Becoming A Learning College: Milestones On The Journey

BECOMING A LEARNING COLLEGE: MILESTONES ON THE JOURNEY by Kay M. McClenney

Three years ago, the League for Innovation in the Community College identified through a competitive process 12 Vanguard Learning Colleges. These colleges, committed to collaborative work on developing in their institutions an ever more powerful and effective focus on student learning, are Cascadia Community College, The Community College of Baltimore County, Community College of Denver, Humber College, Kirkwood Community College, Lane Community College, Madison Area Technical College, Moraine Valley Community College, Palomar College, Richland College, Sinclair Community College, and Valencia Community College.

Throughout the three-year project, the League and the colleges addressed five strategic objectives that focused work in these areas: organizational culture, staff recruitment and development, technology, learning outcomes, and programs for underprepared students. Near the end of the grant-funded period, each of the colleges hosted a final evaluation visit by League staff and the project’s external evaluator. The agenda included sessions with the president and the college’s Vanguard project team, an exhibition of results related to the five major objectives, a special session on evidence of learning, and focus groups with faculty and with students.

The prevailing metaphor for the Learning College Project has been “the journey,” emphasizing the conviction that becoming a learning college involves a long-term and continuing commitment – a journey, not a destination. From materials reviewed and from interviews, presentations, and focus groups conducted, the project evaluation yields five important milestones on that journey.

MILESTONE #1 THE COLLEGE AS ITS OWN CRITIC

An initially surprising theme emerged as a significant milestone on the journey toward becoming a learning college. Many, many people pointed to a new level of honesty and rigor in institutional self-examination as an important result of the Learning College Project.

This is a big deal. Higher education generally is highly skilled at critiquing other social institutions and very slow to criticize itself. And community colleges in particular have been reluctant to engage in tough- minded self-critique, in part because the institutions have suffered too long from inappropriate evaluation (or even disdain) from the outside and inferiority complexes on the inside; in part because their resources and capacities for institutional research have been limited; in part because they have until recently gotten by with anecdotes as a substitute for evidence; and in part because they often are too busy doing the work to have time to assess how well they’re doing it. So affirming and acting on the value of rigorous self-assessment is a major step forward.

Data emerged as an important force in the Vanguard colleges as project leaders, the evaluator, and people on the campuses continuously pressed the question, “How do you know…how good you are? …how well you are doing? …what students are learning?” As one team member reported, “We had to learn not to be fearful of displaying our warts, our deficiencies. And then data became a tool that promotes change. This more honest self-assessment actually produces more significant progress and accelerated improvement in our work.”

The emphasis on the difference between looking good and being good was a common theme. As one college team member said, “We developed the courage to have substance supercede our need to market ourselves.” A faculty member from the same college embellished the thought: “I look at it as polishing chrome versus fixing the engine. For too long, we’ve been really busy polishing the chrome.”

Another aspect of integrity, frequently observed, was captured in this question: “Do our resource allocations match our rhetoric about learning? Are we facing up to the places where the match is not good?” One testimony went like this: “We’re putting everything – effort, time, money – where we say the priority should be. That is integrity, and people recognize it.”

Bringing the discussion together, an administrator attested to a new standard at her institution. People there understand, she said, that as they monitor college progress and performance, their charge is “to be brutally honest, but with hope.”

MILESTONE #2 ASSUMING COLLECTIVE RESPONSIBILITY FOR STUDENT LEARNING

By and large, the business of teaching and learning in American colleges and universities has traditionally been a dramatically isolated and individualistic enterprise. The faculty member designs his own course, develops her own tests, sets his own standards, gives her own grades, all the while declaring, “My classroom is my kingdom.” Collective responsibility for student learning is not something most faculty members learned to value in graduate school.

But it is precisely that sense of collective responsibility, cutting across classrooms, disciplines, departments, and divisions, that is requisite to development of a learning college; and in the Vanguard Learning Colleges, it has emerged in powerful ways. As one team member proclaimed, “The big answer to ’what’s new here?’ is that people are taking more collective responsibility for student learning.” Said another, “Our need and intent is to make the work much more systematic, more public, more transparent. It’s not just our private work any more.” And a dean of developmental education celebrated, as well: “Finally, we’re taking the focus off of divisions and departments and putting the focus on students. I don’t own the underprepared student. We all do.”

BREAKING DOWN INSTITUTIONAL SILOS

It turns out, unsurprisingly, that “knowing people as people” still makes a difference. A remarkable number of interviewees commented on the value of the cross-functional mix of people on the Vanguard teams and in other work groups organized on campus to carry out related tasks and initiatives. One person said, “The mix of people required for the Vanguard team was unprecedented at our college. It promoted honest exchange and addressed disconnects across work areas and roles.” A support staff member observed, “The cross-functional team has helped more than anything to break down silos.”

People at Cascadia Community College cited the importance of “fuzzy edges” – avoiding silos of people, programs, and ideas. Examples include their work to integrate technology into the instructional program; create skills standards for arts and sciences faculty that are analogous to state-defined skills standards for professional and technical faculty; and incorporate shared responsibilities into job descriptions. At Moraine Valley, people have not limited their targets to “breaking down the invisible walls.” They started with the visible ones, physically reorganizing some areas of the campus.

Several colleges are continuing the cross-functional team approach and expanding it more generally across the college in planning, implementation of strategic goals, and monitoring implementation and continuous improvement.

EXTENDING COLLABORATION TO THE LEARNING PROCESS

Happily, the emphasis on collective endeavor extends also to the classroom. Vanguard faculty pointed to the strengths of collaborative learning, citing research that shows results including higher achievement, increased retention, deeper understanding and critical thinking, and greater social competency. Stating what has become a core value at his college, a faculty member asserted, “We’re not through here until everyone in this class has learned this material. Everybody’s learning is everybody’s responsibility.”

MILESTONE #3 BENCHMARKING BEST PRACTICES

As the colleges have embraced rigorous self-assessment and assumed more collective responsibility for student learning, they have also enthusiastically affirmed the power of benchmarking as a tool for spurring initiative and improvement. Participants hailed the availability of best practice models among the Vanguard Learning Colleges as hugely beneficial; and many noted that intercollege observations and collaboration raised the bar for performance. As one faculty member said, “When Toyota built Lexus, they bought BMWs and Mercedes, stripped them down, and used the best of the best. We’re building a Lexus here.”

For benchmarking to be meaningful, the community college field must insist on a rigorous definition of the term best practice. That phrase should refer to educational practices for which there exists compelling evidence that they work in promoting student learning and persistence. Too often, the term has been cheapened by describing programs and practices as “best” without such evidence, based instead on PR, politics, personal preference, good looks, hunch, or ideology. There is a continuing need for rigorous studies of educational practices to yield models and strategies that are proven effective.

MILESTONE #4 BUILDING A CULTURE OF EVIDENCE

Having previously lived comfortably (like most community colleges) in a culture of anecdote, the Vanguard Learning Colleges have made significant progress on the task of building a culture of evidence within their institutions, and the impact has been substantial. “The most compelling thing,” says a chemistry professor, “is that question I’m now asking myself: ‘How do I know that I’m doing what I think I’m doing? How do I know that students are learning what I think I’m teaching?’” Another respondent asserted, “The concept of documenting evidence that an initiative or activity has improved student learning is perhaps the most dramatic change that has occurred at the college through the work on the Vanguard Project.”

The Vanguard Learning Colleges provided numerous examples of important lessons learned from their data – and what they had done in response. At the Community College of Denver, for example, a one-credit-hour seminar required of all entrants to health sciences programs has produced marked improvements in the rate at which students successfully complete their first semester (i.e., from a 60-to-70 percent semester completion rate prior to implementation of the seminar to 90 percent or higher after implementation). Moraine Valley Community College’s new College 101 orientation course also has produced significant positive results. On average, new full-time freshmen who successfully completed COL 101 ended the fall semester with a significantly higher percent of credit hours earned, significantly higher GPAs, and strikingly higher retention rates, compared with students who did not take the course and students who registered but did not successfully complete it. At Richland College, data about in-course retention prompted faculty to redesign a particular biology course that showed a retention rate of only 30 percent. Sinclair Community College faculty and staff, unhappy with dismal student success rates in distance learning (DL) courses, identified several retention strategies: reduce late registration, increase interaction with students enrolled in DL classes, expand information on the DL website, and develop a web-based student orientation course called Passport to Learning.

WHAT KIND OF EVIDENCE?

Most of these colleges describe themselves as much more data-oriented than a few years ago. They collect more data, make more data-driven decisions, and demonstrate more commitment to a philosophy of continuous improvement. The available data shed light in multiple directions. For example, the colleges have data to support enrollment management; data describing the college’s students; data about institutional effectiveness, including information about student and employer satisfaction; and some useful and promising models for student cohort tracking, such as those at Humber College and Denver. Colleges also have some useful data pertaining to the quality of instructional programs. Often these are special studies (of student success in developmental education, for example), many of them initiated or requested by faculty members. Generally they are episodic rather than regular and isolated rather than generalized. Finally, as some people pointed out, we also have grades. Said one Vanguard team member, “We think our strongest evidence of learning is at the course level. We just don’t know what exactly it is.”

Still, there is much work ahead in creating credible cultures of evidence. One challenge is virtually a community college hallmark; that is, when push comes to shove, the people are generally more interested in doing the work than in examining its efficacy. This phenomenon was illustrated repeatedly. Asked about how well a particular intervention was working, an enthusiastic student services director stopped flat, looked quizzical for a moment, and then said, “We don’t know. We’re so busy trying to help students that we don’t have time to find out whether we actually are.”

There are many interesting activities going on, to be sure. For example, people talked about transcript analysis at Valencia – “getting acquainted with students one at a time;” flashlight survey tools and classroom assessment techniques at several colleges; and faculty projects (at The Community College of Baltimore County and Kirkwood, for example) on assessment of student learning.

Not surprisingly, every college has its examples of good assessment. In general, programs with specialized accreditation or external certification and licensure exams are far more likely to be systematic in assessment and in their uses of assessment results. Still, assessment has not found its way to systematic and collegewide implementation. As one faculty member commented, “We have a lot of trees, but still not a very good view of the forest.”

WHAT THE COLLEGES STILL DON'T KNOW

Despite the amount of data community colleges collect and report, we still don’t know much – especially not in any systematic way, in any way that is public and transparent – about what, how well, or at what level students are learning.

MILESTONE #5 DEFINING AND ASSESSING STUDENT LEARNING OUTCOMES

The work of defining and assessing student learning outcomes is some of the hardest and also some of the most important work in undergraduate education. Given the powerful focus of the Learning College Project on, well, learning, a sort of litmus test for the project evaluation was in pointed discussions about the extent to which each college has moved forward on that centrally important agenda. The 12 Vanguard Learning Colleges reported on their progress, both in writing and in a discussion session during the campus evaluation visit. With a few notable exceptions, the overall status of this work might be characterized as Random Acts of Progress.

Nonetheless, there is considerable activity in the arena of learning outcomes assessment, and there are some laudable initiatives. A couple of the colleges qualify as exemplars; others are at various points along the road. Some are being particularly thoughtful about how they proceed. But all seem to understand the inevitable necessity of following through with the work and are anticipating next steps.

Promising initiatives include the work at The Community College of Baltimore County, where Learning Outcomes Assessment Projects are the primary vehicles for measuring progress toward students’ achievement of defined learning outcomes. These include individual course projects (30+ to date) and high-impact course projects (five to date and an additional five during the current year, impacting 13,700 students over two years). Through GeneRal Education Assessment Team (GREAT) projects, CCBC is gathering data to ascertain the degree to which students are achieving the college’s general education program goals. With incremental expansion, the projects eventually will include every general education course. CCBC’s general education assessment also involves use of the ETS Academic Profile, which provides national norms for community college students.

At Cascadia Community College, the entire college is organized around four major learning outcomes. Faculty members are working to articulate levels of learning within those outcomes and within courses, seeking a developmental approach. They are focusing also on key “literacies” such as cultural literacy, media literacy, and communication literacy as they attempt to “break out of the curriculum” to promote students’ development of crosscutting competencies. Cascadia stands out as a place where the “how-do-we-know?” question is characteristically answered through examination of student work. Products include projects, video, web pages, and electronic portfolios – an innovation also pioneered at Palomar College.

Kirkwood Community College is promoting assessment through a faculty grant program conducted through an RFP process. In department and division meetings, significant time is devoted to faculty discussing their assessment projects, and participants report that the work engenders thoughtful conversation and applause from colleagues. Projects may be proposed at three levels: a single course section, multiple courses or multiple sections of a single course, or a cluster of courses or a program.

The challenge of the work on learning outcomes assessment in many community colleges is captured in an exclamation from a faculty member at one of the Vanguard Learning Colleges: “We’re babies at this! I even have the startle reflex.” Another explained, “It takes time for faculty to come to agreement about outcomes.” It takes even longer, it might be observed, for some (or maybe most) higher education institutions to arrive at agreement that they even want to come to agreement about the important outcomes of student learning. Slowly, but slowly, that is changing.

The status of the work varies, of course, across the Vanguard colleges and across community colleges nationally; but the significant challenges appear to be these:

*to move from definition of learning outcomes to design and implementation of assessments; *to improve the quality of assessments (e.g., moving from faculty checklists to authentic student performances); *to upgrade reporting and information systems so that assessment results can be more readily reviewed and used in decision making; *to examine the educational processes behind the outcomes and target areas of needed improvement; *to link learning assessments to grades and degrees; *to ensure that assessment itself promotes learning; and *to bring disparate efforts to scale, so that assessment is systematic and collegewide.

THE JOURNEY CONTINUES

At a relatively early milestone on the journey to become truly learning- centered institutions, the Vanguard Learning Colleges recognized that continuing progress will require a commitment to question everything – fundamental assumptions and longstanding traditions included. In 1993, the Wingspread Group on Higher Education articulated the scope of the challenge with these words: “Putting learning at the heart of the academic enterprise will mean overhauling the conceptual, procedural, curricular, and other architecture of postsecondary education on most campuses.” While not everything will need changing, some of the changes that clearly are needed are also clearly difficult – what the Vanguard Learning Colleges came to call “the hard stuff.” And as one college leader quite accurately observed, “The trouble is, the ‘hard stuff’ is really hard.” Still, there is among these colleges, as at increasing numbers of others across the country, a determination to press on down the road. Their spirit is revealed in statements like these:

“We’ve come very far and have a powerful obligation to move ahead. We cannot turn back.”

“However good we are today, it’s not good enough, and it’s not as good as we’re going to be.”

Kay McClenney mailto:[email protected] is Director of the Community College Survey of Student Engagement and Adjunct Professor in the Community College Leadership Program at The University of Texas. She was the external evaluator for the League’s Learning College Project.