Welcome to Our Workshop:
Improving Student Success and
Retention through Curricular Design
and Infusion
Sept 15th and 16th 2010
Brought to you by….
• Title III Department of Education Engaging
Students grant
• Learning Communities
• Language, Lit and Communication Unit
Plan
Who am I?
• Anne McGrail
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English Faculty
Learning Communities Coordinator
Title III Engaging Students Grant Activity
Director
What You Will Need
• Syllabus and learning
outcomes/objectives for the course you
are developing (bring tomorrow if not
today)
• Articles emailed to you (also on moodle)
• On Course textbook for reference (we are
focusing on Chapters 2 and 4)
• And patience….
Participation Structures
• SOLO (often we begin by thinking and
writing alone)
• DISCIPLINE AND “NEIGHBORDISCIPLINE” GROUPS
• INTERDISCIPLINARY GROUPS
• WHOLE GROUP
Our Goal: Shared Curriculum
• Two moodle sites: Resource and
“Sandbox”
• Log into classes.lanecc.edu
• “Faculty Workshop Sandbox”
• “Curriculum Development Resources for
Student Successs”
Moodle sites
• Share your ideas with colleagues and develop a
“bank” of infusions
• Consult Curriculum Devt. Resource site at any
time
• “Sandbox” site is for posting curriculum begun or
developed during workshop
• Each faculty member has a named course
block—but groups should feel free to revise and
post as “collectives”
$$$ How to Get Paid $$$
• Sign the log-in sheet each day and include your
L#
• Post your curriculum infusion(s) ideas to the
sandbox to share with faculty colleagues
• Post your hours onto your timesheet:
English faculty post to regular timesheet
ABSE faculty post to “Learning Communities
timesheet”
o All others will post to a “Title III/First Year Experience”
timesheet
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Framework for Workshop: Conley’s
“Facets of College Readiness” and
College Success
• Open access college
• Huge variation in student preparedness
• Students are in college but many not
ready to be here
• Conley’s research offers an holistic view
of the complex factors that “add up” to
success
Infusion and Integration:
Concrete, Incremental Changes to Your
Curriculum
• Moving from implicit expectation to explicit
discussion and in-class activity
• Moving from disappointment at student
deficit to anticipating and planning for their
level of “college knowledge,” offering
opportunities for them to develop
• Emphasizing students’ responsibility
Our expectations of students:
they should be comfortable thinking abstractly,
they are able to form mutual peer
relationships,
o they are responsible for their own learning,
o they can reflect readily on their own thoughts,
and act on their guiding thoughts
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The “Self-Authoring Mind”
• Robert Kegan’s work
• “Higher education is a bridge to the ‘selfauthoring mind’”
• Helping students involves academic and
social/psychological dimension
• We can anticipate and prepare for
students’ bewilderment rather than be
merely disappointed and frustrated by it
What are the
Facets of College Readiness?
• We all recognize them
• David Conley’s outlines them in
“Redefining College Readiness” and
College Knowledge
1.Key Cognitive Strategies
2.Key Content Knowledge
3.Academic Behaviors for College Success
4.Contextual Skills and Awareness
1. Key Cognitive Strategies
• Students like stability, are intellectually
drawn to generalizations and may be
content with ideals and values they have
always held (Kegan)
• Students need to move from a preference
and dependence on concrete thinking,
limited points of view, and enduring
dispositions, needs and preferences
1. Key Cognitive Strategies
(cont’d)
• Students need to move toward cognitive
strategies that challenge and stretch these
preferences and habits
• Higher tolerance for intellectual openness,
inquisitiveness, analysis, reasoning,
argumentation and proof
• Need to develop skills in interpretation (vs.
“you’re reading too much into it”)
1. Key Cognitive Strategies
(cont’d)
• Students need to develop habits of
precision and accuracy (rather than
generalizations that bring them comfort)
• Problem-posing and problem-solving
mind-set
2. Key Content Knowledge
• Key structures, concepts and knowledge
of academic life
• Readiness assumes preparation in
writing, research, math, science, social
science and world languages.
• Classes may have huge variations in
preparedness, making course outcomes
hard to achieve across all student groups.
2. Key Content Knowledge
• For many faculty, key content knowledge
is their passion
• Frustration comes when we can’t “get to”
the best content because students are
underprepared
3. Academic Behaviors for College
Success
• Developing our skills in recognizing and
fostering the necessary academic
behaviors for students’ success
• Under this heading lie the key
components of the college success
(CG100) curriculum
• Fast Lane to Success and other First Year
Learning Communities embed this
curriculum
College Success Curriculum
• Skip Downing’s On Course curriculum
includes strategies and advice for
students
• Helps students
understand their own goals and take steps to
achieve them;
o Take responsibility for their own learning;
o Learn how to make wise choices at each stage
of their academic and life journey
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Integration of Success Principles
Across the Curriculum
• While we are not counselors, each of us
can use engaging pedagogical strategies,
classroom activities and homework
assignments to support students’
developing self-awarenss and selfresponsibility
3. Academic Behaviors for College
Success (cont’d)
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Self-monitoring and metacognitive abilities
Understanding ones own blind spots
(Knowledge Surveys)
Tendency to persist when confronted with a
difficult task
• Ability to identify and employ a number of
learning activities
• Ability to transfer learning strategies from familiar
to unfamiliar contexts
3. Academic Behaviors for College
Success (cont’d)
• Mastery of study skills beyond reading
and answering questions
• Time management
• Using information resources
• Note taking
• Communication with advisors
• Balancing social and academic life
4. Contextual Skills and Awareness
• Help students to understand how a
college operates as a system and a
culture
• Means WE need to make explicit to
ourselves and our students the implicit
cultural values and rules in our disciplines
and in academic culture—it cannot be
assumed!
• Downing’s “College Customs” pp. 24-26
4. Contextual Skills and Awareness
(cont’d)
• Norms, values and conventions of
interactions in a college context
• Going beyond writing it in the syllabus—
helping students to live these norms and
values and internalize them as their own.
• Human relations skills to cope with and
adapt to the college system (often
radically different from the community in
which they were raised [Conley 13]).
4. Contextual Skills and Awareness
• “College Knowledge”—the stated and unstated
processes necessary to navigate the system.
• How do these processes intersect with your
sphere of influence?
• Pre-registration and advising, financial aid
calendar, recommendations, mid-term
schedules, grades, add/drop decisions,
prerequisites, key courses/gateway courses,
progression to degree, etc.
Fostering the “self-authoring mind”
“As educators, our job is to disappoint
students’ expectations at a rate they
can stand.”
Robert Kegan, The Evolving Self