I made this presentation today as part of a professional development meeting at Las Positas College, in Livermore California. You can download a copy by clicking on the image above.
Category: student success
dispatch from the trenches
Since leaving CSU headquarters for a job on one of our campuses, I’ve been attuned to the differences of working not with policy makers, but actual educators. A few insights, still in progress:
This is way more fun. My stint away from campus was a little over nine years, and even though I missed it constantly, I’d forgotten how really wonderful it is. A college campus is a microcosm of the world, with facilities for food, housing, work, play, and interaction, but oriented toward a noble purpose, the personal and intellectual development of ourselves and each other, even strangers. It’s life, but with more of the good parts, and less of the rest. Every day I go to work puts me in a good mood. No kidding. I take random walks across the campus just to be in it; last week the student government president noticed my third lap through the pancake breakfast and co-curricular tables, and called me on it.
The strains are different. There is something counterintuitive about work at a place like the Office of the Chancellor, which you would expect to mix the flabby ineffectiveness of the public sector with the flabby ineffectiveness of academic administration. Yet visitors are always struck by the sight of people doing work. They even comment on it. “Everyone here seems to be working all the time.” Well, yes. And as state support dwindles there are fewer of them in the office, to perform the same work or more.
Yet the relentless tilling on the cubicle farm didn’t prepare me for the qualitatively different strain of campus life. At my new job there are many signs of overworked colleagues well past their breaking point; two from this week will show you what I mean.
The first involved money, and the accidental transfer of a moderate sum into the wrong account. It’s no big deal, and we will fix it. But the shriek of protest was immediate and heartfelt, and not from the one whose money went missing, but from the one who got the windfall. She works ungodly hours at full tilt, and the prospect of taking on one more task, even a funded one, nearly prompted her resignation.
The second sign of materially different strain involved an invitation to lunch. My new campus home employs dozens of academic department chairs, and early assays of their inner stuff suggest remarkable quality in about a third of the cases: brilliant, dedicated, and almost eerily suited to edifying and motivating a very wide range of students. They are driven people.
So I shouldn’t have been surprised, but was, when my invitation to a lunch meeting was met in one case with protest. I mean, I was just asking for an hour, and I will provide the sandwich. It even comes with an apple and a cookie. But the response was a mix of tension and suspicion – what is this “lunch” going to evolve into? – and a plaintive close to the email: “I just can’t take on any more.”
That depth of emotion can mean only one thing: he wishes he could.
And that’s what makes the strain here so different. In the system office I often had to appeal to the intrinsic motivation of my colleagues, and remember it in myself: the executive orders and coded memoranda and bar graphs represent real people trying to improve their lives, and we are charged by the public with helping them.
Here such appeals are unnecessary, because the real people are standing in front of us. We know them individually, we root for them. A lot of the time we even like them. And so for a significant number of my colleagues, the motivation is already keen, bottomless, and merciless. Coordinating their work is something I need to do differently than I used to, with fewer naked appeals to altruism and purpose. The colleagues whose help will make a difference already feel these things acutely, even painfully.
They don’t need our reminders, they just need our help.
Money isn’t always money. Most organizations, including the Office of the Chancellor, keep track of baseline or recurring dollars in one category, and one-time dollars in another. The one-time money could come from a grant, or a vacant salaried position, or residue from year before.
Campuses make this distinction too, but – at least on mine – the difference between them is a whole lot wider. Onetime money is a sinkhole of attention, effort, and coordination, consuming resources that won’t go to that precise use ever again. By contrast recurring dollars mean infrastructure, and staff support, and more full-time faculty to teach and govern the university before we burn out the handful who survived the recession. Recurring dollars are lifeblood.
My last few months at the system office included a tense, lengthy negotiation with the State of California for the support of our student success initiatives. They offered us millions of dollars above the typical enrollment budget, but it was onetime funding. We tried so hard and so often to explain why that wasn’t helpful, and why we really needed a baseline commitment, that the governor’s staff finally told us point blank to stop saying so. They were sick of hearing about it, and by then so was I.
But now that I’m on a campus, I think if anything we should have been more insistent. You don’t improve graduation rates and eliminate achievement gaps in temporary earmarks one year at a time. Instead you have to build it into your way of life. And the money to do that is so materially different from other money, it practically needs a different word.
That’s what I’m learning so far.
More field notes to follow.
Image credits: Union University, CSU Dominguez Hills
GE Redesign and High-Impact Practices
This is a presentation and workshop I led today at El Camino College, one of the main transfer partners of California State University Dominguez Hills, where I work. You can see the presentation by clicking on the image above; the narration is visible in Notes Page view.
news from Bowling Green, KY
Western Kentucky University has a lot in common with the California State Universities that have employed me for around ten years. It’s an access-oriented, regional comprehensive university, it’s proud of its continuing academic quality in the face of unpredictable challenges, and it would like to improve its graduation rates.
To that end, the university leaders are looking at educational practices that engage their students personally in their learning, making them less likely to drop out.
On Friday I paid WKU a visit to learn more, and share what we’re doing in California. Our discussions focused on high-impact practices, and making them work for a greater share of WKU students by identifying a handful that can be offered consistently, equitably, and campus-wide.
For example, like some CSU campuses, WKU may decide to focus on service learning, undergraduate research, and internships in particular. Those few would then be systematically offered, coded into student records, and regularly assessed for impact.
The links in this sentence will take you to my slides from the morning presentation and the afternoon workshop.
For my part, these are points I want to remember from Friday’s meetings:
- Everyone is an educator. Although faculty are authors of WKU’s educational programs, I was struck that our meetings were attended in equal parts by advisers, staff, student leaders, administrators – pretty much everyone who interacts with students. I think one value of high-impact practices is that they take advantage of all the ways humans learn; to that end, this full-spectrum participation seems especially important.
- Intentional work requires ongoing professional development. WKU’s efforts in this area are led by Jerry Daday, Executive Director of its Center for Faculty Development. His involvement will be crucial: during a closing discussion of the resources needed for scale-up, people said they needed dedicated training for staff and faculty even more than they needed money.
- Colleges will want a role. This was the biggest surprise of my visit, that deans and associate deans need to see themselves in the emerging approach, and will be unhappy if they can’t. Because high-impact practices are often connected to the student’s choice of major, departments won’t feel their identities threatened. And at the large scale of the whole university, picking a handful of signature high-impact practices for everyone will strengthen the institution’s identity. But what about the layer in between the campus and its departments – say, the College of Arts and Letters, or the College of Nursing?
I’m not sure what to do about that. A good answer may lie in integrated approaches to curriculum, like the AAC&U GEMs project, or in “meta-majors,” broad clusters of related subjects that students pursue before they know exactly what to major in. Such integrated pathways may reside in a single college, and lend themselves to a distinct set of high-impact practices.
(References to meta-majors are getting more common, but the field doesn’t have a single authority I can link you to. One example I like is from Complete College America, which describes meta-majors in its “Guided Pathways to Success” toolkit. See the PowerPoint here, and especially slide 22.)
Or maybe, as some in the meetings believed, bringing along the colleges just isn’t a problem: we need those administrative units behind the scenes, and not because our students should know where they are on the org chart.
I get it, but I’m not so sure. We may find that more should be done at the college level with high-impact practices, and how they bring students in, and support their decision to stay.
The Promise of College
This is a presentation I made today for Los Angeles Community College District leaders working on “college promise” programs with the L.A. Unified School District.You can see or download the file by clicking on the title image here.
Academic Efficiencies
On Saturday my colleague Jeff Gold and I addressed a meeting of the CSU Alumni Council at our San Bernardino campus. He was there to demonstrate the Student Success Dashboard that presents system-wide information about our students and what helps or slows their progress to degree. I set up that part with the presentation here, to explain why and how we use such data. You can download a copy by right clicking on this picture.
Graduation Rates and Inclusivity
This is a presentation I made today to student government leadership from around the California State University.
