Achieving the Dream: Realizing phase two
Many of these colleges must adapt to new populations of students – immigrants who have moved into the area or older workers who have been displaced from manufacturing jobs.
The colleges are using grants from Achieving the Dream: Community Colleges Count to create initiatives and study best practices that improve student success in community colleges.
Twenty-seven colleges in five states (Florida, New Mexico, North Carolina, Texas and Virginia) are now in the second phase of the effort. Each of these colleges will receive $400,000 in grants over four years to implement ideas developed during the first phase, says Carol Lincoln, senior associate at MDC and project director for the Achieving the Dream initiative. Three of the recipients in Florida, Virginia and Texas have ambitious plans aimed at helping students master remedial and developmental courses and successfully transition to college-level work.
- At Broward Community College in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., a team of faculty and staff are working to create a specific sequence of college-preparatory classes students must pass before they can begin college credit courses. The students, who require remedial reading, English and math skills, also work in groups with a “success coach” to get the extra support they need to succeed at school. More…
- In Martinsville, Va., faculty and staff of Patrick Henry Community College have come together to build an “active learning” institute to share best practices of how to involve students more actively in their education. The college is also setting up learning communities for students, implementing a mentoring program and offering a program of supplemental instruction in targeted classes. More…
- In San Antonio, Texas, the four colleges in the Alamo Community College District are working together to develop best practices for teaching developmental math, share information about specific “gatekeeper” courses to ensure that students are prepared for entry-level college courses such as English composition, history and college algebra, and examine the counseling and advising students receive about the sequence of courses they take. More…
Achieving the Dream is a multimillion-dollar initiative supported by Lumina Foundation and involving several national partner organizations. Achieving the Dream works on multiple fronts - including efforts on campuses and in research, public engagement and public policy. The effort emphasizes the use of data to drive change for improved student success. This summer two funding organizations joined the effort in Ohio and Connecticut and gave seven more colleges the opportunity to participate in the program. These colleges are now beginning the first phase of the program, collecting data and developing plans to address their campuses’ specific issues. More…
“Achieving the Dream has re-energized us and given us a goal of looking at student success,” says Jo-Carol Fabianke, vice president at Northwest Vista College and co-chairman of the Alamo Community College District team coordinating the Achieving the Dream effort.
Ted Wright, special assistant to the president for strategic initiatives at Broward Community College, agrees, calling Achieving the Dream a catalyst for change throughout Broward’s three campuses. “It has had a very transformational impact on our institution. Up until now we had a band-aid approach to creating a college-preparatory program. Now we have goals and objectives.”
Learn more about Achieving the Dream.
Broward Community College Nearly 85 percent of the students who enter Broward Community College each year and are seeking a degree require some remedial math, English or reading courses. Forty percent need to take remedial classes in all three subjects.
“Our community is changing significantly in demographics and immigration patterns,” says Ted Wright, special assistant to the president for strategic initiatives at the Fort Lauderdale, Fla. school. “Our president was very concerned about the institution’s ability to respond to changes in the community.”
The Achieving the Dream initiative gives the college an opportunity to develop a new approach to help at-risk students. Initially the college is focusing on a group of about 500 students who need remedial classes in math, English and reading and test into the lowest-level class in two of the three subject areas.
For these students the college has determined a specific sequence for the remedial classes, with preparatory reading first. In addition, students must take a new three-credit “success” course, which teaches them the skills they need to succeed in higher education.
“We took what used to be a one-credit course and turned it into a three-credit course. Each instructor serves as a ‘success coach’ for the 25 students in the class,” Wright explains. Each success coach works with the students outside of class to help them complete the first semester of college. Coaches teach one fewer class than the normal load to give them time to work individually with the students.
Wright says the college is working toward creating learning communities for these students so that they complete all of their remedial courses with the same group of students. A team of faculty and staff also are working to streamline approaches on all three campuses and to develop ways to help students make a smooth transition to the second semester.
“Achieving the Dream has become a centerpiece for change. So many different groups have come to work together in ways they haven’t done before,” Wright says.
More than 50 percent of the 50,000 students who attend one of the four community colleges that make up the Alamo Community College District are Hispanic. In the past the type of developmental education these students received depended on which college they attended.
“We all had our own ways of dealing with developmental students,” says Jo-Carol Fabianke, vice president at Northwest Vista College and co-chairman of the district-wide Achieving the Dream team. “But we’re really not all that different when you look at the data.”
Through the Achieving the Dream initiative the San Antonio, Texas-based colleges – Palo Alto College, San Antonio College, St. Philip’s College and Northwest Vista – began to work together. In the coming year groups of faculty and staff from all four colleges will work to determine best practices for teaching developmental math, to review the content of gatekeeper courses such as English composition, history and college algebra to ensure the content is coordinated with the developmental courses, and to examine the way in which the college advises students.
By next summer, the college plans to have a summit for faculty and staff on these topic areas. For instance, all developmental math faculty members will meet to review the success of the program, discuss best practices, hear from experts and create one way for all four colleges to handle developmental math courses, Fabianke says.
Faculty members who teach entry-level, gatekeeper courses will examine the curriculum for those courses as well as the developmental courses to ensure students learn the skills they need to be successful in those courses. They also will consider what students need in the way of support and examine whether their teaching methods provide that support, she says.
“We’re also going to look at how we are advising students to make sure students are taking courses in the proper sequence,” Fabianke says. For example, she says, students should take a writing course first because their ability to write affects their performance in other courses they take.
“Achieving the Dream has given us a focus. We’re looking at student success – and not just what we think is happening,” Fabianke says, noting that data is driving all decision-making.
Patrick Henry Community College
Many of the 3,500 students who attend Patrick Henry Community College in Martinsville, Va., are displaced workers who lost their jobs when furniture factories and textile mills closed. The area has lost more than 15,000 jobs in the last seven years, and for many of the unemployed workers, their only opportunity is to return to school.
Some, however, have been out of school 30 or more years. Although they are motivated to succeed, many students cannot do the math.
“Through our research we found that a student’s math placement score even before they came here was a good predictor of whether the student would persist,” says Kevin Shropshire, coordinator of institutional research.
With its Achieving the Dream grant, the college has set to work to improve the first-year experience for its students. Part of the plan calls for the college to transform itself into an active-learning institution where faculty members act more as facilitators than lecturers. The idea is to get students working – and learning – together.
Faculty professional development is already under way so that the college can build its own staff of in-house experts to work with the 50 full-time and 50 adjunct faculty members.
The college is working to implement learning communities so the same students take several classes as a group. “Research has shown learning communities to be very successful with developmental education – and a large percentage of our students require developmental education,” says Carolyn Byrd, dean of instructional support services.
Students will have the opportunity to work one-on-one with peer mentors as well as get help with math assignments at the college’s Math Lab. In addition, two instructors will be assigned to certain developmental math classes, with the supplemental instructor available to work with students in study groups and provide extra instruction after class.
“Math is going to be a bigger focus than ever before,” Byrd says. The college will actively track the impact of each of its efforts on student success.
"We thought we looked at data before (we became involved in Achieving the Dream)," Byrd says, "but we look at it much more now. On any topic we discuss, the question always comes up – ‘Do you have the data to support that?’"
“Achieving the Dream has helped us to get re-focused and move toward becoming more of a learning college.”
Four community colleges in Ohio and three in Connecticut are joining the Achieving the Dream initiative and will begin the first phase of the program this summer. Faculty and staff will work together to gather data showing student completion rates and semester-to-semester retention rates, complete an audit of policies to determine if they help or hinder students, and seek input from community leaders.
The Ohio colleges are Cuyahoga Community College in Cleveland, Jefferson Community College in Steubenville, Sinclair Community College in Dayton and Zane State College in Zanesville. Lumina Foundation for Education is providing each college with a $50,000 planning grant for the first year of the program, and the Ohio-based KnowledgeWorks Foundation will fund the implementation grants during the subsequent three years.
The Connecticut colleges are Capital Community College in Hartford, Housatonic Community College in Bridgeport, and Norwalk Community College in Norwalk. The Nellie Mae Education Foundation is providing both the planning and implementation grants to these colleges.
|
Achieving the Dream partners
Lumina Foundation for Education has joined forces with several partners with significant community college expertise for Achieving the Dream: Community Colleges Count. They include:
“We’re very excited about working in partnership with all of these organizations,” says Martha Lamkin, Lumina Foundation's president and CEO. “Our hope is that the Achieving the Dream partnership can spark a national movement to help low-income and minority students succeed in higher education.” Click here to view a short video about Achieving the Dream: Community Colleges Count. |
Leave a comment:
Board