Guest Post: Getting the Message Right

It’s time for the second installment of “SCALERS: Round 2.” Originally created by Paul Bloom at the Duke University Fuqua School of Business 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. Last month, we looked at staffing. Today, Becky Samberg of Housatonic Community College in Bridgeport, CT, shows what HCC is learning about how changing the message can change behavior.

Remember playing the childhood game of telephone? As the message was whispered from one child’s ear to another, one thing was certain: the game always ended with peals of laughter when the message whispered by the first child never was the same message repeated by the last in the chain. From this childhood game, we learn a very valuable lesson: communication needs to be deliberate and precise.

In our DEI work, we strive to be deliberate and precise in communicating with our HCC community about the initiatives on which we are working. Over the last year, however, lower-than-expected success rates in self-paced courses led us to change how we communicate to our students the nature of the self-paced program and the unique expectations of students enrolled in these courses.

Our self-paced program began in 2007 with developmental math courses. Originally, students could enroll in self-paced math courses—what we then called “Open Entry/Open Exit”—at any time in the semester and exit whenever they finished the course. Students also could start the next course in the same semester. We learned, however, that “Open Entry/Open Exit” was a misnomer.  Students were not accelerating as quickly or as successfully as we anticipated, and students’ financial aid obligations and status as a full- or part-time impeded their ability to move from one course to the next during a semester. As we considered these challenges, we concluded that the individualized instructional format and our expectations of students in these courses were not made explicit by the Open Entry/Open Exit title, so we made the following changes:

• We adopted the name “Self-Paced,” emphasizing the focus on individualized mathematics and English instruction. This new course name more explicitly communicates that students enrolling in these courses will have individualized instruction at a self-determined pace.  
• We defined our expectations of students and developed an orientation so students hear a consistent message from their instructors and the Self-Paced studies lab coordinator, who conducts the in-class orientation and oversees students’ visits to the lab. 
• We made lab visits mandatory, deliberately delivering the message that self-paced does not mean no pace, and regular engagement with the course material is essential to student success. 
• We re-designed the courses, communicating to students their obligation to make consistent progress throughout the semester and establishing the expectation that students work toward the goal of successfully completing the course within or in less than a traditional semester.  
• We created a schedule for completing the self-paced courses in a single semester, sharing it with students, and embedding it in the course software. Students are told the pace at which they need to work and the benchmarks they need to reach to successfully complete the course in one semester.

Moving forward, we hope that the changes we have made will increase student success in our self-paced courses. In changing the course title to better communicate the nature of the course and in deliberately and precisely communicating class policies and our expectations of students, we hope to avoid the inevitable outcome of a game of telephone.

Becky Samberg is the chair of developmental studies and DEI director at Housatonic Community College.