About The Pilot Project

Rationale

One of the core principles of the Achieving the Dream initiative is broad-based stakeholder engagement in the college's institutional change efforts. Involving such stakeholders as faculty, students and community members can unearth critical obstacles to student success and help generate solutions that overcome those obstacles and close the achievement gap among groups. When done skillfully, the authentic involvement of critical stakeholders in planning and implementing institutional change can minimize resistance, foster a sense of shared responsibility, create a "distributed leadership" that complements Core Team leadership, and can help maintain momentum in the face of presidential transitions and other challenges. This project aims to explore and develop strategies for involving faculty and students in creating a culture of student success.

The Challenge of Involving Faculty & Students in Institutional Change

It would seem obvious that faculty and students are two groups of stakeholders especially critical to Achieving the Dream's success. No one is closer to the challenges or possesses more hands-on knowledge of the issues. Indeed, three years into the initiative there is mounting evidence from coach and data facilitator reports, as well as from formal Initiative evaluations, that a college's ability to successfully engage faculty in the college transformation effort is crucial. For example, the MDRC/CCRC interim evaluation report indicates that productively and broadly engaging faculty in the student success agenda continues to be a significant challenge to many colleges and that lack of faculty awareness, and even outright resistance, remain critical issues. As for students, if Achieving the Dream is to be a truly student-centered initiative, as it aims to be, partners and colleges must take responsibility for developing appropriate strategies for involving students themselves in the change process.

Objectives

With these conditions in mind, our pilot aims to:

			Test, refine and demonstrate effective strategies for faculty and student involvement in Achieving the Dream problem-solving and institutional change.
			Increase capacity of participating colleges for ongoing faculty and student involvement that contributes to their student success agenda into the future.
			Inform the development of a Toolkit for Engaging Faculty and Students in Community College Institutional Change that all Achieving the Dream colleges can use.

Faculty-Student Dialogues

In early 2007, Public Agenda conducted a series of focus groups to test the hypothesis that combined faculty/student problem-solving dialogue groups could, in combination with other strategies, be a powerful means for colleges to identify challenges to student success, generate solutions, raise expectations and create a sense of shared responsibility for results. Initial focus groups with faculty alone revealed a strong tendency among faculty to blame students for their lack of achievement, and they use this as an excuse to avoid looking at changes that faculty themselves, and the college overall, might need to make. Similarly, when we spoke to students on their own, our conversations revealed that many students feel that the institution (including faculty) does not really care about them, and they use this as an excuse to stay uninvolved. Yet when we combined these two in carefully-designed dialogue groups, both faculty and students moved beyond these defeatist attitudes relatively quickly and began to embrace the joint challenge of promoting greater student success.

Pilot Design

Based on our preliminary experimentation, we have designed what we believe can be a powerful set of interrelated strategies to promote greater faculty and student involvement in a college's student success and institutional change agenda. These are:

			Focus Groups: Separate focus groups with full-time faculty, adjunct faculty, younger students and older students can help determine the "starting point" of these key stakeholder groups, identify concrete obstacles to student success that need attention, and bring to light resistances and dynamics in the campus culture that are impeding progress particularly for students of color. Focus groups will be facilitated by campus personnel and possibly students who will be trained by Public Agenda. Public Agenda will also work with the colleges to develop a sound recruitment strategy.
			Faculty-Student Dialogue Groups: Well-designed sessions that combine these four types of stakeholders in problem-solving dialogues can deepen understanding of existing obstacles to student success, begin to identify solutions that are worth exploring, and plant seeds of cultural change that can be built upon.
			Campus-Wide Conversation(s): A "Campus Conversation" or forum can build on the focus and dialogue groups by broadening participation of faculty and students, adding administrators and staff to the mix. If well designed, we believe such a process can legitimize institutional transformation work and help engender a broader culture of student success.
			Action Task Force: A new or existing "cross-functional" task force of students, faculty and administrators who have participated in the dialogue groups and/or campus conversations can then work on specific actions to improve student success, in coordination with the Core Team and in alignment with established Achieving the Dream priorities.
			Online Engagement: Online strategies (which can range from an elaborate website or, a ,simple listserv) can be used in a variety of ways to amplify the above work with faculty and students. We intend to experiment especially with developing online engagement strategies to engage adjunct faculty in the work of institutional transformation.

Participating colleges might use all of these strategies, or a selection of them, in whatever combination is judged to best meet their own specific needs and goals. (We do require, however, that joint faculty-student dialogue be included as a core part of the program, because this is an especially innovative process that we want to test via the pilot.) Designing the precise mix and roll-out of strategies would be the first phase of work once a college has been selected to participate.

Selecting and Working with Three Pilot Sites

We intend to work with three Achieving the Dream colleges from the Fall of 2007 to the Fall of 2008. Colleges will be selected through an application process. In each case, the college will establish a Student-and-Faculty Involvement Team to design and implement its pilot initiative, in coordination with their Coach and Data Facilitator, Core Team, and with Public Agenda's help and support. In its design phase, this team will take into account such local realities as multi- vs. single-campus situations, the nature of student and faculty senates and the faculty union (if one exists).

Note that this program aims to build capacity at colleges for ongoing work. Public Agenda will provide strategic consulting, training, materials and general support, but individuals from the college will be closely involved in implementing the work in order to develop capacity and sustainability beyond Public Agenda's direct involvement.