Are We Really All In?

Student attrition has been a primary focus among higher education institutions for nearly 50 years, yet overall retention and graduation rates continue to be of significant concern. Despite increased attention, ongoing struggles of colleges and universities to effectively address potential barriers to student progress are well-documented. Part of the challenge lies in garnering widespread organizational commitment that establishes student progress as an institutional priority. Along with leadership commitment, broad institutional involvement and adherence to a systematic approach to testing new, innovative solutions are necessary to better position the institution to make clear, evidence-based decisions that improve the student experience. Jobe, Spencer, Hinkle, and Kaplan explain how one institution did it in their research study The First Year: A Cultural Shift Towards Improving Student Progress.

How To Do College 101

Despite a great increase in the numbers of students enrolling in higher education, specifically at community colleges, the successful completion rates for these students has remained static since the 1970’s. When reviewing strategies to increase student retention and successful completion, the Student Success Course (SSC) has emerged as a promising and prominent strategy for community colleges. Given that, the purpose of the sequential mixed methods study by Kimbark, Peters, and Richardson (Effectiveness of the Student Success Course on Persistence, Retention, Academic Achievement, and Student Engagement) was to determine if participation in a SSC influences persistence, retention, academic achievement, and student engagement on a community college campus. Results of this study indicate that a relationship exists between participation in the SSC and persistence, retention, academic achievement in English and mathematics, and student engagement. Additionally, participants claim that taking the SSC not only altered their perceptions of the importance of the course, but their social and study skills as well.

First-Gen Does Not Mean One Size Fits All

Undergraduate retention and graduation are issues requiring critical attention from public universities across the nation. Degree attainment for first-generation college students (FGCS) in the United States is especially important to meeting future workforce demands, goals for national economic prosperity, and global competitiveness. Cynthia Demetriou, Judith Meece, Deborah Eaker-Rich, and Candice Powell in their research study The Activities, Roles, and Relationships of Successful First-Generation College Students examined the lived experience of students to explore how developmental situations in college are experienced by the people who participate in them. Their report supports previous research that indicates that students who are engaged in various opportunities, especially if they are first-generation, are highly likely to be successful. The report also suggests a number of opportunities that should be offered by colleges.

Group Work Helps Students Solve Real World Problems

We often talk about the differences between high school and college, We even have a section about the differences in our (Open Educational Resource) textbook for College Success Skills, but that argument may be obscuring the fact that teaching and learning is just that. Stating that premise, a recent article about high school mathematics teacher Sandra Cover really got me excited. She is using a very unique method in her classroom that acknowledges the real world. The first reality is that many of today's problems are solved by teams. The second reality is that it is rare that the first suggestion for a solution is adopted without back and forth from members of that team. Covers allows students in her trigonometry class to work in groups and allows them to revise their work (even assessments) when it is incorrect. Cover, who teaches at Lakeview High School in Battle Creek, Michigan, developed this new approach after realizing her students were learning the “what” of math, but not the “how” or “why.” One of the reasons I am so excited about her pedagogical approach is that I feel we can use it in any course we are teaching. Take a look at the entire article here and let me know what you think.

Vibrant Middle Class Driven By Community Colleges

New research from Melissa Kearney and Phillip Levine finds that greater income gaps between those at the bottom and middle of the income distribution lead low-income boys to drop out of high school more often than their counterparts in higher inequality areas, suggesting that there is an important link between income inequality and reduced rates of upward mobility. “Economic despair” may contribute if those at the bottom do not believe they have the ability to achieve middle class status. This research is really fascinating but not all that shocking to the thousands of us that work at community colleges. This tells the all-to-often tragic story of many, if not most, of our students. The upside to all of this is that the opportunities do exist to create a vibrant middle class and more community colleges are opening each year. Moving into the "classroom" (whether onsite or virtually) just how do we introduce this idea. I say early and often. I talk about upward mobility and the quality of life provided by a middle class career all the time. Making the subject relevant, experts say, is the best way to get your students to learn and retain new knowledge. What better way to tie this into everything about them than to talk about the life that can be had by using the fulcrum of higher education (or adult basic education for those seeking a high school equivalency)? You can read the entire report here and I would love to hear your feedback.

Teacher Empathy Key to Student Engagement

Photo from Smithsonian.com

There is a lot of discussion in the social media-stratosphere about anxiety, depression, and other stress-related issues being experienced by larger numbers of students than in the past. There has been research related to many of those topics but not so much on how we as faculty can respond. But there is a recent article by Sal Meyers, Katherine Rowell, Mary Wells, and Brian C. Smith, who teach and work at community colleges, about what they call 'teacher empathy." They note it is a term first used by Psychologist Carl Rogers in Freedom to Learn. Teacher empathy, according to Rogers, is the most potent factor in bringing about change and learning in the relationship between students and teachers. Leading with interpersonal empathy, which is described as the "processes whereby one person can come to know the internal state of another and can be motivated to respond with sensitive care, the research cites the theoretical work of Batson and Segal. Meyers, et. al. note that because we are dealing with groups in our courses, social empathy comes into play. They note "the ability to understand people by perceiving or experiencing their lived situations and as a result gain insight into structural inequalities and disparities" is equally important for teacher empathy to exist. The paper goes on to offer a number of suggestions on how to become a more empathetic teacher. Read the entire article here.

Managing Stress Key to Student Success

What do you know about anxiety related to testing and assessment? Did you experience anxiety when you were in college? Did you find a way to overcome it and succeed? Have you thought to share that with your students? The faculty who teach our College Success Skills course (CSSK 1023) include material about test taking and how to deal with anxiety and other issues that may arise when a student feels stress. Of course we cannot go through our lives without experiencing stress but learning how to manage it allows us to be successful. One of the ways you can help your students to be fully prepared for assessment is to have them think about the process itself. What is being assessed and why? Have them think about the types of test questions you are likely to use. Have them actually come up with questions that they think might be on the test. In this way, they can be more productive when it comes to preparing for assessments. Another method you might want to introduce is using music to set a calm and distraction free environment in your classroom. Using music can help students to focus on the task at hand and block out whatever else is going on in their lives at least for the hour or more that they are testing. I suggest using music like Japanese ambient selections. You can use songs like Still Space by Satoshi Ashikawa or Glass Chattering by Yoshio Ojima. Playing this for 3-5 minutes as your student enter the class on the day of testing will help them to be more mindful of what they have learned and allow them to share this with you. Let me know if you try it or if you have other suggestions of music that will help students perform their best.

I Want to Finish But I Have To Work

Well if I didn't have to work to pay for my college, it might be a lot easier to finish. You have probably heard one of your students make this or a similar statement as you talked with them about their poor performance in your class. We as academics often use this anecdotal information when we are discussing how to help students improve their completion rate. Now there is some verified research that may help all of us as we continue to look for solutions. Researchers at North Carolina State University released the results of a survey they produced using the Revealing Institutional Strengths and Challenges instrument. In a news story by Inside Higher Ed, the data show "that working and paying for expenses were the top two challenges community college students said impeded their academic success. The researchers surveyed nearly 6,000 two-year college students from 10 community colleges in California, Michigan, Nebraska, North Carolina, South Dakota, Texas, Virginia, Wisconsin and Wyoming in fall 2017 and 2018." It is too bad that students from Louisiana were not polled but the students that did participate opened a window into the many impediments community college students face. You can read the entire article here.

Light Touch Interventions Improve Student Success

Want to improve the student success in your classes this spring? Want to improve your student rating as well? The same approach can help both and it is something that is probably already in your teaching toolkit. Engagement is something that provides multiple benefits and while we know that it works, there are still some of us who struggle with implementing it effectively. Colleen Flaherty provides some good information in her article for Inside Higher Ed. She notes, "Students benefit from increased faculty engagement. Yet many professors still resist more student-centered teaching. Part of the problem is that graduate schools are slow to adopt pedagogical training, meaning that some professors may want to up their interaction with students but don’t know how. Another part of the problem is that becoming a better teacher takes time, an increasingly scarce faculty resource. What if engagement wasn’t complicated and didn’t take that much time? Preliminary research called 'My Professor Cares: Experimental Evidence on the Role of Faculty Engagement,' presented last week at the annual meeting of the American Economics Association, suggests that even 'light touch' interventions can make a difference to students." You can read the entire article here.

Why Do You Teach?

We have all become accustomed to talking about learning outcomes or objectives or something else you might call the knowledge that we want our students to have as they complete our courses. Often we begin our semester very focused on these outcomes. Our assessments may even be calibrated precisely to what knowledge we want to measure. But somewhere along the way the human factor plays a part in changing the linear trajectory of the teaching and learning we are hoping is occurring. This messiness is nothing more than human nature. After all, the education science we are hoping to harness is built on humans and we all know how much we change daily, weekly, and throughout our lives. So I want to suggest something that we have discussed in the past. Take a step back and look to your academic training. Why did you become a teacher of economics, mathematics, theater, or fill-in-the-blank? Think back to the ideas that made you excited to want to continue to attend college and earn a master's or doctoral degree. It is that big idea that you need to introduce to your students at the beginning of the semester. What is the macro-level knowledge that is the most important for each of your students to take with them to the next class? What is something that will keep their focus as they delve in deeper as the semester progresses? Paul Hanstedt calls is a beautiful idea and his recent post may help you think about what you will bring to the first day. Now the trick is you must continue to focus on that idea throughout the semester. After the first assessment test, when you and many of your students are disappointed, is a great time to bring the focus back to this big idea. In the middle of the semester, when your syllabus timeline looks like a suggestion rather than a roadmap, is a great time to pull out the big idea. So that is it. Simple enough right? Try it out and let me know how it works for you.

Colleagues at Rice University have posed an interesting topic in a post about active learning. I have written a number of posts about how and why active learning is a good teaching strategy. Many of our faculty at BRCC have adopted active learning strategies. Many of the strategies have come from the Active Learning Manual that I have published annually for almost a decade. But the article addressing active learning poses some good prompts that can help us to dig deeper into the topic. This one for instance: "For years, the term has filled a gap for us. It has functioned rhetorically as a way to contrast evidence-based teaching practices (a much better term, by the way) with more traditional methodologies, but ultimately the wide-ranging utility of this classification is also its drawback. Although, as Cynthia Brame notes, some scholars have tried to create an operational definition for active learning, they also acknowledge the category is enormously broad. This breadth is not necessarily a bad thing in and of itself. Indeed, it means that we have a lot of options for helping students to learn. The problem is that active learning has come to mean all things to all people and essentially encompasses everything that is not passive." You can read the entire article post here. As we begin to plan for the spring 2019 semester, I hope you will consider teaching methodologies that have been proven to help students learn, many of which are active learning strategies.

We can all agree that many of our students struggle with how to best prepare for assessment. Many of them seem to "trust their gut" and go with the tried and true rereading of the entire chapter or pulling an all-nighter. Science proves that neither of those methods work very well. So I was interested to read an article that explains how Colorado State is using science and technology in a new course that helps students become better learners. My curiosity was piqued because of the College Success Skills course we offer (and I teach) but also because I am fascinated by how our brain really works. The article notes that, "Learning is not intuitive. Research shows a disconnect between what people think are the best ways to learn and the habits that actually lead to true understanding and retention." In my experience, that is true but how can we make learning more intuitive or is that even possible? The article goes on to say, "To that end, students study the research behind different learning strategies. Take cramming, for example. Students learn that, while people estimate they learn better studying all at once versus spacing out their learning, studies show the opposite. Similarly, people perform better when they test themselves on what they know while they are studying, as opposed to reading the same material over and over." That is reassuring as we based our Study Group Program administered by the Academic Learning Center on those very notions (garnered from research in the near past). You can read the entire article here and I encourage you (as you continue to prep for spring 2019) to apply the lessons learned by CSU to your own teaching.