Friday, March 30, 2007

Turning them into Students.

Another one I need to get out of the "draft" folder ...

Buried within an article about whether there is any value to a Master's degree for K-12 teachers, Sherman Dorn writes that a senior colleague "told me years ago that part of my job in graduate [education] classes was to turn enrollees into students".

That certainly summarizes our challenge at a community college.

If one operates under the assumption that young people should leave our CC ready to function at the same level as those who started at the Uni (usually about a year or so ahead in math), which is my operational assumption, they had better be independent students when they leave. They rarely are when they arrive. On the other hand, my colleagues at Wannabe Flagship U tell me that a substantial fraction of their enrollees aren't students either. That might explain why the kids who became students along the way have excelled after transfer.

Now I just have to figure out how to increase that fraction.

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