Five Principles for Powerful Classrooms: Lessons From Strengthening Precollegiate Education in Community Colleges

January 2009, Volume 12, Number 1

Pat Hutchings and Molly Breen
The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching

Call it “developmental,” “precollegiate,” “basic skills,” or even “remedial” education, improving the success of underprepared learners is clearly moving to center stage for community colleges. The need for such work is the focus of a number of high-visibility reports over the last several years (Bailey, 2008, 2003; Center for Student Success, 2007; Hayward, et al., 2004; Moore and Shulock, 2007), and that need is in turn fueling action-oriented projects. Among the latter is Strengthening Precollegiate Education in Community Colleges (SPECC), an initiative undertaken by The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching in partnership with The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation. SPECC has worked with 11 California community colleges to explore new approaches to teaching and learning basic skills English and math. These included learning communities, supplemental instruction and other forms of tutoring, and the introduction of instructional technologies.

As part of their commitment to the project, campuses monitored and studied the effects of their various interventions, using commonly defined data elements, conducting interviews and focus groups with students, and creating “faculty inquiry groups” (Huber, 2008) to examine and improve the effects of their classroom interventions. Carnegie’s role was to look across the various settings for general patterns but also to look deeply into individual classrooms. What we learned underlines what most faculty already know but which is often ignored in prescriptions for reform: that any pedagogical approach, whether innovative, like learning communities, or traditional, like lecture, can be done well or poorly. Execution is everything. With this in mind, we put forward five principles that can shape how various approaches are deployed.

1. High Structure
2. High Challenge
3. Intensity
4. Intentionality and Learning How to Learn
5. Inquiry and Making Learning Visible

Our aim in presenting these five principles is to illustrate how they can shape and strengthen a wide variety of classroom approaches.

1. High Structure. Chabot College English instructor Katie Hern describes an exchange with a student a few years back. He was fresh out of high school, in his first semester at Chabot, she recalls, and on the verge of not passing. “What’s going on?” Hern asked him. “College,” he said. “There’s too much freedom” (2007, p. 3).

The insight that too much freedom can be paralyzing is probably familiar to all of us, and it’s certainly familiar to educators like Hern who work with developmental students. Several decades ago, K. Patricia Cross noted that underprepared learners often “lack the organizational schema necessary to comprehend many academic concepts,” and called for learning experiences that are explicit in their expectations and highly structured (Center for Student Success, 2007, p. 53). Her message has been reinforced by more recent research on the importance of step-by-step instructions, explicit models, and examples to imitate and adapt (see Bransford, Brown, and Cocking, 1999). Learners at all levels, though in different ways and degrees, benefit from such “scaffolding.” One of the most important pedagogical steps a teacher can take is to be explicit about the practices and “moves” of more advanced learners.

This insight has been important on SPECC campuses. At Pasadena City College, for example, large numbers (approximately 50 percent) of intermediate algebra students were failing. When mathematics professor Yu-Chung Chang began to explore the reasons for their failure, she discovered—as colleagues on other campuses have as well—that students had particular trouble with word problems. Even those who could easily solve a specific math equation “were stymied when that same equation was presented as a word problem” (Chang, Curtis, and Wright, 2007). Their struggle, Chang saw, was not so much with math as with reading and the process of translating English into the language of mathematics. To address this problem, she created a much more structured approach to solving word problems.

Chang's approach, which she dubbed WRAMPS (Writing and Reading Activities for Math Problem Solving), has had a marked effect. Through a carefully scripted, four-step process of rewriting the word problem in their own words, reading it aloud, receiving peer feedback on their “translation,” and revising, students not only achieved significant gains on post-WRAMPS tests administered by Chang, they also outperformed students in other intermediate algebra classes on the word problem segment of the department's common final. (Answers were graded on a 1-4 scale, with 4 points being the highest. On average, Chang's students scored 3 out of 4 points, while students in other sections scored an average of 1 out of 4 points.) WRAMPS students also reported feeling less anxious about math and began to see it as “relevant and applicable to their daily lives” (Chang, Curtis, and Wright, 2007; for more information on WRAMPS, see the website Chang and colleagues created as part of SPECC’s Windows on Learning project: http://www.cfkeep.org/html/stitch.php?s=66561915414931&id=35258404012079).

The principle of high structure has been powerful in SPECC, and it has also been a topic of lively discussion. How much structure is enough? When do explicit step-by-step instructions become a crutch? Or even demeaning to students? What is the right balance between structure and openness, between guidance and independence, and how does one strike that balance in a classroom with diverse learners? The next principle speaks to these questions.

2. High Challenge. A second principle that emerged in SPECC is high challenge—the flip side, one might say, of high structure. Students need clear, explicit, step-by-step guidance for undertaking complicated academic tasks. But they also need something they can sink their intellectual teeth into, something that engages and challenges them. One of the long-standing critiques of community colleges is that they’re in the business, intentionally or otherwise, of “cooling out” students, lowering their level of ambition, teaching them to settle for less (Clark, 1960; also see Grubb and Associates, 1999, p.11). But SPECC has made it clear that this need not be the case. Even at the most fundamental levels of English and mathematics, intellectually engaging problems and issues exist in abundance. With a balance of challenge and support, students can engage in authentic debate and intellectual exchange.

At Laney College, for instance, SPECC participant Annie Agard has done what some basic skills instructors might hesitate to do: she uses poetry to teach English language skills in a low-level ESL class. Agard began rethinking her teaching practice when she found her students—and their teacher—trapped in a form of learning that felt like little more than decoding: students stumbled over a new word, looked it up or asked the teacher, and moved on, effectively learning to read English without gaining any larger sense of context, tone, or meaning from the text. Intrigued by the recent models for teaching literacy that embrace difficulty, Agard turned to poetry. As she puts it: “In a poem, students can for the first time explore the realms of connotation, implication, and cultural nuance—all the ways in which understanding a language is much more than simply finding the dictionary definitions of words” (Agard, 2007).

The challenges of translation and meaning-making are compounded by the diversity of Agard’s students. One videotaped segment from a typical class shows a group of four students, with as many native languages between them, responding to a poem about a student’s anxiety over showing a play she has written to her English teacher. Because of the high level of scaffolding Agard provides (she moves the class through 13 distinct steps), her students are able to rise to the challenge of reading and understanding poetry in their second language. Indeed, as Agard tells students, difficulty and uncertainty are essential to the experience of reading poetry, and to learning itself. (To learn more about Agard’s ESL classroom see her Windows on Learning website: http://www.cfkeep.org/html/stitch.php?s=64747407161395.)
         
3. Intensity. Community college students have heaping plates. School is important to them, and they make significant sacrifices to attend. But it is often, and necessarily, not their highest priority. Child care plans fall apart, cars break down, finances falter, spouses fall ill…. At every turn there are developments and needs that pull students’ energy and attention away from their academic goals. But on a number of SPECC campuses, interesting experiments are underway to create learning experiences that work for these students by engaging them more intensely in their academic work. Intensity can take a variety of forms.

For instance, intensity can mean a more sustained experience, as illustrated by work at Los Medanos College, where mathematics faculty worked with institutional researchers to track the progress of students who took and passed elementary algebra. “Of those who completed elementary algebra but waited to enroll in intermediate algebra, only 25 percent successfully completed a transfer-level math course within three years,” reports Myra Snell, a faculty member in math at Los Medanos. “Of those who went directly to the next level, 47 percent completed a transfer course in the three-year period.” As it turns out, the same pattern holds in the English department, where the numbers are 12 and 41 percent, respectively. Snell concludes, “This prompted a much greater sense of urgency about the need to counsel students about continuing in the developmental math sequence without stopping out. It also provided a convincing rationale for encouraging faculty to give up precious class time to do activities that connect students to campus resources like the career center and academic counseling. We cannot take for granted that students who successfully complete our courses will persist” (Snell, 2008).

Intensity can also mean greater immersion, or higher “dosage,” as in several new “math intensives” developed by the Teaching and Learning Center at Pasadena City College (PCC). These include a two-week, no-credit, basic skills math boot camp, called “Math Jam,” for first-time PCC students; XL, an intensive summer learning community focused on prealgebra; and an NSF-supported “MathPath” of two math courses in the same semester that makes it possible for students starting in developmental mathematics to pursue math-based majors. Each of these intensive immersion experiences has proved powerful in raising student retention and success. In the summer Math Jam, for instance, 91 percent of the students were retained, 89 percent qualified for a selective fall program called Lifelines, and 56 percent significantly improved their scores when the placement test was re-administered at the end of the experience (Pasadena City College, SPECC Report, 2006, p. 5).

A third meaning of intensity is greater connectedness, as illustrated by the Springboard to Transfer program at Chabot College, a learning community that links a precollegiate English (reading and writing) course, with a general education course—for instance, history or anthropology—at the transfer level. Springboard continues for three semesters, so intensity is not only a function of the longer time frame but also of sustained relationships, both among students (who move ahead in a cohort) and with the English instructor, who continues with the cohort for the duration. “Many students describe a strong sense of connection they feel to each other and to the English teacher who stays with them throughout the program,” Chabot’s evaluation of the program reveals. “Some use the word ‘family’ to describe the Springboard environment, and several say that during moments when they considered dropping out, they stayed in because of their peers or English instructor…” (Chabot College, SPECC Report, 2006, p. 7).

4. Intentionality and Learning How to Learn. Much is known today about how people learn, and educators at all levels are tapping into new insights from cognitive science, educational research, and the scholarship of teaching and learning. But teachers are not the only ones who need to understand the learning process. Research shows that students are more likely to succeed if they can become “intentional learners,” who understand and can monitor their own learning (AACU, 2002). Indeed, intentionality is especially important for underprepared learners, who often come to college with a short supply of “studenting skills,” including habits of planning and persistence and routines for note taking and studying. Beset by competing demands on their time and energy, they may not know how to set goals and monitor their own progress.

With these issues in mind, many faculty participating in SPECC felt a special responsibility to help students understand themselves as learners. Consider College of the Sequoias, where a goal of basic skills courses in English is to help students become more able and confident judges of their own work: a key characteristic of expert learners. Toward this end, a number of faculty have adopted the Web-based (and trademarked) “Calibrated Peer Review” model to teach writing. At the heart of the process is a rubric for evaluating writing in three stages, with each stage requiring a more nuanced grasp of what writing and reading should accomplish. First, students evaluate texts produced by the instructor, scoring them as excellent, mediocre, or weak. Next, they score anonymous writing samples submitted by their classmates. Finally, in the self-evaluation stage, they apply the same rubric to their own writing. At the end of the exercise, students review the full set of scores (including the instructor’s) and are encouraged to explore and question the grades they received. At the beginning of the semester, reports English instructor Jeff Maryanow, fewer than half of the students could score their own work accurately—that is, in ways that accord with the instructor’s judgments (typically, students start out seeing their writing as significantly more successful than their instructor does). But by the end of the semester, 90 percent of the students could accurately assess their work (College of the Sequoias, SPECC Report, 2006, p. 3).

This capacity for self-assessment is no mean feat; even for the most sophisticated writers, judging one’s own work remains a significant challenge. It is an example of what some educators today call metacognitive routines—practices that help learners get smarter about their learning process. An awareness of one’s own metacognitive routines, an ability to be intentional and self-directed, is not a remedial exercise but a characteristic of the most accomplished learners and a necessity for the kind of life-long learning needed in today’s complex, ever-shifting world.

5. Inquiry and Assessment to Make Learning Visible. One of the great impediments to educational improvement at every level is that so much of what goes on in the minds of learners is invisible. It is hard, after all, to design a useful innovation or intervention without knowing what students really understand, what misunderstandings block their progress, and where they get off track. And unfortunately the steps involved in thinking through an intellectual task typically take place “behind the scenes.” They are hidden because mental activity is, by nature, mostly invisible, and they may be even more hidden in basic skills contexts where students are often unsure of themselves and do not want their errors and misunderstandings exposed. Thus, a final SPECC principle is the importance of inquiry and assessment in making students’ experience as learners visible (to teachers and to students themselves) in ways that can inform and support what happens in the classroom.

While this is not a new idea, it is one that has been gaining ground in the last decade. Sometimes marching under the banner of the scholarship of teaching and learning, faculty from a full range of fields and institutional types are treating their classrooms as laboratories, systematically studying their students’ learning in order to improve it (Huber and Hutchings, 2005). Such work reflects a realization that teaching and learning are complex endeavors that raise consequential questions—questions that can usefully be explored and acted upon. Doing so, in turn, requires tools and processes for capturing and analyzing student learning in powerful ways. SPECC offers many examples of such inquiry: tracking student progress over time, pre- and post-tests, student focus groups, interviews with individual students, and “think alouds” in which the learner describes, as fully as possible, the steps in her or his thinking while trying to solve a problem or perform a task (see Bond, 2007, n.p.).

An especially creative form of inquiry emerged at Chabot College, where SPECC participants set out to capture student voices in a way that would catalyze improvement for both learners and teachers. The campus brought together a group of students who collaborated on a one-hour video that makes reading issues dramatically visible. The many students featured in the video talk about their (sometimes impoverished) history as readers, their reactions (frustration, withdrawal, excitement, urgency) when faced with unfamiliar and difficult texts, and the help that teachers do and (mostly) do not give when assigning readings. The result, Reading Between the Lives, has been used in faculty development settings and also in classrooms, where it has sparked conversations with and among students about their routines as readers, where they encounter roadblocks, and what strategies they find helpful. (The film is divided into four parts and can be viewed on the Internet Archive at www.archive.org.) Projects like these extend the meaning of inquiry by giving a central place to the student voice and underlining the need to find or create many more occasions when that voice can be captured and heard (Bueschel, 2008).

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In the work on SPECC campuses, it has been useful to identify and name the five principles above. But they are not neatly distinct. Many classrooms embody more than one, and perhaps it is fair to say that the most promising innovations live at the intersection of the five. In fact, understood deeply, all five principles point to an important underlying belief, which is that basic skills are not, in fact, so basic or simple—either to learn or to teach. There are no simple formulas or models. The good news is that SPECC and other projects taking place across the country are documenting promising innovations, gathering evidence of their impact, and sharing what they learn so that others can build on it.

References      

Agard, A. “Asking Their Own Questions: ESL Students Take Charge of Their Reading.” Windows on Learning: Resources for Basic Skills Education. Multimedia websites by participants in Strengthening Precollegiate Education in Community Colleges. Stanford, Calif.: The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, 2007. http://gallery.carnegiefoundation.org/specc/[.] Accessed February 13, 2008.

Association of American Colleges and Universities. Greater Expectations: A New Vision for Learning as a Nation Goes to College. Washington, D.C.: Association of American Colleges and Universities, 2002.

Bailey, T. “Community Colleges in the 21st Century: Challenges and Opportunities.” CCRC Brief. New York: Community College Research Center, January 2003.

Bailey, T. “Challenge and Opportunity: Rethinking the Role and Function of Developmental Education in Community College.” CCRC Working Paper No. 14. New York: Community College Research Center, November 2008.

Bond, L. “The Think-Aloud Protocol: A High Yield/Low Stakes Assessment.” 2007. http://bondessays.carnegiefoundation.org/?p=9 [.] Accessed February 11, 2008.

Bransford, J.D., Brown, A.L., and Cocking, R.R. (eds.). How People Learn: Brain, Mind, Experience, and School. Washington, D.C.: National Research Council, Committee on Developments in the Science of Learning, National Academy Press, 1999.

Bueschel, A. C. “Listening to Students About Learning.” Strengthening Precollegiate Education in Community Colleges (SPECC). Stanford, Calif.: The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, 2008.

Center for Student Success and the Research and Planning Group for California Community Colleges. Basic Skills as a Foundation for Student Success in California Community Colleges. Sacramento, Calif.: Academic Senate for California Community Colleges, 2007.

Chabot College. SPECC Report. Hayward, Calif.: Chabot College, 2006.

Chang, Y., Curtis, C., and Wright, L. “No Longer Lost in Translation: How Yu-Chung Helps Her Students Understand (and Love) Word Problems.” Windows on Learning: Resources for Basic Skills Education. Multimedia websites by participants in Strengthening Precollegiate Education in Community Colleges. Stanford, Calif.: The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, 2007. http://gallery.carnegiefoundation.org/specc/ [.] Accessed February 13, 2008.

Clark, B. The Open Door College: A Case Study. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1960.

College of the Sequoias. SPECC Report. Visalia, Calif.: College of the Sequoias, 2006.

Grubb, W. N., and Associates. Honored But Invisible: An Inside Look at Teaching in Community Colleges. New York: Routledge, 1999.

Hayward, G. C., Jones, D. P., McGuinness, Jr., A. C., and Timar, A. “Ensuring Access with Quality to California’s Community Colleges.” National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education, commissioned by The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, 2004.

Hern, K. “When Capable Students Don’t Pass: The Problem of Academic Sustainability.” The National Teaching and Learning Forum, Sep. 2007, 16(5), 1-5.

Huber, M. T. “The Promise of Faculty Inquiry for Teaching and Learning Basic Skills.” Strengthening Precollegiate Education in Community Colleges (SPECC). Stanford, Calif.: The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, 2008.

Huber, M. T., and Hutchings, P. The Advancement of Learning: Building the Teaching Commons. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2005.

McFarland, S., Chandler, J., Patterson, E., Watson, C., and Williams, M. Reading Between the Lives. DVD. Hayward, Calif.: Chabot College, 2007.

Moore, C., and Shulock, N. Beyond the Open Door: Increasing Student Success in the California Community Colleges. Sacramento, Calif.: Institute for Higher Education Leadership & Policy, California State University, Sacramento, 2007.

Pasadena City College. SPECC Report. Pasadena, Calif.: Pasadena City College, 2006.

Snell, M. “Re: SPECC—For Your Review,” E-mail to Molly Breen, March 24, 2008.

This essay is an edited excerpt from Basic Skills for Complex Lives: Designs for Learning in the Community College. A Report from Strengthening Precollegiate Education in Community Colleges (SPECC). Stanford, Calif.: The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, 2008. This report is part of a larger set of papers and resources available at no cost at: www.carnegiefoundation.org/specc

The content for this issue of Learning Abstracts was provided by Pat Hutchings, vice president, and Molly Breen, program associate, The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching.

Posted by The League for Innovation in the Community College on 01/27/2009 at 10:00 AM | Categories: Learning Abstracts -