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Title III Grant Blog

RECENT POSTS

COLS 1010 Expansion

Labor Market Insights from EMSI

Commencement Reflection/Title III at Six-Months In

Student Success Survey

Title III Teaching Innovation Grant

Reflections on the ATD Conference

Welcome!

STATE & NATIONAL COMPLETION EFFORTS

Achieving The Dream

Complete College America

Gates Foundation

Drive to 55

 

Helping First Generation Students See Themselves as Graduates

Multiple studies have shown first-generation college students, especially those from lower-income households, struggle compared to their peers who have had at least one parent complete a bachelor’s degree.[i] [ii] [iii]

At Roane State Community College, more than half of our students are considered first-generation and are Federal Pell-Award eligible (Federal Pell is a federal aid program for low-income students and families). As part of the Title III grant, Roane State implemented an intervention designed to show these students that they can beat the odds and successfully complete a degree.

The intervention, determined to have at least moderate effectiveness by the What Works Clearing House, involved recruiting recent graduates from Roane State to talk with incoming freshmen at orientation about the obstacles they faced both academically and socially, and how they overcame challenges on their path to a degree. While we were not able to invite recent graduates to speak at every orientation, we were able to hold these discussions at three of our new student orientations and one of our adult student orientations. In total, 422 students were able to engage in a conversation with recent Roane State degree awardees. You can read the actual study here and our proposal for the intervention here.

Post-discussion surveys indicated:

  • More than 90% of the students enjoyed hearing from other Roane State students and learned from the experience
  • Nearly 90% would recommend the discussion to other students
  • Nearly 80% felt better prepared for college after the discussion

The discursive portions of the survey also showed that the three most important lessons students derived from the recent graduates were:

  1. Study!
  2. Relationships and communication with their peers and faculty is critical
  3. Get involved with the Roane State community

As a discussion moderator at one of the new student orientations, I can personally attest to how positive this experience was for new students. I was able to see in the faces of the audience a true sense of identification between the recent graduates and the incoming freshmen. Faces lit-up as the recent graduates talked about juggling school and work, the pride of their parents in them attending college, and overcoming a less than perfect academic past.

It was something truly powerful for these students to see someone like themselves achieve what they hope for their own futures. It should be heartening to know, especially on the first day of a new semester, that many of our first-generation students now have models for academic success.

August 2017


[i] https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2016/03/how-to-help-first-generation-students-succeed/473502/

[ii] Housel, T. H., & Harvey, V. L. (2009). The invisibility factor: Administrators and faculty reach out to first-generation college students. Boca Raton, FL: Brown Walker Press.

[iii] Johnson, S. E., Richeson, J. A., & Finkel, E. J. (2011). Middle class and marginal? Socioeconomic status, stigma, and self regulation at an elite university. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 100, 838–852


Up Next: Some early results...

Previous: COLS 1010 Expansion, Labor Market Insights from EMSICommencement Reflection/Title III at Six-Months InStudent Success Initiative Survey!, Title III Teaching Innovation Grant, Reflections on the ATD ConferenceWelcome!


Image result for sos

RECENT POSTS

Labor Market Insights from EMSI

Commencement Reflection/Title III at Six-Months In

Student Success Survey

Title III Teaching Innovation Grant

Reflections on the ATD Conference

Welcome!

 

STATE & NATIONAL COMPLETION EFFORTS

Achieving The Dream

Complete College America

Gates Foundation

Drive to 55

Study Succeed Organize/COLS 1010 Expansion

Starting this Fall, Roane State will be making its college success course, COLS 1010: Study-Organize-Succeed (S.O.S), mandatory for all new Freshmen. To make this possible, our college success coordinator, Nancy Hamilton, has reached out to educators across the college and East Tennessee to recruit a corps of excellent adjuncts that will help deliver the COLS 1010 curriculum. During the month of June, this corps of new faculty has had an opportunity to learn more about the course and meet with returning adjunct instructors at two separate trainings. I also had the opportunity to attend one of these trainings and learn first-hand about why this course is so vital for new college students at Roane State.

While S.O.S. teaches a number of valuable study skills such as two-column note-taking, at its core, it is a class where students have the rare opportunity to examine their own motivations for and mindset about attending college. The transition from high school to college can be disorientating for many students. The new level freedom, higher academic expectations, and the pressures of finding the right career can result in students becoming overwhelmed or unmotivated. S.OS. challenges students to reflect on their reason for attending college and career goals through journal entries, creating an academic plan, and job shadowing. These activities are paired with both practical study-skills advice and strategies to build resilience in the face of the new challenges. The strategies students learn are all grounded in well-researched applied psychology concepts such as, “creator mindset”, “growth mindset”, “self-management”. Each of these concepts asks students to believe in themselves, their ability to learn new-things, and their own power to overcome setbacks. If students are able to internalize these concepts, there is a much greater chance they will be successful in their time at Roane State.

If you are interested in learning more about the concepts and strategies taught in COLS 1010 check out the below resources. They have useful concepts that any instructor can reinforce in their own classroom. I also think that that you will find the general advice provided by S.O.S. can help any of us be more productive, reflective, and intentional in our actions.

Mindset and Time Management Concepts

Creator Mindset

Growth Mindset

Self Management and the Quadrant II system

Study Strategies

Two-column note taking

Graphic representations (concept cards)

Generating questions

SAILS Resources


Up Next: Helping First Generation Students See Themselves as Graduates

Previous: Labor Market Insights from EMSICommencement Reflection/Title III at Six-Months InStudent Success Initiative Survey!, Title III Teaching Innovation Grant, Reflections on the ATD ConferenceWelcome!


 

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RECENT POSTS

 

Labor Market Insights from EMSI

Commencement Reflection/Title III at Six-Months In

Student Success Survey

Title III Teaching Innovation Grant

Reflections on the ATD Conference

Welcome!

 

 

STATE & NATIONAL COMPLETION EFFORTS

Achieving The Dream

Complete College America

Gates Foundation

Drive to 55

Labor Market Insights from EMSI

For better or worse, one of the more ubiquitous forms of writing on the internet is the listicle--those articles with click-bait headlines like “The Top 5 Cities in the World” or the “Ten Most Delicious Foods”. This blog, for better or worse, is not immune to publishing listicles, especially now that Roane State Community College has access the Economic Modeling Software International database (EMSI). This powerful tool allows researchers at the college to develop lists and gather insights on the “Top 10 Medical Careers in East Tennessee” or the “Hottest Industries within 60 miles”.

Over the course of the next few months, the college will be using EMSI to provide students the most up-to-date information about career opportunities and to develop plans for the creation of new programs. The following is a small sample of the type of valuable information that EMSI can provide.

The Top 10 Highest Paying Allied Health Medical Careers in East Tennessee

  1. Dental Hygienists
  2. Diagnostic Medical Sonographers
  3. Occupational Therapists
  4. Registered Nurses
  5. Lab Technicians/Technologists
  6. Physical Therapists Assistants
  7. Respiratory Therapist
  8. Radiologic Technician
  9. Cardiovascular Technologists
  10. LPN

The Top 5 Fastest Growing Allied Health Medical Careers in East Tennessee

  1. Lab Technicians/Technologists
  2. Occupational Therapy Assistants
  3. Substance Abuse and Behavioral Disorder Counselors
  4. Opticians, Dispensing
  5. Medical Office General/Billing and Coding

The Top 5 In-Demand Allied Health Medical Careers in East Tennessee

  1. Medical Office General/Billing and Coding
  2. Lab Technicians/Technologists
  3. Substance Abuse and Behavioral Disorder Counselors
  4. Opticians, Dispensing
  5. Veterinary Technicians

As we gather additional data from EMSI on in-demand job, be on the lookout for additional listicles and possibly a chart or graph or two.


Up Next: SOS: COLS 1010 Expansion

Previous: Commencement Reflection/Title III at Six-Months InStudent Success Initiative Survey! , Title III Teaching Innovation Grant, Reflections on the ATD ConferenceWelcome!


 

Graduating students

RECENT POSTS

 

Labor Market Insights from EMSI

Commencement Reflection/Title III at Six-Months In

Student Success Survey

Title III Teaching Innovation Grant

Reflections on the ATD Conference

Welcome!

 

 

STATE & NATIONAL COMPLETION EFFORTS

Achieving The Dream

Complete College America

Gates Foundation

Drive to 55

 

Commencement Reflection/Title III at Six-Months In

Congratulations Roane State Community College graduates!

Today we will hold the first of three commencement ceremonies celebrating the more than 1200 graduates from our college (final numbers will be available later this Summer). With the help of Title III completion initiatives, we are confident that in future years that this number will only continue to grow. These graduates will either commence, move forward, in a variety of careers or in their academic programs at a 4-year college or university. They will as a group make our region and communities a better place.

In this celebratory mood, it is good to reflect on what we have accomplished so far with our title III initiatives and what we can look forward to in the coming months.

Some Completion Initiative Highlights:

  • On-boarded 2 new success coaches: Welcome Joshua and Sarah! We hope that you had a great semester and that many of your students have been successful this semester. With your help, we know that students are more easily able to get an appointment with their success coach and that your colleagues are more effective coaches.
  • Progress on Scheduling Software: RSCC staff members have participated in two full-days of training on the newly purchased Infosilem software. Staff and Faculty also had the opportunity to hear first-hand from Catawba College the difference that Infosilem has made for them. We are excited about how this software will allow more students to get the classes that they need and help departments work together to create class offering that better meet the need of their students and faculty.
  • New Capabilities-Labor Market Analytics Software: RSCC has acquired software that will allow us to provide more up to date labor market data for our students making decisions about their career and for college as it evaluates the workforce needs of our community.
  • Teaching Innovation Grant: With the help of title III funds, we developed a program to address one of the core findings of our general education self-study. We have already funded three projects to address students’ perennial question of “why am I taking this class?”. We are hopeful that these projects will infuse more High-Impact teaching practices into the classroom and help students see the relevancy of their general education classes to their career goals and the world outside the classroom.
  • New Initiatives Approved!: As our title III grant progress and evolves, we will be engaging in new initiatives and modifying existing ones. Here are a few of the things that the title III grant will allow us to do in coming months:
    • Provide stipends to faculty for Summer advising training and working with allied health students.
    • Invite more faculty to the Achieving the Dream Conference this January in Nashville.
    • Purchase 100 COLS 1010 Textbooks for students to checkout from the library.

Other Upcoming Title III Funded Projects

While the Summer may be slower, we will still be actively pursuing our completion initiatives through: COLS 1010 training, more Infosilem training, Fall and Spring data analysis, and New and Adult Student Orientations.

Be sure to come back throughout the summer to read about each these projects in more detail.

Have a great Summer and congratulations to students and faculty on their many accomplishments this academic year!

May 5th, 2017


Up Next: Labor Market Insights from EMSI

Previous: Student Success Initiative Survey! , Title III Teaching Innovation Grant, Reflections on the ATD ConferenceWelcome!


 

RECENT POSTS

 

Labor Market Insights from EMSI

Commencement Reflection/Title III at Six-Months In

Student Success Survey

Title III Teaching Innovation Grant

Reflections on the ATD Conference

Welcome!

 

 

 

STATE & NATIONAL COMPLETION EFFORTS

Achieving The Dream

Complete College America

Gates Foundation

Drive to 55

 

Student Success Initiative Survey!

There is a famous story, probably apocryphal, about President John F. Kennedy’s first visit to NASA headquarters in 1961. While on his tour of NASA, he stopped to talk to a man holding a mop and said:

"Hi, I'm Jack Kennedy. What are you doing?"

"Well, Mr. President," the janitor responded, "I'm helping put a man on the moon."

Roane State Community College may not be in the business of putting a man on the moon, but we are tasked with the sometimes seemingly impossible task of improving student success. Like putting a man on the moon, this task requires that all faculty, staff, and our students understand our commitment to student success. A central effort in promoting the understanding of Roane State’s student success efforts is an online survey developed by Achieving the Dream called the Institutional Capacity Assessment Tool, or ICAT. 

ICAT

This survey sent to everyone, including maintenance staff, will help the college understand how deeply student success initiatives have penetrated the culture at Roane State. During the Fall 2017 semester, there will be a number of follow-up conversations based on the results of the survey.

So take the 30-minutes to 1-hour survey and help the college better understand where we are with our commitment to student success. The survey will be open from March 13 – March 24. You can find the authentication code in an email from our Vice President of Institutional Research, Karen Brunner.

While Roane State may not be putting a man on the moon we want to ensure the whole college understands what it means to be committed to student success. (We do, however, have an observatory that can get you a pretty good view of the moon and have received recognition from NASA).

Up Next: Commencement Reflection

Previous: Title III Teaching Innovation Grant, Reflections on the ATD ConferenceWelcome!


MegaphoneMan With A MegaphoneMegaphoneMan With A Megaphone

Call for proposals

RECENT POSTS

 

Labor Market Insights from EMSI

Commencement Reflection/Title III at Six-Months In

Student Success Survey

Title III Teaching Innovation Grant

Reflections on the ATD Conference

Welcome!

 

 

 

STATE & NATIONAL COMPLETION EFFORTS

Achieving The Dream

Complete College America

Gates Foundation

Drive to 55

 

The Call: Teaching projects to implement High Impact Practices that address the findings of RSCC’s 2017 Academic Self-Study findings.

One of the core findings of RSCC's 2017 Academic self-study was that students often struggled seeing the relevancy of coursework not directly related to their program of study.

Thanks to our Department of Education Title III Grant, we are able to offer grants ranging from $250-$1,000 to faculty or teams of faculty members interested in proposing an innovative activity or series of activities that address the question of:

How do we increase our students’ sense of connection and relevance between careers and “real-life” problems and the academic skills and content across their general education classes?

Faculty are required to incorporate at least one prioritized “High Impact Practice” (HIP) in their proposals: a common intellectual experience that can be adopted across disciplines, leveraging service-learning experiences to demonstrate relevancy, or integrating collaborative assignments and projects that engage students in real-life problem-solving.

The Application: 

Resource Guide: (web) (download)


FAQ

Q: I do not teach a general education class. Can I still apply?

A: Yes. But, you must partner with another faculty member who teaches a general education class. Some ideas might be to:

  • Seek input from a general education instructor on a service-learning experience that asks students to explain how what they are learning in their English or Math class applies to their service learning experience and career goals.
  • Have students generate questions based on a service-learning experience that they could then ask their general education instructor.
  • Create a shared assignment with another faculty member where students enrolled in their career class would be able to complete part of it as an assignment in their English/Math class and part for their Education class.

Q: What is the Maximum Award

A: $1,000 per instructor (up to $2,000 total for a team--award does not necessarily need to be split 50/50).


Q: I was hoping to buy supplies not provided to me by my department. Can I do that? Would this be in addition the stipend?

A: Yes, as long as it is related to your project. It would be in addition to the stipend. Please note that supply purchases may need additional approval from DOE and would be funded after stipends.


Q: I wanted to include extra questions in my course evaluation as part of the evaluation plan, but I won't get the results back until January. Is this ok?

A: This is not a problem. The Office of Institutional Research will relieve the student evaluation results. If further follow-up on these particular results are needed the Office of Institutional Research will be sure to contact you.


Eligibility

  • Faculty of any rank, including adjunct faculty, are invited to apply.
  • The proposed activity must pertain directly to general education courses (activities that help link or make apparent connections between career and general education courses are welcome).
  • Faculty not teaching a general education course can apply for an award if their proposal is designed in collaboration with a faculty member teaching a general education class.
  • The proposed activity must take place during the Fall 2017 semester.

Timeline

Activity

Date

Call for Proposals Published

August 28th, 2017 

(Round 1 March 21st, 2017)

Application Workshops 

By appointment

email: tinleyjj@roanesate.edu 

phone: ext. 4816)

Application Due

Friday, October 20th 

Awards Announced

Second Round: November 17th

First Round: May 5th

Project Implementation

Spring Term 2017

Evaluation Due

 May 12th, 2017


Up Next: Student Success Survey

Previous: Reflections on the ATD ConferenceWelcome!

 


 

Reflections on the Achieving the Dream Conference
RECENT POSTS

Labor Market Insights from EMSI

Commencement Reflection/Title III at Six-Months In

Student Success Survey

Title III Teaching Innovation Grant

Reflections on the ATD Conference

Welcome!

 

 

STATE & NATIONAL COMPLETION EFFORTS

Achieving The Dream

Complete College America

Gates Foundation

Drive to 55

 

Last week, a team from Roane State Community College that included President Whaley, Brad Fox, Faculty Senate President, staff from Institutional Research, Dr. Ward, V.P. of Academics, and Amy Keeling, Director of Curriculum and Advising, attended the Achieving the Dream (ATD) Conference.

For those of you unfamiliar with ATD, it is a national organization that brings together community colleges from across the nation to share their initiatives to address disparities in student success and increase the number of students achieving their goal of completing a college degree or specialized training. You can learn more about ATD initiatives here. And you can see some visualizations of the ATD conference topics here.

With nearly 100 sessions, poster presentations, and multiple key-note speakers, it would be impossible to summarize everything shared at the conference. What follows does not do justice to the amazing work being done by the ATD member colleges (of which RSCC is one). However, it distils a few of lessons shared with RSCC by other colleges into pithy, aphorism-like, or tweet-like, if you will, statements:

On Student Engagement and Completion/Retention Predictors

  • How do we measure and encourage student engagement? This is next step of data analysis. This is what will move us from lagging to leading indicators; from reactive to proactive.
  • Student engagement correlates with student success.
  • Just because a student is getting A’s and B’s does not necessarily mean that they will be retained long enough to graduate. We need to be on the lookout for signals besides grades that allow us to intervene before the student leaves us.

(Insights from Civitas Learning, Austin Community College, West Hills College, and Lone Star State)

On Guided Pathways

  • If we don’t make information clear to students, they will find their own way to get it.
  • On further analysis the college found students chose electives based upon perceptions of whether the class was easy or hard and where the course appeared alphabetically in the course catalog. Consequently, ‘Aquatic Life’ was a disproportionately popular elective.
  • Students need a predictable and reliable schedule.

(Insights from Miami Dade, Austin Community College, West Hills College, and Lone Star State)

On Sharing Data

  • Sharing course success data by Instructor was difficult at first, but it resulted in more conversations and collaborations between faculty and greater consistency in expectations for students across courses. Ultimately we are on the path to becoming more equitable and making it less of a “role of the die” if a student succeeds in their courses.
  •  Being able to look at the success rates of other classes helped our instructors answer the question of “what does this have to do with me”.
  • We had been asking faculty to fix higher-ed, but no one was clearly showing them what was broken and what they could do about it.

(Insights from Pierce Community College)

On Creating a Culture of Student Success

  • Because we made student success a campus wide project, we decided to do away with faculty development day and invite faculty, staff, and students to simply development day.
  • We found college wide reading circles to be an effective way of sharing our student success agenda across faculty and staff.
  • All departments, including the maintenance department, were asked to create a plan to improve student retention.
  • The more trust, the faster that you can move an initiative forward.
  • We need to agree on what is wildly important.

(Insights from Northeast Wisconsin Technical College and Bergen Community College)

On Changing our Mindsets about Students

  • Be ready for the students that you will have and not the students that you think you should have.
  • We should consider substituting the term at-risk for underserved.

(Insights from AAC&U and Being Student-Ready)

On Collaboration and Faculty Leadership

  • Faculty collaboration and leadership is a powerful force for student success.
  • Learning communities are difficult to schedule and hard to maintain, but when they work, they work.
  • Faculty will be the ones that help scale up the integration of high impact practices.
  • Collaborative assignments in class help students see connections between school and career.
  • Employers want workers that know how to work successfully in teams.

(Insights from Tacoma Community College, Palomar CollegePatrick Henry College, and Baltimore County Community College)

If any of these insights or initiatives are of particular interest to you, or echo your own efforts, feel free to reach out to me for more information or to share your efforts to increase student success. 
 

Up Next: Title III Teaching Innovation Grant

Previous: Reflections on the ATD Conference


Graduating students

Roane State Community College Title III Completion Initiatives!
RECENT POSTS

 

Labor Market Insights from EMSI

Commencement Reflection/Title III at Six-Months In

Student Success Survey

Title III Teaching Innovation Grant

Reflections on the ATD Conference

Welcome!

 

STATE & NATIONAL COMPLETION EFFORTS

Achieving The Dream

Complete College America

Gates Foundation

Drive to 55

In October of 2016, Roane State Community College was recognized by the Department of Education for its completion initiatives and awarded a 5-year grant to build on these efforts.

The grant will specifically help fund the following completion initiatives:

  1. Expansion of RSCC’s Success Coach advising for first-time students
  2. Integration of RSCC’s recently completed degree maps into degree works
  3. Upgrades to the student Early Alert system for students struggling with course work
  4. Scheduling software that will allow RSCC to ensure that students have a better chance graduating on time
  5. Training of College Success 1010 Instructors
  6. Initiatives supporting the use of data to inform student success intervention
  7. Resources for faculty integrating High Impact Practices into the curriculum
  8. Technology for faculty to increase student engagement
  9. Opportunities for former students to talk with new students during orientations about how they succeeded at RSCC

I hope that you find this blog an informative window into the exciting initiatives designed to help RSCC students to succeed and complete.This on-going record of the grant activities will provide weekly highlights of RSCC efforts and reflections on various completion projects happening at higher-education institutions throughout the country.

 

 


Up Next: Reflections from the Achieving the Dream Conference.


 

Contact: 

Jeffrey J Tinley • • Click name for email address

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