Rethinking Guided Pathways On-Boarding — Orientation
What welcome do new community college students receive when they arrive on campus?Community colleges typically have an orientation, frequently a day or less, many times on-line. Orientation may include an overview of campus resources, perhaps enacted as a scavenger hunt. Often these orientations are optional (or, as often, overlooked by students) and many times on-line.
Could Guided Pathways On-Boarding be designed as a more intensive experience that initiates the student into the overall intellectual and geographic landscape and provide them with a sense of what the educational journey will entail, mapping the transition from high school to community college and the subsequent move to degree, certificate, or transfer to a four-year institution and beyond?
Elite small liberal arts colleges have orientations that last five days to two weeks long because they understand their incoming freshman are facing a significant change in their lives and identities, e.g., Amherst, Williams or Swarthmore Colleges. One would think that many of our students of color would be facing at least the same amount of change to their lives and identities when they matriculate to our community colleges as these students attending elite colleges. Many of our students of color come from families and neighborhoods where no one has graduated from college and therefore they don’t have this hidden support. Many of these students are not exposed or have access to family or friends who understand the inner-workings of professional work environments and the culture of higher education. Many feel they are an imposter attending college while other students know their way around. They lack a sense of belonging.
Community colleges need to provide Guided Pathways On-Boarding experiences that is worthy of the transformation that many of our community college students experience when they come to our campuses. The orientation needs to create a culture of dignity, belonging and psychological safety as the student learns to apply their strengths towards their academic goals.
The Center for Community College Student Engagement, recognizing the vital importance of the initial interactions and experiences of students, has created the Survey of Entering Student Engagement (SENSE)[x] that focuses on the first three weeks of the semester. SENSE measures the benchmarks of early connections, high expectations and aspirations, clear academic plan and pathway, effective track to college readiness, engaged learning, and academic and social support network.
Literature and practice have recognized that new students come to college with optimism, hope and the belief that they will succeed in college. However, it is just as widely recognized that by the third week, students become discouraged, bored, disengaged and may withdraw energetically or procedurally. As noted above, the SENSE initiative has found that engaged learning within the first three weeks of the semester is critical for determining student success. [xi] What would make it possible to draw on students’ initial enthusiasm and ground their hope in experiences that will effectively prepare them for the academic demands?
A Guided Pathways On-Boarding orientation that only includes a quick tour of the college and its resources is a missed opportunity. A redesigned GP On-Boarding orientation could be an opportunity for students to rethink their identity as college students. Orientation could welcome the whole person to college, describe the geographic and intellectual landscape they will have the opportunity to explore, and begin to plan the students’ academic journey. If orientation is extended beyond a day or two, it could become a time to learn and practice academic and even professional behaviors in a supportive environment.
The 21st-Century Commission on the Future of Community Colleges report, Reclaiming the American Dream: Community Colleges and the Nation’s Future[vi] challenges the field to “reimagine the community college required for new times.” The Commission sets forth a set of imperatives it calls the “Three Rs: Redesign students’ educational experiences. Reinvent institutional roles. Reset the system to create incentives for student and institutional success.”
Taking seriously the 21st Century Commission’s challenge of redesigning the community college, what would it look like to reinvent the initial experiences students have on entering community college?
A growing number of voices in research and practice call for a comprehensive approach to student support in orientation, student success courses, counseling, and in the classroom itself. Studies well summarized by Paul Tough in How Children Succeed,[vii] have recognized not only the importance of addressing the affective domain, but that the affective is an integral part of learning. Hunter Boylan, the director of the National Center for Developmental Education notes that, “The weaker a student’s cognitive skills, the more important other affective factors are in student success.”[viii] A recent qualitative study by CCRC, They Never Told Me What to Expect, so I Didn’t Know What to Do”:[ix] found that “community college success is dependent not only upon academic preparation but also upon a host of important skills, attitudes, and behaviors that are often left unspoken.”
The community college experience can be confusing for entering students, particularly recent high school grads. In many ways community colleges resemble high school, and in other ways, the educational and behavioral rules have changed. But those changes have not necessarily been made explicit. Could Guided Pathways On-Boarding be designed as a more intensive experience that initiates the student into the overall intellectual and geographic landscape and provide them with a sense of what the educational journey will entail, mapping the transition from high school to community college and the subsequent move to degree, certificate, or transfer to a four-year institution and beyond?
This page was written by Rose Asera, Former Senior Researcher, Carnegie Foundation for Advancement of Teaching at Stanford & Diego Navarro
References:
[i] Advancing Student Success in the California Community Colleges Recommendation 2.2
[ii] CCRC Brief #36 June 2007
[iii] CCRC Brief #36 June 2007 Research by the Community College Research Center, retrospectively studying the effects of enrollment in a student success course in community colleges in Florida, found positive though moderate effects. …However, the results were marginal though statistically significant: enrollment for students who did not require remedial courses was associated with a 9 percent increase in the probability of success. For students who enrolled in one or more credits of remediation enrollment was associated with a 5 percent increase.
The results of a study of students in Virginia community colleges were similarly moderate. Promoting Gatekeeper Course Success Among Community College Students Needing Remediation Findings and Recommendations from a Virginia Study (Summary Report) Davis Jenkins Shanna Smith Jaggars Josipa Roksa November 2009
[iv] http://www.ccsse.org/sense/aboutsense/
[v] Mike Rose, Back to School, Why Everyone Deserves a Second Chance at Education The New Press 2012
[vi] AACC April 2012
[vii] Paul Tough, How Children Succeed Houghton Mifflin Harcourt 2012
[viii] Targeted Intervention for Developmental Education Students Journal of Developmental Education VOLUME 32, ISSUE 3 • SPRING 2009 NCDE has published a collection of instruments to assess the affective domain
Research in Developmental Education vol 22 issue 1, 2008
http://ncde.appstate.edu/sites/ncde.appstate.edu/files/RiDE_22_1.pdf
http://ncde.appstate.edu/sites/ncde.appstate.edu/files/RiDE_22_2.pdf
[ix] They Never Told Me What to Expect, so I Didn’t Know What to Do: Defining and Clarifying the Role of a Community College Student Melinda Mechur Karp and Rachel Hare Bork July 2012 CCRC Working Paper No. 4
[x] http://www.ccsse.org/sense/survey/bench_engagedlearning.cfm
[xi] http://www.ccsse.org/sense/survey/bench_engagedlearning.cfm