Office of Instruction and Student Development Update October 18, 2013
Student Success Conversation Continued
Erin Wall, Tracey Thomas, Julia Peterson, Sheila Hall and I attended a Strengthening Student
Success conference last week sponsored by the Research and Planning Group for California
Community Colleges. The conference gave us the opportunity to get together with our colleagues
from community colleges across the state and delve more deeply into issues related to enhancing
student success and achievement. Here are some key points we took away from this conference:
The importance of educational pathways and “just in time” guidance: The focus on
pathways is not merely a focus on retaining students from the first year through the second
year of their academic program. Our pathways approach must focus on supporting student
success throughout the entire student retention cycle from pre-enrollment, through year to
year persistence, to completing a course of study that leads to graduation or completion of
the student’s educational objective.
Professional development is the key to innovation: It’s critical that the college invest in a
professional development program that promotes effectiveness of faculty and staff, provides
a venue for colleagues to exchange information, and emphasizes teamwork,
experimentation, inquiry, and reflection in a collegial fashion.
Develop adult education and community colleges partnerships (AB 86): The legislature will
provide $25 million in planning grants for Adult Education entities and community colleges
to develop regional plans to address the education of adults. Our portion of the planning and
implementation grant will be used to better provide adults with the following:
Elementary and secondary basic skills, including classes required for a high school
diploma or high school equivalency certificate;
Classes and courses for immigrants eligible for education services in citizenship and
English as a second language and workforce preparation classes in basic skills;
Education programs for adults with disabilities;
Short-term career technical education programs with high employment potential; and
Programs for apprentices.
The keys to the successful integration of adult education and CR will be the creation of
partnerships with the K-12 system, strengthening our dual enrollment initiative, looking at
alternative assessment and developing basic skills and ESL noncredit courses.
Acceleration can make a positive difference: We had the opportunity to attend a wonderful
four hour post conference session, led by a team of faculty from Chabot College, Laney
College and El Camino College on the Acceleration in Context (AIC) initiative. The AIC
initiative is a comprehensive initiative aimed at supporting the introduction and
implementation of accelerated curriculum and pedagogy across a broad section of
disciplines and programs. The good news is that our English department submitted an
accelerated English 350-150 course (English 102) curriculum proposal that is making its
way through the approval process. Peter Blakemore and Jay Scrivner will be teaching the
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first pilot sections of ENGL 102 this spring semester. Thank you to our English department
colleagues.
Student success is a topic that we’ll spend more time talking about during our CR Student Success
Summit, co-sponsored by the President/Superintendent and the Academic Senate, early spring
semester. We will provide more details about our summit sometime next month.
Spring Schedule Development
We’re in the final stages of getting our spring schedule released for viewing. The associate deans
and directors responsible for course scheduling are working with Tiffany and faculty from across
the district to develop a schedule that supports FTES generation, meets the unique needs of students
in our Del Norte, Klamath-Trinity and Mendocino locations, and maximizes classroom space.
Several faculty, staff, and administrators have remarked that the spring schedule development
process is proceeding smoothly. While schedule development is always a complicated, sometimes
difficult process, we are grateful that our efforts to work collaboratively and collegially are once
again paying off.
Voice-Over Internet Protocol (VoIP) Training
Next week there will be a representative on the Eureka campus to present very important VoIP
training session for IT staff. Steven Roper has the IT department working very hard right now to get
all tickets completed and closed. Please keep in mind that IT response times may be a bit slower
next week since the IT staff will be in training.
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