Building and Sustaining Critical Connections

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Building and Sustaining Critical Connections
National Center for Academic Transformation
Redesign Alliance 4th Annual Conference
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STAND UP

• If you earned a degree while attending college
  as a part-time student
• If you earned a degree while working 20 or more
  hours per week
• If you ever, for any reason, stopped/dropped
  out of college
• If you were the first in your family to attend
  college

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STAND UP

• If English is your second language
• If in the course of your daily college life,
  you found yourself in the minority
  (race/ethnicity/gender) in most situations
• If you can name an individual who made a
  significant difference in your development and
  success in college.

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IMAGINE SUCCESS!
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• Build Connections, Build Success
• How can institutions foster
• stronger and more diverse connections
• withand amongstudents?

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MAKING CONNECTIONS What Matters Most for
Student Success?
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CCSSECommunity College Survey of
Student Engagement

• Cumulatively, CCSSE has surveyed almost a million
  students from 754 different community colleges in
  49 states, British Columbia, Ontario, Nova
  Scotia, the Marianas, and the Marshall Islands.

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SENSE Survey of Entering Student Engagement

• Cumulatively, SENSE has surveyed well over
  100,000 students from 199 different community
  colleges in 35 states, the Northern Marianas,
  and the Marshall Islands.

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Initiative on Student Success

• Listening
• systematically
• to students

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ACHIEVING THE DREAM Community Colleges Count

• Evidence emerges from
• Over 1100 coach visits to 102 colleges in 22
  states
• Required student cohort tracking
• Required evaluation of student success strategies

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WHAT MATTERS MOST

• Engagement matters!

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Engagement Matters furthermore

• In many colleges, with many students, engagement
  is unlikely to happen by accident.
• It has to happen by design.
• Or, by redesign.

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WHAT MATTERS MOST

• In focus groups with students, what do they
  typically report as the most important factor in
  keeping them in school, persisting toward their
  goals?
• Relationships matter

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PERSONAL CONNECTIONS
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Student Focus Groups

• If students ran the college.?

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Personal Connections
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Personal Connections

• Entering Students First Impressions of Their
  Colleges

The very first time I came to this college, I
felt welcome.
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• Piglet sidled up to Pooh from behind.
• Pooh! He whispered.
• Yes, Piglet?
• Nothing, said Piglet, taking Poohs paw. I
  just wanted to be sure of you.
• A.A. Milne (1882-1956)

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CULTIVATING CONNECTIONS
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Cultivating Connections

• Connections with students futures
• Connections in the classroom
• Connections on campus / outside the classroom
• Connections beyond the campus
• Connections in virtual space

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Cultivating Connections

• The twofold challenge
• Use data to understand the status quowhich
  students need to be better engaged
• Find ways to use each dimension, each venue for
  engagement to create meaningful, lasting
  connections

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Least Engaged Students

• Among the least engaged community college
  students
• Part-time students
• Traditional-age students (those 24 and younger)
• Students not seeking credentials
• Students who have not completed 30 or more
  credits
• Male students
• Students who work more than 30 hours per week
• Students who have not participated in orientation
• Students who have not participated in learning
  communities

This analysis does not include students who hold
degrees. Source 2009 CCSSE Cohort
data.
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CONNECTING STUDENTS WITH THEIR FUTURES (AND WITH
REALITY) High Expectations and Aspirations
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High Expectations and Aspirations

• Percent of entering students who strongly or
  somewhat agree that they have the motivation to
  do what it takes to succeed in college
• 90
• Percent of entering students who strongly or
  somewhat agree that they are prepared
  academically to succeed in college
• 84

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High Expectations and Aspirations
Percentage of students who, at least once during
their first three weeks of college
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CONNECTIONS IN THE CLASSROOM
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• What is a good class?

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ENGAGED LEARNING
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Active and Collaborative Learning

• Worked with other students on projects during
  class
• National
• 46 often or very often (13 never)

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CONNECTIONS OUTSIDE THE CLASSROOM / ON CAMPUS
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Connections on Campus Orientation
Have you attended an orientation program or
course?
Students who attended a college orientation
Source 2009 CCSSE Cohort data.
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Connections on Campus

• Students who say they never worked with other
  classmates outside of class to prepare class
  assignments
• 41
• Students who report that they never discussed
  ideas from their readings or classes with
  instructors outside of class
• 47

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An Integrated Support Network Entering students
who are unaware of support services during their
first three weeks of college
Source SENSE data.
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• Students
• dont do
• optional!!

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Making the Most of Connectionson Campus

• Make outside-the-classroom engagement
  inescapable.
• Require students to participate in educational
  experiences that are important to their success.
• Make student services mandatory and/or integrate
  them into coursework.

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CONNECTIONS BEYOND THE CAMPUS
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Connections Beyond the Campus
Will you have an internship, field experience,
co-op experience, or clinical assignment while
attending this college?
Source 2009 CCSSE Cohort data.
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Making the Most of Connections Beyond the Campus

• Require experiential learning as part of the
  course.
• Encourage high-impact experiences such as
  service learning, study abroad

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CONNECTIONS IN VIRTUAL SPACE
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Connections in Virtual Space

• FACT Students increasingly use social media and
  other virtual tools to interact.
• FACT Students value personal connections at
  their colleges.

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• These are just technologies. Using them does
  not make you modern, smart, moral, wise, fair, or
  decent. It just makes you able to communicate,
  compete, and collaborate farther and faster.
• Thomas L. Friedman
• Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist

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Connections in Virtual Space

• Use online and social networking tools to
• cultivate relationships
• that help students feel connected and
• encourage them to persist in their studies.

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Use of Social Networking ToolsFor any purpose
Traditional-Age Students
Nontraditional-Age Students
Source 2009 CCSSE data.
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Use of Social Networking ToolsTo communicate
about coursework
Traditional-Age Students
Nontraditional-Age Students
Source 2009 CCSSE data.
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Use of Social Networking Tools

• Some use of social networking tools is related to
  increased engagement
• But there is a point of diminishing returns.

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• With new technologies weve tended to do the
  same things more efficiently, when what we need
  is to do different things more effectively.
• Christopher Dede, Professor
• Harvard School of Education

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DOING EDUCATION DIFFERENTLY, BASED ON
EVIDENCE Whats Required?
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WHAT MATTERS MOST

• Focused, sustained efforts to purposefully
  redesign educational experiences and bring them
  to scale, can produce real improvements in
  student engagement, learning, persistence, and
  academic attainment.

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WHAT MATTERS MOST

• Student Engagement By Design

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Encouraging Student Success Strategies

• Mandatory
• Assessment and placement
• Orientation
• Success course for students in dev ed
• Participation in learning lab, tutoring and/or
  supplemental instruction

• Stop late registration/ create late-start classes
• Early advising / development of academic plan
• Early alert systems

Students dont do optional.
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Encouraging Student Success Strategies

• Linked courses/ learning communities
• Learning communities required for FTIC
• Learning communities linking student success
  course and dev ed
• Counselors and advisors in learning communities

• Supplemental instruction
• Case management / success coaches
• Summer bridge or boot camp programs short/
  intensive skill refreshers
• Contextualized dev ed
• Cooperative/collaborative learning at scale

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Fundamentals

• The center of our work is student learning,
  persistence, and success.
• We cant get better at what were not willing to
  look at.
• Every course, every program, every service, every
  academic policy, every college is perfectly
  designed to achieve the exact outcome it
  currently produces.

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Fundamentals

• 4. If nothing changes, nothing changes.
• 5. Neither organizations nor individuals are good
  at accomplishing things they never actually
  decided to do.

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• Better is possible.
• It does not take genius.
• It takes diligence.
• It takes moral clarity.
• It takes ingenuity.
• And above all, it takes a willingness to try.
• Atul Gawande

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• Kay McClenney
  Director
  Center for Community College
  Student Engagement (CCCSE)
• kmcclenney_at_ccsse.org

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• Eventually everything connects people, ideas,
  objects. The quality of the connections is the
  key to quality per se.
• Charles Eames American
  designer, 1907-1978