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:k.mcclenney@verizon.net 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.