Listening To Students About Learning Strengthening Pre Collegiate Education In Community Colleges Series

The author explores how students can become partners in innovation and inquiry, more engaged in the classroom, and better positioned to succeed when educators listen to their students talk about learning. Bueschel concludes that students who have not been successful in school present many challenges, but they can also be an asset in overcoming those challenges, and that making them partners in their education will improve their chances for success. (Contains 9 notes.).

Bueschel explores how students can become partners in innovation and inquiry, more engaged in the classroom, and better positioned to succeed when educators listen to their students talk about learning.

This report details five principles for creating powerful classrooms and offers a new vision for professional development: (1) High Structure; (2) High Challenge; (3) Intensity; (4) Intentionality and Learning How to Learn; and (5) Inquiry and Making Learning Visible. Included are recommendations drawn from the work of the 11 community college campuses that participated in Strengthening Pre-Collegiate Education in Community Colleges (SPECC): (1) The success of underprepared students must be an institution-wide, core responsibility; (2) Professional development should be reinvented as an intellectually engaging, integral element of work in an educational institution; (3) Institutional research must be expanded to focus more directly on core issues of teaching and learning; (4) Community colleges should lead the way in developing richer, more revealing measures of student learning; and (5) Ongoing, larger-scale improvement requires a lively, open "teaching commons" that values the knowledge of practice.

Strengthening Pre-collegiate Education in Community Colleges (SPECC) is a multi-site action-research project, focused on teaching and learning in pre-collegiate mathematics and English language arts courses at 11 California community colleges. In this report, the author discusses the data gathered over the course of the SPECC project and reflects on the need for new ways to measure student learning. The report includes an appendix with tables showing success, retention and persistence data for each of the 11 SPECC campuses. (Contains 3 tables.).

Student Success in Community Colleges As more and more underprepared students enroll in college, basic skills education is an increasing concern for all higher education institutions. Student Success in Community Colleges offers education leaders, administrators, faculty, and staff an essential resource for helping these students succeed and advance in college. By applying the book's self-assessment instrument, colleges can pinpoint how their current activities align with the most effective proven practices. Once the gaps are identified, community college leaders can determine the best strategic direction for improvement. Drawing on a broad knowledge base and illustrative examples from the most current literature, the authors cover organizational, administrative, and instructional practices; program components; student support services and strategies; and professional learning and development. Designed to help engage community college leadership and practitioners in addressing the practices, structures, and obstacles that enhance or impede the success of basic skills students, the book's strategies can be tailored to various institutional levels, showing how to unite faculty, staff, and administrators in a cooperative effort to effect institutional change. Finally, Student Success in Community Colleges reveals how investing in a comprehensive basic skills infrastructure can be a financially sustainable model for the institution as well as substantially beneficial to students and society. "This is a most unusual and valuable book; it is packed with careful analysis and practical suggestions for improving basic skills programs in community colleges. Compiled by a team of practicing professionals in teaching, administration, and research, it is knowledgeable about what has been done and imaginative and practical about what can be done to improve the access and success of community college students." K. Patricia Cross, professor of higher education, emerita, University of California, Berkeley "For its first hundred years the community college was committed primarily to access; in its second hundred years the commitment has changed dramatically to success. This book provides the best road map to date on how community colleges can reach that goal." Terry O'Banion, president emeritus, League for Innovation, and director, Community College Leadership Program, Walden University "This guide is the most comprehensive source of information about all facets of basic skills or developmental education. It will be invaluable not just to community college educators across the nation, but also to those in high schools and four-year colleges who share similar problems." W. Norton Grubb, David Gardner Chair in Higher Education, University of California, Berkeley

Based on a three-year study of over 20 community colleges, Basic Skills Education in Community Colleges analyzes developmental education practices, exploring what goes wrong and what goes right, and provides a series of recommendations for improved practice.