Announcing More to Most!

We are delighted to announce the release of MDC’s latest publication, More to Most: Scaling Effective Community College Practices. More to Most is a guide for community colleges that are expanding small or pilot programs into larger, sustainable efforts that serve most—if not all—of the students who can benefit from them. You can watch an introductory slide show and download a copy from www.more2most.org.

As we discuss often on this blog, community colleges across the country have developed unique programs that help students succeed and put them on a path to a better life. The Developmental Education Initiative colleges and states have been vital partners as we’ve learned together about the resources and practices that are required to scale-up effective developmental education programming—and to help students accelerate through or bypass remediation altogether. Much of that learning is reflected in the pages of More to Most, including examples of promising practices from many of the DEI colleges and states. We’ve also included material that’s been featured on Accelerating Achievement, including the SCALERS model developed by the Center for the Advancement of Social Enterprise at Duke University's Fuqua School of Business and case examples from Kingsborough Community College, the Academy for College Excellence, and Chaffey College.

Even in focused efforts like DEI and Achieving the Dream, deciding which programs to expand and how to do it is a complex process that can waste valuable time and resources if not conducted thoughtfully. The comprehensive—but not prescriptive!—process outlined in More to Most helps you assess which programs are ripe for expansion, and gives direction on how to design a scale-up plan—and it’s all designed to dovetail with planning structures already in place.

To test out the process, we reached beyond the DEI network to Jackson Community College, an Achieving the Dream college in Jackson, MI. JCC recently used More to Most in its decision to expand three student success initiatives. With the strategies outlined in the guidebook, faculty, staff, and administrators at Jackson demonstrated the program’s effectiveness and connected that success to the college’s strategic plan. They examined the expansion’s budget implications, how it would be evaluated, and created a work plan. Finally, they examined the policy implications of the expansion. The undertaking involved deep conversations among faculty, student services, and business office staff, and the resulting plan is a great example of how the process can be customized to dovetail with any college’s specific needs or culture. (Click here to learn more about Jackson’s experience from a March 1 spotlight session at the recent ATD D.R.E.A.M. event.)

If you want to see how the process might work on your campus, head on over to more2most.org and download your copy. Let us know what you think!

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.

Guest Post: What’s Next for SCALERS?

Today’s post comes from Paul Bloom, Faculty Director and Adjunct Professor of Social Entrepreneurship and Marketing with the Center for the Advancement of Social Entrepreneurship (CASE) at Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business. Paul is also the creator of the SCALERS model. (Thanks, Paul!) Below, he shares the genesis of the model and his ideas for the next iteration of the work.

The idea of developing a model like SCALERS came to me a few years ago while reading the best-selling book, Made to Stick, written by the brothers Chip and Dan Heath. Among other things, they point out that acronyms can help ideas catch on and be remembered. I thought of my home discipline of marketing, a subject I taught for years and years, and how it has used the device of the “4P’s” (Product, Price, Place, and Promotion) to help students remember the essence of marketing. It occurred to me that the emerging field of social entrepreneurship needed a similar hook to help students and practitioners understand what it was all about.

As a newcomer to social entrepreneurship, I was struck by how possessed everyone was with the concept of “scaling.” Indeed, I have come to believe that more than anything else, what distinguishes social entrepreneurs from more conventional leaders of social-purpose organizations is the former groups’ obsession with scaling social impact. These folks want to change the world, not just run a sustainable and effective do-gooder organization. So whatever acronym or words I generated to help the field “stick” had to relate to the concept of scaling.

Fortunately, the letters of the acronym SCALERS suited what I was detecting from my own research and the research of others as the organizational capabilities that were the key drivers of successful scaling (i.e., Staffing, Communicating, Alliance-Building, Lobbying, Earnings-Generation, Replicating, and Stimulating Market Forces). I had to make some compromises – the word “Staffing” does not completely cover the range of human resource management capabilities that are needed for scaling, and “Lobbying” is just a portion of “Advocacy” (but the letter “A” was taken already). Nevertheless, I am very pleased by all the positive feedback and attention my original writing on the model has received (see Bloom and Chatterji, California Management Review, 2009 and Bloom and Smith, Journal of Social Entrepreneurship, 2010).

Still, my thinking about scaling is evolving and there are aspects of the SCALERS model that I have modified since the earlier articles were published. I am currently putting the finishing touches on a short book that will introduce these modifications and also try to explain the model to a wider audience. As much as anything, the modified model stresses that what makes one capability or driver important in one specific situation may not be the case in other situations. The importance of any particular SCALER will depend on the resources the organization possesses as it starts its scaling and the theory of change on which the organization is building its initiatives. For example, if the organization is poorly endowed with certain types of human or financial resources, then the importance of building capabilities to improve those resources (i.e., Staffing, Earnings-Generation) should become even more important for scaling success. And if the organization is theorizing that desired social impacts will occur if it informs more people about a problem or if new regulations are introduced, then the importance of building capabilities in Communicating or Lobbying will become paramount. Conducting an honest assessment of your organization’s unique situation is necessary for getting the most out of the SCALERS model.

Paul Bloom is Faculty Director and Adjunct Professor of Social Entrepreneurship and Marketing with the Center for the Advancement of Social Entrepreneurship (CASE) at Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business.