WHAT DOES A SUCCESSFUL STUDENT NEED TO KNOW
While we continue to offer a college success skills course, many of the students who would benefit most are not enrolling in the class. If you are advising a student who has struggled with time management, test anxiety, metacognition issues, critical thinking or any other issues that prevent their academic progress, it may be time to suggest they enroll in a CSSK 102 class. In the absence of taking that class, you should strongly encourage them to take advantage of the various workshops offered by the Academic Learning Center. Karp and Bork, of the Community College Research Center, have written a working paper on the topic. They note "While low college success rates are typically linked to students’ lack of academic preparation for college and their subsequent need for developmental or remedial instruction, research suggests that even many students who are deemed “college-ready” by virtue of their placement test scores or completion of developmental coursework still do not earn a credential." Their paper builds on previous work arguing that community college success is dependent not only upon academic preparation but also upon a host of important skills, attitudes, and behaviors that are often left unspoken. The paper  clarifies the role of the community college student and the components of that role that must be enacted for students to be successful. They provide a concrete, actionable description of the community college student role and present a framework that practitioners can use to help students learn how to be successful community college students.

USING STUDENT RATING FEEDBACK EFFECTIVELY
As our students begin to complete their ratings of their experiences in our classes, it is a good time to take a look at how we as faculty can use the data and what the current research says about the process.  Safavi and Bakar, et al. suggest that faculty may want to add some additional questions to the ratings in order to gather information more specific to their subject matter and teaching approach. In research performed by Slocombe, Miller, and Hite, they note that students tended to give higher evaluations to professors who used humor and to professors they liked but the difficulty of the class did not impact students' ratings of faculty. Ronald A. Berk's research revealed that students' expectations about how the results will be used are also critical to future response rates. Chen and Hoshower found that students’ motivation to participate in  the  rating  system  hinged  on  the following semi-observable outcomes (in order  of decreasing importance): (1) improvements in teaching, (2) improvements in course content and format, and (3) faculty personnel decisions (promotion, tenure, salary increase).

BECOMING A LEARNER-CENTERED EDUCATOR
Dr. James Lang has written a column for The Chronicle of Higher Education about some of the small decisions he has made that had a big impact on his classes. He writes, "When I first started teaching, the open space of a 50- or 75-minute class period seemed an eternity. Like many a new faculty member, I worried about having enough material. I wanted to ensure that, if discussion faltered or if I rushed through the lecture too quickly, I would have options to fill the remaining time. My greatest fear was using up everything I had and finding 30 minutes still left on the clock. Twenty years later I seem to have the opposite problem: not enough time in the class period to accomplish everything I have planned. It seems so difficult to me now to do much of substance in 50 minutes. I don’t know whether to blame that shift in perspective on the fact that I have more teaching experience or that I’m just older. I suppose those two possibilities don’t untangle very easily." Continue reading here.