Achieving the Dream
The District became the first Achieving the Dream Leader College in Michigan in the fall of 2011. As a Leader College, we met high standards of practice and performance and have shown three years of sustained student success improvement.
Our Achieving the Dream program has demonstrated commitment to and made progress on the four principles of Achieving the Dream: committed leadership, use of evidence to improve programs and services, broad engagement, and systemic institutional improvement. We are honored to be a part of a prestigious group of AtD community colleges in the United States.
Contributing to a Multi-Year National Initiative to Increase Student Success
The District had the distinction of being selected as one of less than 90 community colleges to participate in the national Achieving the Dream (AtD) initiative and is one of six community colleges brought into the partnership in Michigan in 2007-2008. The Achieving the Dream initiative was created by a number of national partners to increase the number of community college students who succeed by completing developmental education and college-level courses with a “C” or better, returning to college from semester to semester, and completing certificate and degree programs. The national partners include the Lumina Foundation for Education, the American Association of Community Colleges, the Kellogg Foundation, and the Kresge Foundation.
Our initiative is funded by a five-year grant from the Kresge Foundation. We identified four priority interventions based on research on student achievement patterns, these are:
- Student Advising: increase student involvement in student orientation, testing, advising, and course placement.
- Developmental Education: increase student achievement in developmental education courses, beginning with English departmental education courses and in the transition from Developmental Education and college-level courses.
- Student Retention: increase the percentage and number of students who persist from fall to fall semesters and who complete certificate and degree programs.
- Institutional Effectiveness and Research Capacity: increase the institutional research capacity of the Institutional Effectiveness function with a focus on collecting and using student learning outcomes data.
The Coordinating Team
The initiative is coordinated by a core team and supported by District and Campus teams. These teams are:
- Core Team
- District Office Team
- Campus Teams (Downriver, Downtown, Eastern, Northwest, and Western)
The initiative is led by our core team members:
Vice Chancellor of Student Services, Brian Singleton ( ATD Coordinator)
Vice Chancellor of Institutional Effectiveness, Johnesa Hodge
English Faculty Chairwoman, Dr. Ella Davis
Intervention Priorities
Improve the early alert system and increase in faculty participation; create professional development programs for faculty members and student advisors; conduct research on student COMPASS testing, advisement, and course placement practices; create a faculty/staff task force to align COMPASS cut-off scores to developmental education course objectives; and training of registration staff on COMPASS protocols.
Implement new approaches in communication with faculty members on needs of the AtD student cohort; increase in faculty referral of students to the learning center; develop toolkits of teaching techniques specific to the needs of the AtD student cohort; improve the assessment of student learning outcomes and feedback for teaching and learning improvement.
Establish baseline and benchmark data on student retention; conduct faculty and advisor dialogue sessions to discuss student retention issues and solutions; design and implement formative and summative assessment processes; complete first phase of implementation of effective interventions to increase student retention.
As part of AtD initiative one of WCCCD most notable achievements has been the continuous enhancement of the college’s institutional research capacity in support of AtD as well as state and federal agencies accountability initiatives. The Office of Institutional Effectiveness continues to expand institutional research functions through professional development and increased use of management reports to measure student success and quality improvement initiatives such as AtD. The need for tracking the progress of the AtD student cohort was one of the primary driving forces for the expansion of WCCCD’s institutional research capacity and the strengthening of the overall institutional effectiveness function. Other related improvements include a number of upgrades to the information technology capacity, coordination of a web-based survey research calendar of more than 25 instruments a year, and advancement of multiple strategies for environmental scanning efforts to ensure timely response to changes that impact the college within its internal and external climate.
