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I'm going to tell you a little bit about how we got to where we are
and then tell you a little bit about the structure of our Student Success Plan.
In 2005, when I arrived here,
I was impressed, as the President is, with all the things that are going on
on Cerritos College's campus in regards to student success.
and
lots of people were doing lots of things but, as the President says,
they were in silos, and I remember
working with Bob Chester, to resurrect, the then Faculty Senate President,
to resurrect the Basic Skills Committee.
and then when Bryan Reece became Faculty Senate President in 2006, Faculty
Senate started to have as a regular part of its agenda
student success, and a Student Success Plan began to emerge
and it was faculty driven, and I think that's the best kind of students success plan, one
that the faculty are core participants in.
Then, as time went on, we had Spring 2009, and I remember this day
this time very well, we had to present ARC Data
to the trustees.
This was a third presentation (inaudible)
(inaudible) data and our numbers going
up slightly but they were still going up.
But in the third year,
our numbers did not look good. Most were
down from the prior year
at best they were flat
and I remember the Trustees had a very rich discussion about
what should we do to change the direction of these numbers
and the Trustees challenged
those of us who were administrators
and the faculty to come up with a plan to try to address
the ARC numbers, and to help them
move in a positive direction
year after year.
And I really appreciate the fact that Bryan, as Faculty Senate President,
took that charge
seriously for the faculty
and he and I have been working
of
ever since 2009, and even before a little bit, but it got serious in 2009,
we put together a task force
over 30 people from all different constituency groups participated.
We put together up a Students Success Plan
and then the task force morphed into a committee
and now we have
a Student Success Plan
that's
embraced and endorsed by almost every constituency group on campus
including the Board of Trustees.
Now what does it look like?
I think it's really
very interesting plan, and I like the fact that it's in circles that intersect.
It deals with the five basic elements that we think are essential
to having success for students.
The first is Student Engagement.
That's really what..the students are the primary people who
enact this part of the plan.
They're not totally responsible for it, because we have a responsible to
to help them know how to become more engaged,
and the iFALCON grant is really directed toward doing a lot of that.
And then we focus on teaching practices.
None of us, I think, are perfect teachers. My line is
until every student gets a legitimate A in every class,
there's room for improvement
and so as long as there's room for improvement, we need to be talking about
what can we do in our teaching practices to enable every student to succeed
at the highest level.
Some students need learning support, so we talk about learning resources
what are we doing in terms of tutoring,
in terms of up supplemental instruction
counseling, all of the support activities that contribute to the student succeeding
in the classroom.
We look at academic infrastructure.
We've got to have good classrooms, we've got to have good technology; it's all of those
things that are part of the behind-the-scenes
activities
students shouldn't really even be aware of these they should be automatic,
natural,
and
understood part of the experience at Cerritos College.
We've introduced, since I've been here, over 50 new Smart classrooms,
and we still more,
but that's an example of what we're doing. We've changed
our Course Management System
to one that does not require us to spend increasingly higher fees
from Blackboard
or Web CT or any of those propriety
priortary
groups. We now have Saki, which is an open source
course management system
and that enables us to
you use a system that won't bankrupt us, and yet, provide a good infrastructure for students.
Finally, we looked at programs.
When I got here,
every time I go out, and I'm in a doctor's office or
I ask or, in my dentist's office, I ask, where did you get your education?
Because, I want to know, did they get educated at Cerritos, or did they know about Cerritos,
and I often find
even if they didn't go here
they will say, oh yeah I'm tried to get into Cerritos, but you have such a large waiting
list
I really wanted to go there.
Or, no, I got my degree or certificate at Cerritos. We have a lot
of what I call Signature
Programs at Cerritos.
But, like the President
I want every one of our programs to be a Signature Program
so that
every student and the LA basin
wants to come to Cerritos, because our program in X,
is the best in this area, and in the state,
and in the nation.
Finally, what do we mean by student success?
We look at it in two different directions.
First of all, we look at what are the students learning,
what concepts, what skills,
what values do they possess
and that's the whole point
of assessing student learning outcomes.
That's how we learn what students are learning.
The second variable is achievement.
What do they get? Do they get a degree? Do they transfer, do they earn an certificate?
And those are the things that are reflected in the ARC data.
We wrote the ARC data to improve
but ARC data is not the whole story.
Learning is the other part of the story, and that's why student learning outcomes
are so all important, so that we can assess are
our students learning
what we think they should learn
when we offer the classes and the programs
and when they get a degree or transfer from Cerritos