LETS GET ENGAGED
Join us tomorrow for the professional development workshop "Do You Know Who I Am? Creating a Culture of Engagement in your Classes." The session starts at 1:00 pm, is sponsored by the Teaching+Learning Center, and will be held in 311 Magnolia Building (Mid City Campus). You can register here but feel free to come tomorrow if your schedule changes. We will be discussing the various forms of engagement, which research proves is one of the best methods to enhance student retention and is very effective for creating a sense of community for institutions. If you are looking to add a few new tools to your teaching toolkit, this is a great opportunity for you.

USING DATA TO HELP STUDENTS SUCCEED
Although it’s important to understand effective practices from peer institutions, each institution has a unique culture that needs to be understood in order to help students succeed. At the outset, “most people really couldn’t characterize our student population. We might have had some sense of gender distribution, maybe a little bit about ethnicity, but not a whole lot. So part of it was plodding along, trying to ask very simple questions about our students and adding that to our dataset,” says Margaret Martin, Title III director and sociology professor at Eastern Connecticut State University. Higher education institutions generate a wealth of data that can be used to improve student success, but often the volume of data and lack of analysis prevent this data from having the impact it could have. “I think it’s hard for the general faculty population or administrator population to really have a handle on the data that is really driving decisions,” says Martin. “They don’t get a chance to see it or they just get very infrequent information about it. So there may be too much data, but it’s often not communicated effectively to people in ways that are both understandable and useful to them.” You can continue reading about this topic here.

BECOMING RETENTION SAVVY
Retention is a very important issue in higher education right now. It is not difficult to understand why, when you look at the budget constraints facing colleges like BRCC. The new thinking is that institutions have a responsibility to promote and support student learning and that they should measure their success as institutions based upon how well their students learned. Certainly, students have a great deal of responsibility for their own success, but so does the institution and, by implication, the faculty members. The shift from “teaching” to “learning,” then, is really a shift away from measuring the success of a college or university based upon resources and processes to measuring success based upon outcomes. These imperatives are behind the current drive to collect student success data and to help faculty and staff develop strategies to raise success rates. In short, institutions are turning to their faculties for help in improving upon dismal retention numbers. Want to see what your student retention IQ is? Take the quiz here.