SWOCC Awarded Achieving the Dream Leader College Status, Oct. 1

Achieving the Dream (ATD) has announced that Southwestern Oregon Community College earned Leader College distinction—a national designation awarded to community colleges that commit to improving student success and closing achievement gaps. Southwestern has shown how data can inform policy and practice to help community college students achieve their goals, resulting in improved skills, better employability, and economic growth for families, communities, and the nation as a whole. “It is an honor and privilege to be selected by Achieving the Dream as a Leader College after only three years. This demonstrates the quality of work that our faculty and staff are doing, and have been doing, to improve student success and retention. I’m very proud of what we’ve accomplished. I’m particularly proud that this initiative has been faculty led: the data teams, the writing and math projects, and the leadership, have all been faculty driven,” said Dr. Patty Scott, president of Southwesten. Southwestern’s Writing and Math departments accelerated some courses for students who needed help bringing their writing and math skills up to college level. The Writing intervention course was created by English Professor Joy Parker. It allows students to replace a five-credit sentence fundamentals course and a three-credit paragraph fundamentals course with a single three-credit writing course (WR90). Over the last three years, students have completed this course at a higher rate and have gone on to complete College Writing at a higher rate than had been done previously. Getting students to successfully complete the gateway courses in college writing and math is a significant step in aiding student persistence in college and helping them attain a degree or certificate. As Professor Parker put it, “This class is sort of like a Habitat for Humanities workshop for adults who are perfectly capable of writing an essay or building a house. They have the muscles and skills needed; they just need to know how to apply them in the college context. Once I changed how I viewed the classroom, and thus how I designed classes, the student success amazed me. All I had to do was get out of their way. Our work at Southwestern was based on work done at Columbia University funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. I am grateful to them and to Dr. Scott for providing the resources we needed to help our students move one step closer to achieving their dreams.” “Becoming a Leader College is very powerful and affirms the exceptional work and commitment of faculty and staff to their students’ success,” said Achieving the Dream Vice President for Community College Relations Cindy Lenhart. “Southwestern is using evidence to make informed decisions that lead to significant institutional change.” The 2015 Leader Colleges are making strides in the national movement to increase student completion and close achievement gaps, demonstrating the power of the Achieving the Dream Approach. With the guidance of Achieving the Dream coaches, colleges not only systemically change the way they operate, but also implement key student supports that align with their overall policies and institutional systems, such as college readiness programs, mandatory new student orientation, student-success courses, developmental course redesign, curriculum redesign, and intensive, individualized advising. James Fritz, Associate Professor of Art at Southwestern and the Achieving the Dream Core Team Leader shared, “The genius of the Achieving the Dream movement is that the initiatives we do are championed by teachers or staff based on best practices in retaining students. They are grassroots efforts from the ground up, not mandates from the top down. ATD then requires us to collect data on student performance to demonstrate that the initiative is working. The use of a “best practice” combined with longitudinal data collected over several years tells us if the initiative is working and helps us tweak it to make it work better.” Achieving the Dream grants Leader College designation for three-year cycles. After three years, institutions must undergo a recertification process to maintain Leader College status.