Guest Post: Good, Better, I-BEST

Today, we welcome John Wachen of the Community College Research Center to Accelerating Achievement. Below, John summarizes findings from a recent CCRC study of Washington State’s I-BEST model for integrating basic skills and workforce training.

To meet the ambitious goals set forth by the federal government and private foundations to increase substantially the number of students with high-quality postsecondary credentials, the higher education system must focus on retaining students and accelerating completion, particularly among underrepresented populations. One promising program model that works with basic skills students is the Integrated Basic Education and Skills Training (I-BEST) model in Washington State’s two-year colleges.

I-BEST was developed to increase the rate at which ABE and ESL students advance to college-level coursework and completion by integrating basic skills and career-technical instruction. In the model, basic skills instructors and career-technical instructors jointly teach college-level occupational courses that admit basic skills students. An I-BEST program is a series of these integrated courses in a career-technical field that leads to a credential. The I-BEST model has received a significant amount of attention in recent years as policy makers and practitioners in other states look for effective strategies to help low-skilled students move farther and faster along educational pathways.

Researchers at the Community College Research Center (CCRC) conducted several studies of the I-BEST model over the past few years, including a field study of implemented programs in Washington State’s colleges. Findings from our field study include information about program structure and management, integrated instruction and support services, and program costs and sustainability.

Below are some highlights from our findings:

• Structured pathways. All I-BEST programs are part of long-term educational pathways that can yield increasingly valuable credentials. Our research suggests that it is important to provide structured, coherent pathways for basic skills students, who might otherwise find it difficult to navigate a broad array of choices.
• Integrated instruction. For each I-BEST course, the basic skills instructor and career-technical instructor must jointly teach in the same classroom with at least a 50 percent overlap of the instructional time. The degree to which basic skills and career-technical instruction is integrated in the I-BEST classroom varies considerably across programs. Fully integrated instruction is uncommon and difficult to achieve but we did find several examples of highly collaborative team-teaching.
• Faculty selection and collaboration. The team-teaching model is challenging for the instructors and facility with it often takes time to develop. The relationship between the instructors is critical and it is therefore important to identify and select instructors with the willingness and ability to work with a co-instructor.
• Funding and sustaining I-BEST. Approved programs are funded at 1.75 times the normal rate per full-time equivalent student (FTEs) to help cover the higher program costs. At many colleges, however, the expense of running the programs was a primary concern. Colleges identified several factors needed to sustain I-BEST programs, including maintaining strong enrollments, solid commitment from senior administrators, and continued financial support through enhanced FTEs.

Our report in Community College Review contains additional discussion of these and other findings, including a profile of I-BEST students, information on student financial support, and lessons for other states and colleges.

Stuck on You

Problem Solved!

Last week, DEI college teams, partners, and Achieving the Dream coaches gathered in Durham, N.C., for the Annual DEI Summer Workshop. As we mentioned last Thursday, one goal of the workshop was to address current implementation challenges by giving college innovators time to share their ideas and problem-solve.

We organized a group problem-solving activity we like to call "Sticky Issues." On Friday afternoon, we broke into small groups of five to seven people and gave each person a chance to share one implementation frustration, obstacle, or difficulty that they are “stuck” on. The rest of the group had ten minutes to brainstorm solutions to help the person overcome the stated challenge. Traditional rules of brainstorming apply: no idea is too off-the-wall and no one is allowed to say “that will never work!”

The Sticky Issues session isn’t about commiseration; it’s about colleges comparing ideas and spreading good practices. Here’s a sampling of the challenges raised during the session and some of the interesting ideas that were generated:

• Sticky Issue: How can we get students to sign up and show up for boot camps?
  Possible Solution: The message you use to market a boot camp is important. Put a price tag on it by sharing a cost/benefit analysis and focusing on student success data. Market it to parents. Charge students and pay them back upon completion.

• Sticky Issue: How can I get faculty to believe the data about program results?
  Possible Solution: Host an annual half day Data Summit for faculty. Take them off-site and make it fun. Ask faculty champions to present about how they use data. There is a fear of judgment, so these kinds of events can be used to demystify the data.

It was great to see the wisdom of the DEI crowd targeted at specific challenges and to see the enthusiasm of participants as they thought about implementing the new ideas on their own campuses. We might just try bringing sticky issues to Accelerating Achievement…stay tuned!

Wish You Were Here

Hello from the DEI Summer Workshop! We've gathered together the DEI college teams, partners, and Achieving the Dream coaches in Durham, NC to cogitate, collaborate, and come up with answers to big questions about developmental education. We’re asking some big questions about scaling and sustainability, too. 

When we began DEI, we were focused on expanding effective pilots and policies for students needing developmental education. When we started, colleges were serving some students in those programs and designed their work to serve even more of those who can benefit; the next challenge will be to sustain this work to serve most of those who can benefit from these effective programs—because a solution that isn’t available to most of those who need it, isn’t really a solution.

We began our day by asking attendees to envision this goal of extending their work from more to most of the students who could benefit. What would that look like? What would change on the campus? What would change among faculty? What would change for students?

One college participant shared her vision of the future: there is very little need for developmental education at the college, because most students arrive prepared or accelerate quickly to college-level work. Every student has a case manager, who serves as a friend and an advisor to make sure that they "start right, stay right, and end right." 

With that mantra still echoing in our heads, we're spending the rest of our time here reflecting on the first 18 months of DEI and capturing our accomplishments, addressing current implementation challenges, making plans for incorporating DEI learning into other student success efforts, and building a strong, sustainable learning community of developmental education innovators. Check back Monday for a full recap of the event.

Alyson Zandt is a Program Associate at MDC.

GSCC Says Pedagogy Matters

Are you a developmental education instructor interested in improving pedagogy? Global Skills for College Completion (GSCC) wants you to get involved:

• Join the GSCC Adjunct Faculty Community. We invite adjunct faculty to launch the community, and connect with the GSCC project. You will help advance and build upon GSCC's approach to improving developmental education pedagogy by connecting with adjunct faculty from across the country. This summer, GSCC is offering a stipend to developmental math and English adjunct instructors who will design and launch the online community. For details and to apply to the GSCC Adjunct Community workgroup, click here.
• GSCC is preparing for the fall launch of the Pedagogy Matters Campaign Community.  GSCC will hire and pay a stipend to ten 10 developmental education Math and English faculty to plan the Pedagogy Matters Campaign. This community will use crowd sourcing to build a viral campaign of faculty advocates to raise national awareness about pedagogy and advance a Pedagogy Matters Manifesto. If you want to help the country improve developmental education pedagogy to achieve better student outcomes, click here to apply to the Pedagogy Matters Campaign community workgroup.

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.