Leaders and Training > Faculty Roles

Creating a Faculty Culture of Student Success, Valencia College. In response to the State of Florida instituting a mandatory competency test that students needed to pass to enter intermediate algebra, faculty member Sophia Graff set about to provide students with an opportunity to prepare for the competency test, in groups. Graff recruited a dozen other faculty members to help flesh out her idea. They set up a drop-in support table in the rotunda of the math building, where the opportunity for tutoring would be highly visible, and students would understand that they were not alone in needing help. The faculty members volunteered to take turns walking small groups of students through the types of questions asked on the test, clarifying key concepts, and offering test-taking strategies. The faculty team tracked test outcomes over the course of a year and discovered that the approach worked: student passage rates improved significantly.

Adjunct, Faculty Certification Course/Professional Development, Sinclair Community College. The Center for Teaching and Learning offers the Adjunct Faculty Certification Course several times throughout the year. The course is offered as a 6-hour workshop with online content and classroom observations completed within 5 weeks. Completion of this certification course along with teaching 9 payload hours will make an adjunct eligible to request the rank of Lecturer II. Adjunct faculty who are already Lecturer II and would like to facilitate future Adjunct Faculty Certification Courses may qualify to do so by attending the certification course.

Integrating Supplemental Instruction into courses, Austin Community College. Supplemental Instruction is a nationally recognized academic support program offering free, regularly scheduled study sessions for traditionally difficult courses. SI sessions are peer facilitated by students who have already been successful in the same class that you are taking. Some of the positive results of SI have been that faculty have reported such experiences as more interaction with students in class, high participation rates, less distractions during lectures. One negative is that the teacher is not allowed to attend the SI sessions or know who is attending. This is for both the student and the faculty member. Some students are afraid to ask questions of teachers. For the faculty member, not knowing allows a blind result for the statistics, and extra credit cannot be given to skew the grades.

Integrating Experiential Learning Beyond the Classroom, Kapi’olani Community College.

Instructional Teams, Integrating Student Support into the Curriculum, New College, NY.

Intensive Faculty Professional Development, Community College of Vermont.

Faculty Data Summits, Valencia College.

Faculty Coaches, Austin Community College. Elected by their peers, Faculty Coaches facilitate departmental efforts to enhance the depth, and use, of departmental and institutional data about what happens to ACC students. The Faculty Coach is charged with leading departmental discussions in regard to revisions of the curriculum and improvements to support services that are needed to increase student success across all student categories. The Faculty Coach is the liaison between the department, OIEA, and the institution for the Student Success Initiative. The Faculty Coaches lead discussions of the data within their departments. The team will guide the College in additional departmental data needs. By reporting to the SSI Steering Committee, the team of Faculty Coaches will help to coordinate the College’s curriculum revisions and resource needs to achieve the Student Success Initiative overall goal of increasing success for all students regardless of age, gender, ethnicity, race. or socio-economic status.

Centralized Academic and Technical Support with Faculty Engagement, Tallahassee Community College, FL.

Learning Communities, Kingsborough Community College. New Kingsborough students with no more than three credits join a small group, or cohort, of about 25 students. Together, they take three “linked” courses: an English course; a course that satisfies a college requirement; and a one-credit student success seminar. Professors collaborate to connect their courses, allowing students to make more connections between what they learn in psychology, for example, and what they read and write about in English.

Fast Pass: Fast-Track Developmental Education Program, Athens Technical College. A College Success Class that includes instruction using MyFoundationsLabPlus that will enable students to work on basic skill deficiencies and retest at the conclusion of the academic term, potentially eliminating the need to take one or more of the prescribed learning support courses. We are considering either making this class required for those students who are eligible for it OR eliminating this intervention altogether since at this time we are not getting sufficient numbers of students enrolled in the class–the idea is very good in theory but has proved difficult to implement.

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