Strengthening Pre Collegiate Education In Community Colleges

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.

Eaton details the key factors that have caused community colleges to shift from crucial sites of higher education opportunity to ambiguous centers of quasi-educational programs and services. Examining curriculum, access, the associate degree, and general education, the author suggests what actions can be taken to strengthen the collegiate purpose across all institutional levels - providing specific suggestions on reshaping the institutional agenda for faculty, administration, presidents, and trustees. And as an alternative to changes in policies and practices, Eaton also considers structural changes for the community college - such as changing their relationship with four-year schools, changing their educational role, or becoming four-year institutions - as ways of emphasizing and strengthening their collegiate function.

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.).

The author discusses how faculty inquiry can inform and support classroom teaching and learning, as well as allow for better designed courses and programs. "Faculty inquiry" is a term that encompasses a range of practices that engage teachers in looking closely and critically at student learning for the purpose of improving their own courses and programs. As part of the larger scholarship of teaching and learning movement, it also involves going public with insights, experiences and results that other educators can evaluate and build on. The essay looks at how faculty inquiry has been mobilized to improve the teaching and learning of basic skills at a cluster of California community colleges participating in the Carnegie Foundation initiative on Strengthening Pre-collegiate Education in Community Colleges (SPECC). Appended is "Survey of Participants in Faculty Inquiry Groups" by Cheryl R. Richardson. (Contains 22 notes and 6 tables.).

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

Co-published with This timely volume addresses the urgent need for new strategies and better ways to serve community colleges’ present and future students at a time of rapid diversification, not just racially and ethnically, but including such groups as the undocumented, international students, older adult learners and veterans, all of whom come with varied levels of academic and technical skillsThe contributing researchers, higher education faculty, college presidents, and community college administrators provide thorough understanding of student groups who have received scant attention in the higher education literature. They address the often unconscious barriers to access our institutions have erected and describe emerging strategies, frameworks, and pilot projects that can ease students’ transition into college and through the maze of the college experience to completion. They offer advice on organizational culture, on defining institutional outcomes, on aligning shifting demographics with the multiple missions of the community college, on strengthening the collaboration of student and academic affairs to leverage their respective roles and resources, and on engaging with the opportunities afforded by technology.Divided into three parts – understanding today’s community college campuses; supporting today’s community college learners; and specialized populations and communities – this book offers a vision and solutions that should inform the work of faculty, administrators, presidents, and board members.