take on a new project and no space to host a boutique student success center. We needed an ATD intervention that would work for us.
    
The Classroom-Embedded Intervention Pilot
Our Classroom-Embedded Intervention Project was “choose your own adventure” style. The concept was deceptively simple:

• Ask the faculty to share what strategies were working to improve student success.
• List the best and distribute them.
• Track out-of-class interventions and withdrawals on student profile cards. 
• Look at the results measured by end-of-course grades and performance on System Common Final Exams. 

Sharing success strategies for our ATD pilot was intense, energizing, and fun. Faculty circulated ideas via e-mail, and adjunct instructors joined the conversation. Soon we had an amazing list of strategies which we distributed at our spring kick-off meeting and posted in our online repository, The Sandbox. We all started the semester focused on good teaching and intensively intervening according to each instructor’s best professional judgment. Interventions were recorded on a student profile card that also included student contact information.

Analyze Results; Build On What Works
When student success rose 7 percent, we knew that we were on the right track. Looking at the student profile cards helped us to see patterns in interventions and withdrawals, and we have used this information to more carefully devise targeted interventions. We continue to share resources on our online learning repository and have added a Saturday work day a month into the semester to focus on pedagogy. Week 11 of each semester is now designated as “Advising Week.” Instructors use a one-page handout to tell students about the next course in their sequence, course delivery options, and answer questions. 

Ongoing professional development is imperative and challenging. Many of us are pursuing the International Alliance for Learning Certification in Accelerated Learning, and we are sharing the program’s researched-based, brain-friendly methods that improve student success and retention.

CyFair’s has expanded the Classroom Embedded Intervention throughout the Transitional English department. The Transitional Math and ESOL Departments are considering implementing the approach in the fall semester, and plans are under way for a presentation at an all-college faculty forum on student success. Faculty will have an opportunity to learn about what the Transitional English department has accomplished and to consider how the approach can be expanded college-wide in appropriate, discipline-specific ways. 

Interested?
You are invited to download our list of interventions, advising handout, and contacts for accelerated learning, which are posted on my faculty webpage. Together, we can achieve the dream one classroom at a time!

Sharon Miller is a professor of transitional English at Lone Star-CyFair. The Classroom-Embedded Intervention has been nominated for a Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board STAR Award.

Guest Post: Changing Lives by Improving Skills

Today’s post comes from Kyle Smith, dean of academic instruction at Western Texas College in Snyder, Texas. WTC joined Achieving the Dream in 2010 and dug into developmental education right off the bat. Below, Kyle shares how he has incorporated techniques he learned as a community college student into WTC’s developmental and vocational offerings to improve student success—and how WTC is now taking the approach to local junior high and high schools in hopes of having an even larger impact on college readiness.

During my high school years, I never gave much thought about going to college. I actually waited until the spring of my senior year to even take the ACT. Based on the results of the ACT, my high school counselor told me that if I did decide to go to college I would be at best a “C”-level student. Looking back, I am certainly surprised that a counselor would make such a negative prophetic statement. However, she initially turned out to be right. Right after my high school graduation I enrolled in a summer college course and made a C. In many ways, I felt as if I had landed right about where I was supposed to. I then accepted a partial athletic scholarship to a community college and this is where academically things changed dramatically for me.
 
This particular community college’s counseling office sponsored a series of workshops that dealt with very specific academic skill sets. I had never been exposed to SQ3R; OK4R; Cornell notes; the 80/20 Rule; the LOCI system of memory; and backward planning to name a few. Why had I not heard of any of these approaches before? Where had they been? I was very hungry for them. I began to apply some of them almost immediately and they made all the difference in the world for me. Through repetition and practice, I ultimately developed a very specialized set of academic skills that enabled me to graduate with honors in all of my subsequent academic pursuits. For me, these skill sets represented a message of hope. 

As a higher education administrator, I understand the importance of having high expectations for students. However, I also understand just how critical it is to provide students some of the tools necessary to meet those expectations. The development of a college readiness course that includes the aforementioned skill sets has been an important initiative at Western Texas College. We have seen great results in pairing such content with developmental coursework. We began pairing the readiness course with fast-tracked developmental math courses in 2009. The 2009 successful completion rate for traditional developmental math courses was just under 40 percent; the successful completion rate for the fast-track courses in Spring 2011 was 70 percent.

We are also integrating the college readiness content into vocational programs, including our Licensed Vocational Nursing curriculum. We understand that information without application is rather worthless for most students. We also know that they need to apply what they have learned in relevant ways. We are essentially trying to knock out two birds with one stone: for example, a child care major referred to a developmental reading or English course can apply the Cornell note-taking approach to program specific content that s/he will encounter in a later course. Perhaps, the student applies Cornell to an article about Piaget's stages of cognitive reasoning. Such integration requires coordination between program chairs and a developmental faculty member who has completed the academic skill sets training. At WTC, we initially ran the academic skill sets class as a stand-alone class; while that worked well, it was difficult to secure the funding to continue the courses on a long-term basis. We are now diligently working on integrating the content into the vocational curricula, training the respective program chairs and vocational instructors in the academic skills content. Once they’ve been trained, they recommend where the content can be introduced in the existing vocational curricula. We’re still in the early stages, but so far so good!

This summer we will be holding train-the-trainer workshops on the academic skill set content. We will have junior high and high school faculty there as well as our own college faculty. There is a hunger for specifics – items that students can start applying in class the very next day. If our colleagues at the secondary level can introduce these skill sets to students before they come to our doors then we are well on our way to truly changing lives for the better. 

Kyle Smith is dean of academic instruction at Western Texas College in Snyder, Texas.