Reflections on Developmental Mathematics–Building New Pathways.

Overview of Projects Developmental education is a pedagogical challenge, especially since students are grappling with academic material they have seen before (some recently). Perhaps they had mastered this material and forgotten it or not mastered it the first time around. Sometimes those earlier educational experiences left faint traces or even scars. We were excited to work in this area because developmental education is a place where the quality of teaching really matters.Starting in 2005, we designed an action research project, Strengthening Pre-coIIegiate Education in Community Colleges (SPECC; Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, 2011). We invited 11 California community colleges to join us in this endeavor. These campuses already had some developmental programmatic interventions in place. As part of SPECC, colleges could expand and enhance their current developmental efforts and also work with us to study the effects of those efforts. In addition, we fostered a sense of community among the participating colleges and made opportunities for them to learn from each other’s experiences so that ideas and models had the chance to move and grow. In terms of knowledge building, the project had 11 locally-shaped laboratories actively working on all aspects of developmental education.Not surprisingly, the SPECC campuses offered the range of the intervention programs that are common across community colleges: different configurations of learning communities; first-year experiences; various uses of technology in both mathematics and English classrooms; as well as use of tutors and instructional aides in the classroom, in scheduled study sessions, and in labs. Many of these interventions were small programs, nurtured by the faculty and staff responsible for them.It is a challenge to sum up the outcomes of 3 years in one or two paragraphs. We certainly gained more insight into the nature of the problems in developmental education, from the broad policy and systemic barriers to the students’ protective behaviors. In terms of student outcomes, there was a general moderate positive trend across the campuses, with a few highly visible successes. A strength of the action research design- the local variability – became more of a liability in measuring outcomes. It was hard to know across sites if the nature of the intervention was die same-a learning community in one setting is not the same as a learning community in another – or if the measurement of learning was similar across sites.As is commonly the case, we also had unexpected and less measurable outcomes. Although SPECC was not framed as a leadership project, the very nature of the design and opportunities afforded let some faculty develop as leaders on their campuses, and some grew into leadership roles in the state. A second serendipitous outcome was the critical mass of experiences that gave faculty inquiry an identity as a recognized form of professional development. We introduced Carnegie’s signature work in the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning and the faculty ran with the idea. Faculty translated the concept of examining teaching practice and student learning to the community college setting. In contrast to many Scholarship of Teaching and Learning studies which are conducted individually, faculty organized the work collaboratively as Faculty Inquiry Groups (FIGS), reflecting the culture of community colleges. In those FIGS, faculty shaped questions about student learning and gathered a wide range of evidence – campus data, examples of student work, student interviews and focus groups, and “think- alouds” – to answer those questions. Their findings came back to the classroom as content, pedagogy, and assessments, all of which were subjects for further inquiry.Developmental MathematicsWe were lucky that there were no blazing failures but saddened by the quiet disappointments. Among the disappointments were the high failure rate of students in developmental mathematics and the realization of how hard it is to change that rate.