STRATEGIC
LEARNING GOAL 2:
Ensure
that students experience extraordinary learning success in their earliest
encounters with the college and establish a solid foundation for success in
future learning.
An Essay by Ann Puyana and Sandy Shugart
Like
most colleges,
Connection and direction: key elements to student persistence and success.
Research1
and our own internal data suggest that students will persist longer (even
through academic and personal set-backs and stop-outs) and meet with greater
success (more course completions and higher passing rates) if they can
establish both connection and direction at the college as early
as possible.
The
need for connection is both intellectual and emotional. The college setting feels like an alien
culture to many newcomers, with its particular architecture, uniquely shared
behaviors and expectations, special vocabulary, and layers of procedural
bureaucracy. Beginnings can be daunting,
and a natural reaction to fear and discomfort is flight. To be willing to stay and explore uncertain
circumstances, one must feel first that the venture is safe. (“No physical or
psychological harm will come to me here.”)
Beyond that basic level, however, staying in a new culture is further
assured by initial and increasing feelings of welcome, acceptance, and engagement…which
in turn lead to acculturation and a sense of belonging, of having a vital role
in the new environment. The Peace Corps
uses the term “early returns” for volunteers who, mostly for “culture shock”
reasons, do not complete their two-year period of service abroad. In our case, we have “early leavers”
(no-shows, withdrawals, drop-outs), often caused by similar feelings of
cultural exclusion and discomfort. Start
Right commits Valencia at all stages, from first contact to graduation and
beyond, to ensuring positive, helpful, and effective interactions with
students.
Another
aspect of students’ connection is with self: feeling ready for and sensing real
possibilities in the challenge they have set before themselves. Of them, this requires initially a leap of
faith and much courage, and then a growing sense of independence and
responsibility for their decisions and commitments. Of us, it requires a genuine belief in the
potential of each individual to learn under the right circumstances, and a
willingness to help discover and develop those “right circumstances.” (The self-fulfilling expectations prophecy is
widely held as true: children, students, employees…rise or sink to the level of
belief in capacity and expectation of performance held of them, and in
turn by them.) Empowering the student
self also requires us to recognize them as adult partners in their education.
From them, we can learn much about what interests and motivates them, as well
as what life experiences and understandings they bring to this new learning. We can also enable deeper learning by
explicitly linking new information to prior knowledge and by evolving our
offerings from a collection of courses to a holistic, interconnected
curriculum. Finally, we can shepherd
students to their “learning edges,” balance points between the known and the
unknown where intellectual challenge and support can foster and accelerate
growth.
At
Valencia, we are helping students to make essential and meaningful connections
in many ways, including: orientation and course placement, the Student Success
program, advisement and counseling, small classes, frequent and helpful
interactions with staff and instructors, career guidance, tutoring and student
support labs, technology access, linked courses, and special courses for
non-native speakers of English and for those who need further preparation
before enrolling in college-level courses.
Furthermore, we are responding to differences in learning styles and
applying other effective practices for adult learning, most notably through an
institutional and increasingly individual shift from teaching-centeredness to
learning-centeredness. Our Core
Competencies (Think, Value, Communicate, Act) link course work to the
over-arching abilities of an “educated person,” making it easier for us to
build an integrated experience for our students, and in turn for them to better
understand the interrelationship and transferability of knowledge and skills
derived from their “higher education.” A
coherent curriculum and genuine engagement in the learning process, in addition
to forming context and connection, also contribute to the other key influence
on student persistence and success: direction.
Research
findings1 tell us that students who have a plan are much more likely
to complete their education than those who do not. Many students arrive at Valencia adrift and
searching rather than with a destination in sight. Some are fearful of naming a destination and
thus blocking off other potential paths; few understand the interrelatedness of
many careers and the likelihood of multiple, evolving job experiences over a
working lifetime. The retention
literature1 indicates, however, that early development and recurring
refinement of long-range goals bring purpose, meaning and persistence to
students’ educational pursuits.
At
Valencia, LifeMap (“Life’s a trip; you’ll need directions”) has become the
formal vehicle for our institutional goal of helping students get started on
and then further develop their life, career and educational plans. The various stages of LifeMap reach back to
before college (middle school programming) and extend through graduation to
transitions to work and/or continued learning.
With this dynamic metaphor now established, we want to extend the success
relationship between college academics and life planning throughout the
curricular and extra-curricular college experience, thus empowering students to
develop meaningful personal and professional directions for themselves, and
then to build the educational plans that will take them there.
In
summary, good educational practices, based in the learning and retention
research of our profession, obligate us to commit our resources and energies to
Ø Build welcoming, dynamic,
inclusive learning communities
Ø Create the expectation and
resources for students to develop and implement career and educational plans
Ø Apply understandings of
learning styles and brain research to learning activities
Ø Foster student development
through challenging standards and effective support
Ø Engage adult students as
active partners in their learning
Ø Use early and frequent
feedback loops to exchange and apply information for improved teaching and
learning
Ø Assess outcomes and
research what’s working and what’s not throughout the college.
Bridging
the gap between what we know about how adults learn best and what we do about
it in our practices is one of our greatest individual professional and
institutional challenges. It seems that
institutions have always asked, “Is this student really college material?” Now society’s evolving needs and our
commitment to genuine learning results press us to ask a more provocative
question: “Is this college really student material?” At Valencia, we want the
answer to be a resounding “Yes!”
1 A list of relevant research references is attached.
9/17/01, scs