Facilitator: Tom Ott, Director of Developmental English
Recorder: Dianne Perkins, Assistant Department Head for College Writing
Do instructors neglect to intervene in behavior that undermines students’ capacity for success?
Although a math instructor from the day’s featured film said that he never scolds students for text-messaging in the back of class because they are “adults” who can establish their own priorities, Tom Ott suggested that CCP students are better served when we intervene in such behavior.
Several agreed. Because many students come from public schools where such behaviors imposed no academic consequences, we are doing them a favor, said one, “when we remind them, early on, that such behaviors will impair their success in college courses.”
Another admitted that she herself would have failed that math class if she had been allowed to continue text-messaging in class.
Even group work—how to engage in it constructively—needs to be taught and modeled for students, said another.
Most agreed that the style in which an instructor intervenes—never by humiliating a student in front of peers--is crucial. “We need to explain to students, and establish for ourselves, clear distinctions between our own responsibilities and theirs.”
One instructor asked if an exit exam for each course, with clear criteria that students can see at the outset of the semester, would spur their engagement and performance, especially if they had to repeat that course, permitting them to build upon prior skills. Even “a limited number of texts,” departmentally approved for each gatekeeper course, she urged, would forge more consistency in the content of these courses, allow repeating students to build recognizable skills, and exempt them from the need to buy a new round of expensive texts each time they have to repeat such a course.
Students who must repeat a gatekeeper course, another lamented, are forced to go all the way back to the beginning of that course when sometimes all they need to return to are concepts introduced in the sixth or seventh week.
Could CCP create special sections of gatekeeper courses reserved exclusively for repeating students?
“Our registration process gets in the way of offering such sections,” one noted.
An instructor who had taught such a section years prior said that it hadn’t seemed very successful, for students had found it discouraging “to be surrounded by so many other failing students.”
Citing “Crystal,” a student in the featured film who was struggling, for the third time,to pass developmental math, one instructor said that Laurence Steinberg, in Beyond the Classroom, would invoke her as precisely the kind of student who needs to become more reflective about how to help herself—how, for example, to carve out an hour a day for study despite her busy schedule. To encourage such reflection, he added, he himself sometimes asks students, before he returns an assignment, to write down the grade they think they deserve for it. If he finds a discrepancy between their conjectured grade and the one they receive, he asks them to write, analytically, about the possible sources
of that discrepancy.
CCP, it was suggested, needs to come up with domain-specific study tips and to create specific interventions for students after their first failing grade in gatekeeper courses.
Why, another wondered, don’t instructors receive, for each repeating student on a new class list, a written report from the prior instructor, delineating the weaknesses in his or her work? Access to such reports, all agreed, would strengthen early intervention for repeating students.
One instructor wondered if we know what is working, these days, at other colleges. Do we, he asked, keep tabs on the best practices of similar institutions?
Ott responded that best practices at CCP likely replicate the best practices of other institutions. He cited trends at La Guardia, Maricopa, and University of Denver that encourage learning communities and sponsors. “I think the key is an institutional approach to best practices,” he stressed.
At one four-year school where she had taught, recalled another instructor, all students had to take a professional writing exam in order to graduate. The school’s Learning Lab offered regular refresher courses for students who had failed this exam.
Another reported that at Delaware County Community College, the Dean had approved a special course for students who had repeatedly failed an introductory course.
Another expressed hope “that there are systems in place at CCP which are effective in helping students who are enrolled in gatekeeper courses to move through them.”
At Cumberland Community College, a participant interjected, all lower-level courses would offer three-week intensive course reviews.
Another cited Baltimore and La Guardia, where there had been an exit exam for every introductory course and during the winter semester there had been “intensive workshops for students who needed to retake the exam,” designed for just ten students at a time.
Ott noted that last summer, forty CAP A students were offered a six-week workshop and that, after retesting, 67.7% of them passed into level B.
Is the College, he rhetorically asked, doing enough institutionally to support its students?
“Right now, no,” he conceded. He nonetheless noted his optimism about “Achieving the Dream” because “Hines is a serious funding agency.” Teaching, he further remonstrated, “can be a very isolating experience, but it shouldn’t be.”
One instructor observed that the same course, taught to two different groups of students, can yield markedly different results when each group dynamic is so different. Another agreed, adding that even the meeting time of the class often yields a particular dynamic, “and I’m not sure I have any answers.”
“Sometimes,” pondered another, “you have to ask students for the answers.” He noted that students are often more willing to participate in a class when their own input is sought and implemented.
Ott underscored that anything “that gets in my way in teaching has to be removed” and urged colleagues to issue “fair warning” to students whose behaviors are impeding the greater academic good.
One instructor noted that Math 016 and 017 are running four sections of a pilot program in which all instructors are using the same text, written by faculty, and all students are taking the same tests.
Has there been a sustained and focused discussion, asked one instructor, about only 0-level courses and the need for competency-based instruction in those courses?
“Not really,” conceded Ott. He suggested that another discussion needs to take place: how to change the culture of the institution, in which many instructors seem so devoted to their own proclivities that they won’t accede to departmentally approved practices or even recommended texts. “What we tend to do here,” he suggested, “is talk about consensus but more often, merely talk ourselves into exhaustion.”
Picking up the thread of an earlier suggestion, one instructor warned that “Crunch reviews offered by learning labs are great tools, but only for courses that offer universally administered exit exams.”
What is the pervasive fear, several wondered, of sanctioning exit exams in gatekeeper courses?
“Faculty fear,” suggested Ott, “that we will have to teach to a test. However, we always, in fact, teach to a test. The question is ‘Whose test do we teach to?’”
“Do we even know what works?” asked another. She cited a prominent brain researcher from Yale who is using functional MRIs to find out, finally, how dyslexic children’s brains differ from those of others. She cited an effective technique, used by a teacher of her own dyslexic son, demanding repeated reflection on the passage he had just read.
“One thing that the film showed,” another instructor observed, “is that training in developmental education increased the pass rates of students. How, then, do we get people who want to teach just Developmental English?”
“I’m not sure,” Ott responded, “that I’d want just Developmental Ed faculty, but those who teach in the program need to accept certain responsibilities.” He added that although the capacity for metacognition isn’t in full force until one’s early twenties, “it’s a very powerful thing to get students to think about what they’re doing.”
Several instructors returned to the character “Crystal,” the student who needed time to be self-reflective. “If she had possessed that time,” mused one, “she would have been able to figure out her problems.”
“But if young kids are neurologically quick to grasp certain things—syntax, vocabulary, idioms—how can we get adult students to learn them in one semester?” posed another. “How exactly does the brain learn when students are in their late teens and early twenties?”
If the answer isn’t clear, added one, what is patently unfair “is to pass English 098 students who aren’t ready for English 101.”
What is fair, added Ott, is “for students to see what minimum competencies have been established for each course and to know that these are accepted. They should be able to see essays written by English 098 students that show that they’re ready for English 101. I know I could do a holistic evaluation of such an essay and tell whether or not the student is ready for English 101.”
One instructor wondered if gender-separate sections of gatekeeper courses had ever been attempted. Although some wondered if the ACLA would protest such ventures, a few noted that several gender-separate charter schools had recently been approved in Philadelphia. ”If it’s a truism that empirical research in our field (basic writing) is so difficult to conduct,why, then,” asked another instructor, “do we seem to hold such firm assumptions about certain practices?” She cited the film’s tendency, for example, to depict the class conducted via group-work as inherently superior to the class dominated by lecture. “For that matter, what is the meaning of that ubiquitous term, ‘student-centered learning?’ Isn’t any successful learning student-centered’?”
“I wouldn’t rule out lecture as a potentially effective mode of teaching,” said Ott. That there is lecture and lecture—one style governed by detachment and little eye contact with students—another that is more animated and visceral, punctuated by questions—most agreed.
“There is some evidence in social science,” interjected another, “that students who are forced to play the role of teacher learn a great deal from that process.”
One instructor cited a paradigm for developmental writing that Temple, decades ago, had used for its Developmental Writing course, under the acronym “ELECT” (English Language Enrichment Center at Temple), which allowed students, while attending regular classes for the course, to pass it as soon as they had written, on site, in a well-proctored lab, four essays deemed passing by the student’s instructor as well as one other. Although that program, in her opinion, could have been better administered, she suggested that such a model might help CCP students who need to repeat English 098 or 101—allowing them, with motivation, to pass the course in six to seven weeks.
Ott reiterated his optimism about the strides CCP can make via “Achieving the Dream” and thanked instructors for their thoughts on its gatekeeper courses.
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