Brief Summary:
There were four presenters this week at Kellogg on
the topics of Learning Assistance Services, Technology/Access, Think Well/Learn
Well and Diversity Issues.
Jane Neuburger presented on Learning Assistance
Services. She is the director of the
Syracuse University Tutoring & Study Center and presented on Academic
Supports such as tutoring. The quote of
the day was “Think Grand; Make Moves Incrementally.” She also shared the Completion
by Design Schema and encouraged us through group activity to list the
issues that hinder students’ success and the issues that help their
success. We examined Academic and
Behavioral issues that our students face as well as the Home Issues they bring.
She shared the basic success formula of I+E=O which stands for INPUTS +
ENVIRONMENTS = OUTPUTS. Improving Advising, Assessment and Placement while
creating coherent pathways from enrollment through employment can set our
students up for success. Finally, a
comprehensive support plan
creates an integrated program which ties together assessment, differentiated
placement, differentiated instruction, support services and a feedback loop for
analysis and evaluation.
The second presenter was Dr David Arendale from the University of
Minnesota. He presented a brief overview
of Universal Learning Design, making the curriculum and instruction accessible
to all. He also shared numerous examples
of utilizing technologies in the classroom, such as podcasts and webcast office
hours/study sessions, to make material accessible and to enable to students to
co-create the course materials.
The third presenter was Leonard Geddes, describing
his Think Well/Learn Well
model which gives specific targets for Metacognitive Learning Goals tied to
Bloom’s Higher Order Thinking Skills and Corresponding Learning Outcomes. Leonard Geddes was a Kellogg 2011 participant. Participants in his session developed
specific questions to guide reading a textbook in order to develop meaningful
study plans for students—enabling them to ask the right kinds of questions of
the text in order to access some of those higher order thinking skills, such as
“what are the different kinds of beekeeping techniques?” or “which techniques
are better than others?” rather than the simpler recall/memorization techniques
that were so useful to them as high school students but do not fulfill the
needs for deep learning required in college courses.
The final presenter was Dr Geri Miller, Appalachian
State University faculty in the counseling department. Her emphasis on getting to know students
through ethnoautobiographical interviews and her playful metaphor of
Hulahooping gave us some basic techniques for helping students from backgrounds
different from ours to feel welcomed and safe to share and learn.
Critique:
One of my reactions to this week’s material is that
I’m distressed that we may replace faculty positions with tutoring staff—full-time
salaried positions becoming hourly wage positions. In Colorado, some colleges
are eliminating Level 1 developmental courses as early as this fall—students are
already enrolled in these courses. We
must align admissions policies, probation/suspension/readmit policies, and
assessment/placement policies to ensure that students are placed appropriately
into level 2 and higher dev ed courses, but in the short term we will have to
assemble a plan to serve these students who have already been admitted but for
whom there is no appropriate course for placement. I keep hearing that Adult Basic Education
will be the answer, and I’m hoping that these ABE programs are getting a heads
up that they may experience an influx of these students. Also, I’m not sure who pays for ABE. And finally, students who are planning to
take college courses, to receive financial aid for those courses, may find that
they are ineligible because they are not able to enroll in the appropriate
courses. Or, worse, we may do things
like place a student whose reading skills/placement scores are too low to
qualify for the lowest level of READ course into GEN ED courses (with those
thick difficult to read textbooks) to fill his/her schedule, effectively
setting the student up for failure.
I have seen Dr Arendale present on UDL before and
was happy for the refresher and for the new ideas for podcasts and
student-created content. I think his
class would be very engaging and accessible to diverse students. He creates high standards, but lots of
flexibility—including allowing for students to listen to podcasts of material while
riding the bus or working out in the gym.
Leonard Geddes’ Think Well/Learn Well program is
very exciting to me—our discussions last week about cognitive neuroscience and
learning left me wondering how might I actually create lessons/activities that
would engage higher order thinking/critical thinking, and I left his session
with some specific techniques I can use.
In fact, I’m wondering if I can use some of these question formation
exercises in my practicum with high school students developing college-ready
study and reading skills. In fact, I
think these skills could be useful in many contexts, especially for first year
students. Perhaps I may try some of
these techniques in the Academic Achievement Strategies course.
Finally, while we only had a half day with Dr
Miller, her advice for developing listening skills, confirming
messages/non-verbals and guidelines for communicating across cultures will
certainly assist with making higher education more accessible to all.
Description of the implications:
My subtitle for this reaction paper “Higher
Education is Broken” comes from my sense that there are two frameworks: the competitive
higher ed model, and the cooperative model.
The competitive model is as follows: sink or swim, ‘you’re not college
material, kid’, you’ve got to learn the unwritten rules before you run up too
much student loan debt or fail out. The
competitive model works for people coming from a privileged background—if you
can afford to send your children to good schools, test preparation programs,
summer enrichment camps, they’re more likely to succeed. I have known faculty (let’s use the example
of law school faculty) who expect students to walk into their classrooms “ready
to learn”, ready to follow wherever the professor may lead. One of Jane Neuberger’s comments which
troubled me reminded me that at most colleges students pay out of pocket for
their tutoring. There are also faculty
who make the case, “why do we need tutoring?
Students should just come to office hours for help with classes.” It is difficult to argue with that. It seems that many of these academic support
services seem put in place as a workaround for students to get help from
tutors/advisors INSTEAD of from faculty.
That seems broken to me.
The Cooperative model I think we need to more
toward looks something like this: if there are 100 students who graduate from a
high school, then there should be pathways to 100 meaningful pro-social roles/jobs
in the community, adequately compensated with a family-supporting living wage.
These roles have dignity, are visible, and have different types of people
serving side by each—instead of mostly white people in certain jobs and mostly
darker skinned people in other jobs. This sort of grand solution would require
partnerships among K-12, workforce readiness and higher education institutions,
but the Completion by Design model and the proposed comprehensive model for Dev
Ed Demonstration projects really lay a framework through which we could actualize
real societal change by integrating community need (service learning needs
assessments, too) into the equation of creating meaningful pathways for young
people to grow into adult responsibilities and roles.
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