The Urgent Case:
Focusing the Next Generation
of Community College Redesign
on Teaching and Learning
Dr. Karen A. Stout
President and CEO,
Achieving the Dream
2018 Dallas Herring Lecture
November 28, 2018
2018
DALLAS HERRING LECTURE
NC State College of Education ced.ncsu.edu
Dear Colleagues,
We are pleased to share with you the full transcript of the 2018 Dallas Herring Lecture,
delivered by Dr. Karen A. Stout, the president and CEO of Achieving the Dream, Inc. It was
delivered at the NC State College of Education’s Friday Institute for Educational Innovation
on Wednesday, Nov. 28, 2018. The 2018 lecture also marked the public launch of the Belk
Center for Community College Leadership and Research at NC State.
As you will find, Dr. Stout makes a bold and unapologetic call for community college leaders
to place a greater emphasis on teaching and learning, around which “institutional reform is
long overdue.” Dr. Stout lays out key guiding principles for community college leaders driving
reform:
1. supporting and rewarding reflective practice;
2. establishing centers focused on teaching and learning at the crux of the college’s
organizational structure;
3. designing centers to honor the diversity and range of experiences among faculty;
4. meaningfully engaging part-time faculty; and
5. making teaching and learning integral to efforts to make their institutions student-
centered.
Her call is one to join pioneers in the field like Achieving the Dream Network colleges,
which are continually strengthening their institutional capacity by prioritizing in teaching and
learning.
In the coming years, through the Belk Center for Community College Leadership and
Research, we will address critical issues of teaching and learning. Graduate faculty and
Ed.D. students will jointly explore and propose solutions to problems of practice relating to
teaching, pedagogy and the student experience in the classroom. We anticipate this research
to inform North Carolina community college leaders’ taking up Dr. Stout’s call and guiding
principles for improving teaching and learning.
Our work in this area exemplifies the NC State College of Education’s mission to improve
the educational outcomes of all learners. Over two-thirds of our faculty are engaged
in sponsored research endeavors, and they are leveraging over $79 million in grants to
transform the practice of teaching, learning and leading across North Carolina, the nation
and the world. With the establishment of the Belk Center for Community College Leadership
and Research, the NC State College of Education will expand our reach through enhancing
our preparation of outstanding community college leaders and strengthening our support of
community colleges.
Cordially,
Mary Ann Danowitz, D.Ed.
Dean, College of Education
NC State University
Audrey J. Jaeger, Ph.D.
Alumni Distinguished Graduate Professor
Executive Director, Belk Center for
Community College Leadership and Research
NC State University
1
2018 Dallas Herring Lecture by Dr. Karen A. Stout
Since becoming president and CEO of Achieving
the Dream in 2015, Dr. Karen A. Stout has
led the growth and expansion of its national
network of community colleges to include new
initiatives in a number of areas critical to their
ability to advance their goals. She has received
national recognition for her accomplishments
and achievements in higher education
innovation and leadership including Diverse:
Issues in Higher Education’s 2018 Leading
Women, American Association for Women in
Community College’s 2017 Woman of the Year,
and Washington Monthly’s 16 Most Innovative
Higher Education Leaders in 2016.
Previously, Stout was president of Montgomery
County Community College (MCCC) from 2001
to 2015, when she led the college through a
transformation process to improve student
success. Under her leadership, the college
earned the prestigious Achieving the Dream
Leah Meyer Austin award for its efforts around
student success.
Stout holds a doctorate in educational
leadership from the University of Delaware,
a master’s degree in business administration
from the University of Baltimore, and a
bachelor’s degree in English from the University
of Delaware. Granted President Emeritus
recognition by MCCC, she also holds honorary
degrees from MCCC and Miami Dade College.
About Dr. Karen A. Stout
2 NC State College of Education
An Introduction
I am honored to be here to continue the tradition of the Dallas Herring Lecture and to
follow previous speakers whom I greatly admire for their contributions to community
college leadership: Josh Wyner, Ken Ender, and Eduardo Padrón.
As president of Achieving the Dream (ATD), I am proud of our strong partnership with
North Carolina State University, much of it linked by the visionary efforts of Bob Templin,
a leader whom we proudly share as a colleague. Bob is a founding member of the ATD
Board of Directors, serving as its chair from 2011 to 2018. His leadership has bridged ATD
and this program—helping us to advise on the curriculum, primarily around data and
analytics, and in establishing the North Carolina State University DREAM Fellows
program, which will continue at DREAM19. We are looking forward to our new work with
you and the Aspen Institute, through the generous support of the John M. Belk
Endowment, to build supports to ensure the ongoing success of the presidents of North
Carolina’s community colleges.
The “Localness” of Community Colleges and Its Implications
for Reform
I am also honored to deliver a lecture that reflects the principles espoused by Dallas
Herring, who believed that education was a crucial driver for individual success and
the health of the community. His legacy is that of a champion of access to education
for all, a visionary who saw the need to establish what has become North Carolina’s
community college system, and a believer in the power of educators and citizens to make
a difference in the public welfare. Reading the transcripts of Herring’s interviews reveals
that he believed that educational improvement was local, born in his words “by the right
of the local people to determine policy in education.”
Herring’s belief in the power of our collective localness, an asset we still must cultivate
and leverage as community college leaders, was prescient. The challenges we face today
are the same fundamental ones that have existed since the proliferation of technical and
community colleges across the country during his era. As Kevin Dougherty (Community
College Research Center) notes in a recent overview of community college reform efforts,
the very mission of community colleges is our challenge:
Community colleges are assigned a key and very difficult role. They are expected to
provide higher education opportunity and social mobility for less advantaged
students. But this is to occur in a society with great social class and race inequality,
where higher education access and completion are subject to powerful sociopolitical
forces mobilized to preserve that inequality.
The 2018 Dallas Herring Lecture: The Urgent Case:
Focusing the Next Generation of Community College
Redesign on Teaching and Learning
2018 Dallas Herring Lecture by Dr. Karen A. Stout 3
Herring saw that our localness is what makes our sector unique and essential to
accomplishing that larger purpose: improving the economic and social mobility of our
students to, in turn, strengthen our communities and beyond. The organization that I lead,
ATD, which was founded in 2004 and soon to celebrate our 15th year, focuses on that
same guiding principle of the essentialness of local change, supported by a networked
approach to institutional transformation, as being fundamental to scale improvements in
institutional student completion and therefore gains in national community college
student success outcomes.
‘Reforming our Reforms’: The State of Community College
Redesign
To speak to the next generation of reform, and my call to center teaching and learning in
that redesign, it is important to understand the early work of the community college
student success movement through 2015 which addressed the challenge of low and
inequitable student outcomes by making structural changes in how institutions operate,
admittedly, now, around the margin of our institutions.
• ATD’s five founding principles for reform emphasized these elements:
1. building a culture of evidence;
2. addressing equity gaps identified in the data;
3. building broad engagement of key stakeholders in the student success work;
4. leadership; and
5. systemic improvement.
The focus on these principles helped colleges set the stage for cultural transformation,
primarily through the strategic use of data—and more specifically requiring colleges
to disaggregate their data to identify and address equity gaps for low-income students
and students of color. Much of ATD’s early work focused on the redesign of
developmental education.
• Completion by Design’s “loss/momentum framework” helped institutions
organize their work around the student journey into and through colleges around
four components: connection, entry, progress and completion. By focusing on the
areas where students commonly lose their momentum through the discrete stages
of that journey—from interest and application through enrollment and, ultimately,
completion—Completion by Design has helped colleges ask the right questions and
direct resources to the strategies most likely to keep students on the path to attaining
their goals.
• AACC’s Reclaiming the American Dream: A Report of the 21st Century Commission on
the Future of Community Colleges (2012) outlined “three R’s” for reimagining
community colleges: redesigning students’ educational experiences, reinvention of
institutional roles, and resetting of the system. By building on the learnings from ATD
4 NC State College of Education
and CBD’s efforts, AACC’s report amplified the reform community’s calls to redesign
our institutions around the student experience and reinforced the imperative to not
just focus on access but also student success.
Each of these provided leaders with frameworks for reorganization and reinvention that
have led to measurable improvements in practice. We are seeing gains in retention
in student cohorts and in gatekeeper courses, and smaller gaps in attainment across
student income levels and racial and ethnic groups. But our collective reform efforts have
not yielded the desired results. By almost any measure, as community colleges, we are
still not meeting our goals, particularly for low-income students and students of color
who now make up most of the students at our nation’s community colleges. The data
is familiar. While we have data that shows that community college graduates thrive in
work and life (e.g. ATD’s 2017 “Measuring What Matters” report), data from the National
Student Clearinghouse show that fewer than four in 10 students who start in our
institutions earn a credential within six years. Completion rates for minority students still
lag their white counterparts by 10 percent or more, and only 15 percent of our students
who transfer to four-year institutions earn a bachelor’s degree within six years.
We are now in a stage of “reforming our reforms” with a clear understanding for the
imperative for more accelerated and scaled results. The Aspen Institute College Excellence
Program (CEP) has emerged as a leading voice with its Aspen Prize and its groundbreaking
leadership work. The AACC Guided Pathways framework has emerged on the shoulders
of learnings from ATD and CBD and CCRC’s groundbreaking analysis of our redesign
successes and failures. At ATD, our own research and development efforts have led us to
evolve our five founding principles into seven fundamental institutional capacities.
These capacities are ones which we believe colleges must have in place to affect scaled
and accelerated student success. They also are helping us recast and customize our
signature leadership and data coaching model to support colleges where they are in their
respective student success journeys, including their work in adopting a guided pathways
approach.
“By almost any measure, as community
colleges, we are still not meeting our
goals, particularly for low-income
students and students of color who now
make up most of the students at our
nation’s community colleges.”
2018 Dallas Herring Lecture by Dr. Karen A. Stout 5
These new approaches focus significantly on
structural and process change and mutually
reinforce our collective efforts to support
colleges in improving student outcomes.
Yet, these efforts have lacked an explicit
focus on improving teaching and learning
as a primary lever for institutional
transformation.
“Our reform conversations center on
everything but teaching,” wrote Josh
Wyner in his 2014 book What Excellent
Community Colleges Do. Gail Mellow and
colleagues in their aptly titled book Taking College
Teaching Seriously, Pedagogy Matters! point out that
“attention to instruction is not routine” and that among the many investments we make
as institutions, too little attention is paid to supporting faculty.
If we are to put students at the center, excellent teaching and support for quality
instruction must be at the core of our reform work. Since 2015, as a reform movement,
we have continued to revise our reform frameworks to guide improvement with this in
mind, but focusing on teaching and learning still is not central to the field’s overall theory
of change.
For example, CCRC’s book Redesigning America’s Community Colleges led to the
development of the AACC guided pathways framework, which includes as one of its four
priorities ensuring that students are learning. The Aspen Institute’s framework includes
learning among its own four key outcomes. And ATD’s new capacity framework explicitly
calls out teaching and learning as a key fundamental. Even with this new attention,
however, there’s still a limited focus on teaching itself, and, more importantly, what is
required for institutions to build a culture of teaching and learning excellence.
The Need to Focus on Teaching and Learning
Creating greater urgency for teaching and learning in institutional reform is long overdue.
Our faculty have always been and will always be the first and most frequent point of
ongoing contact with our students. College leaders need to empower faculty to lead
changes in pedagogy, rethink and align course and program student learning outcomes,
build coherent and clear course and program sequences, and engage in advising in new
ways. Teaching must be made more dynamic, relevant, culturally responsive, and engage
and cultivate students’ ownership of what they learn. It also must support students in
Teaching and
Learning
Equity
Student Focused
Culture
Engagement
and
Communication
Strategy
and Planning
Policies and
Practices
Leadership
and Vision
Data and
Technology
At Achieving the Dream, learning from our colleges has led us to evolve our
five founding principles into seven fundamental institutional capacities.
6 NC State College of Education
developing a growth mindset and connect them to
academic and non-academic supports to help them
stay on the path to completion and employment. But
the onus cannot solely be on faculty to do more. They
need support and time for more reflective practice and
to participate in ongoing collaborative professional
development. They need supports and incentives to
enable them to teach and learn in new ways.
Though institutions and reformers have worked on these
areas for some time, we often tried to double down on
areas that data say could make a difference without
tackling more systemic approaches that fully address
student motivation and the overall quality of teaching
and learning.
Early in the ATD movement, for example, developmental education faculty were deeply
involved in the student success work. Our hypothesis then was that if we “fixed”
developmental education, more students would enter college pathways and complete.
While promising models of faculty leadership and many pedagogical innovations
emerged from this work, we learned early that this was not the “secret sauce” for reform.
Today, many college leaders have still not picked up teaching and learning as a key
thread for improvement. It is our blind spot.
Many community college presidents are willing to leave
matters of pedagogy to academic departments because
they are reluctant to be perceived as interfering with
faculty autonomy. Others lack experience in teaching,
having entered leadership roles by climbing the rungs
of administration. In my own case, I never had a course
in pedagogy or curriculum design. I taught part time
for 15 years in several delivery modes. I was handed
a sample syllabus, rough learning outcomes, and a
textbook and sent off to teach with little support, even
while teaching as a college president.
Improving teaching and learning is a big job to take on.
ATD’s work in assessing improvement in nearly 200
institutions reveals that teaching and learning is among
the areas where capacity is weakest across our network institutions.
“If we are to put
students at the
center, excellent
teaching and
support for quality
instruction must be
at the core of our
reform work.”
“Creating
greater urgency
for teaching
and learning
in institutional
reform is long
overdue.”
2018 Dallas Herring Lecture by Dr. Karen A. Stout 7
Our Institutional Capacity Assessment Tool (ICAT) has been administered at 180 network
colleges since September 2016. It includes the seven fundamentals I mentioned earlier:
1. strategy and planning,
2. policies and practices,
3. leadership and vision,
4. data and technology,
5. equity,
6. engagement and communication, and
7. teaching and learning.
In the framework, we define teaching and learning primarily as the “commitment to
engaging full-time and part-time faculty in examinations of pedagogy, meaningful
professional development, and a central role for them as change agents with the
institution.”
Within the Teaching and Learning capacity area, colleges evaluate themselves around
five teaching and learning dimensions:
1. instructional practices and support services,
2. developmental education,
3. structured program maps,
4. professional development, and
5. culture of evidence.
Of the 12 questions that comprise the assessment of Teaching and Learning, colleges
rank their capacity around program-level outcomes, learning supports for students, and
accelerated options for developmental education highest. Conversely, faculty applying
research-based instructional practices, faculty leadership in student success efforts,
effective professional development programs for instruction, updating professional
practice based on acquired professional development, using data to improve educational
practice in the classroom, and professional development supports for adjunct faculty
participation are ranked as the lowest capacity areas.
These results indicate that much of our reform work in teaching and learning to date
has been outside the classroom. We have much more to do to build a deep focus on
pedagogy and to support our colleges in building a culture of teaching and learning
excellence.
Based on our learning from the field, I believe three key organizing principles and five
building blocks can serve as an important framework to support leaders in our colleges
in developing the culture of teaching and learning excellence that is necessary to see the
scaled, accelerated, systemic, and sustained results that our students and communities
require from us.
8 NC State College of Education
Organizing Principles for Creating a Culture of Teaching and
Learning Excellence
ATD’s work has led us to three organizing principles that we believe can lead to creating
a culture of teaching and learning excellence:
1. Full-time and adjunct faculty are using
inclusive evidence-based instructional
practices to foster student learning. Jesse
Stommel, co-author of the book An Urgency of
Teachers: The Work of Critical Pedagogy, puts it
well: “Teachers teach; pedagogues teach while
also actively investigating teaching and
learning.” Too few of our community college
faculty are pedagogues because we have not
created conditions for reflective practice to thrive.
When faculty investigate and bring inclusive
pedagogical practices into the classroom, they
help bring the student to the center, lift their
strengths, and empower them to be more
autonomous in their journeys as learners. And as
we develop efforts to support and sustain this
culture of ongoing inquiry and improvement, we
need to make sure that adjunct faculty are not
only involved, but also can facilitate and lead
these efforts around improved pedagogy.
2. Students are engaged as active learners in
an accessible, empowering, personalized,
and supportive academic climate. Inclusive
pedagogy and an emphasis on growth mindset
alone are not sufficient to counter the growing
needs many of our students face outside of the
classroom, including food and housing insecurity.
Faculty can play important roles in identifying and
connecting students to resources, but we cannot
expect them to know how to take on new
advising and coaching roles unless we change
how we think about faculty-student interactions
and provide the tools and resources they need to
do this work.
3. Institutions are creating an organizational culture that embraces professional
learning for continuous improvement. This work involves engaging faculty at all
levels in improving their practice, supported by structures such as Centers for Teaching
and Learning, which have begun to take root on community college campuses. But
it also requires stepping back and looking at our overall strategic efforts in all areas
“These results
indicate that much
of our reform work
in teaching and
learning to date
has been outside
the classroom. We
have much more to
do to build a deep
focus on pedagogy
and to support
our colleges in
building a culture
of teaching
and learning
excellence.”
2018 Dallas Herring Lecture by Dr. Karen A. Stout 9
to ensure that they are aligned with and support our efforts to improve teaching and
learning to create a culture of instructional excellence.
The Building Blocks of Instructional Improvement
These three guiding principles—inclusive, evidence-based instructional practices;
engaged students; and organizational culture built around continuous improvement—
represent the foundation upon which a culture of teaching and learning excellence can be
built. But they are just that—a foundation. Once leaders have committed to establishing
these principles as the expectations for teaching and learning on their campuses, they
must delve more deeply into the specific practices and strategies that can serve as the
building blocks to make a culture of excellence a reality.
Let me outline five of them.
First, leaders must adopt continuous improvement models to drive
innovation in curriculum and pedagogy. Continuous improvement models
are commonplace, but I’m referring to what Gail Mellow calls a “pedagogy
matters practice improvement model,” one which places faculty members,
departments and divisions at the center of a process focused on the design
and refinement of inclusive pedagogical practices.
Dr. Mellow writes that “faculty want to, can and should have the opportunity to improve
their practice.” We know from our work that pedagogy is critical to student success and
refinement of pedagogy requires that our institutions offer faculty time and continuous
opportunities for reflection. We know this time and reflection is not common in most of
our colleges. Instead, many of our colleges are like the one described by Sean Michael
Morris, cofounder of the Digital Pedagogy Lab, and thrive in a “culture of non-inquiry.”
In a culture of teaching and learning excellence, leaders create an atmosphere that
promotes inquiry by making it safe for individual faculty members, departments, and
divisions to continuously assess their practice by asking questions—questions like:
• What did we try?
• What risks did we take?
• Where did we fail?
• Where were we successful?
• What was the impact on our students?
• What do we keep and what do we change?
Inquiry can be sparked through formal structures. At Valencia College in Florida, for
example, tenure projects require faculty to design plans to change instruction based
on the use of data, then implement them and measure the change in student learning
outcomes. At Dr. Mellow’s institution, LaGuardia Community College, faculty are grouped
into “reflective learning circles.” Supported by coaches, these groups develop lessons,
10 NC State College of Education
which are posted online for others to critique. And the Community College of Baltimore
County’s culturally responsive teaching and training program challenges faculty and staff
to examine assumptions, how they interact and collaborate with others, and how they
develop the specific knowledge and skills necessary to teach and work effectively people
from all backgrounds.
Other approaches may be informal, such as encouraging experienced instructors to reflect
and share their learnings with their peers on a regular basis. Formal or informal, these
efforts must become intentional institutional practice.
Continuous improvement efforts also must emphasize getting data into the hands of
faculty to “open the doors and windows” on their practice. In the hands of individual
faculty, data can help identify how students are progressing through not just their own
courses, but also through the programs they are part of. In the hands of faculty teams,
data can help align courses and programs and give each faculty member a deeper
understanding of the student journey into and through their courses.
At Pierce College in Washington, leaders focused on the “democratization of data” as a
key part of overall student success efforts. The college put real-time data on department,
course and instructor-level student success, broken down by demographic indicators,
in the hands of each member of the faculty. Chancellor Michele Johnson said the key
to encouraging faculty to work with this new, often uncomfortably granular level of
data was for leaders to emphasize that the purpose of the dashboards was to focus on
improvement, and to encourage them to examine their course design pedagogy.
When teachers become pedagogues, as Jesse Stommel says, these kinds of reflective
questions, as informed by a deeper understanding of data, become a core part of
how faculty continue to learn. The answers will help drive improved teaching and
improvement at scale.
The second building block to create a culture of teaching
excellence is focused on creating a hub innovation on campus to
help make improvements in teaching happen. Leaders must invest
in Centers for Teaching and Learning and align the work of the
centers with their institution’s broader student-centered mission
and student success agenda. For faculty and staff to really focus
and reflect on their practice, they need professional support, as well as
the time and space to do so. I would suggest that teaching and learning
centers are currently an undervalued and under-resourced asset that many
community colleges would benefit from reevaluating and reinvesting in.
2018 Dallas Herring Lecture by Dr. Karen A. Stout 11
Achieving the Dream’s annual survey indicates that
about two-thirds of ATD member institutions (113 of
169 responding colleges) have centers; but research
shows that where they do exist, these centers are not
as robust as they need to be. Andrea Beach and her
colleagues reveal in their book, Faculty Development
in the Age of Evidence, that the centers typically are
under-resourced and understaffed. Well over half (59
percent) of institutions contacted by the researchers
said their budgets were less than $50,000. They are
typically run by a single person on campus responsible
for faculty development and focused on a limited set of
teaching interventions. They often are led by faculty
who are recognized as excellent teachers but are not
trained in faculty development. These faculty members
are frequently on rotating assignments in and out of
the centers, contributing to a lack of consistency in
leadership, focus and influence. In short, the structure and support for these centers
suggests that they are not central to the student success outcomes work of their institution.
I would argue that Centers for Teaching and Learning can—and should—play a role as
an anchor for excellence across the institution.
To be effective, colleges need to ensure that their center is aligned with the institution’s
student success mission. They need to be adequately resourced and staffed by people
with backgrounds in faculty development who can share information from research
and best practices. These faculty developers can play new roles in culture building by
improving faculty capacity to collect and use data on student learning and by fostering
collaboration among faculty from varied disciplines to surface inclusive pedagogical
practices that benefit all students.
As Beach and her colleagues note, centers should not be places where faculty come to be
repaired, but—like the garage where the founders of Apple computers developed their
first computers—“places where creative faculty members gather to take risks, innovate
and transform the educational landscape.”
How can leaders create centers that fulfill these roles?
First, the center’s role in helping faculty teach better and become reflective
practitioners must be recognized and supported. Many faculty members come to our
campuses developed in their content areas and underdeveloped in the pedagogical skills
required to teach them. Leaders can set the expectation that all faculty know how to use
evidence-based teaching practices and frameworks for effective practice, which run the
“I would argue
that Centers for
Teaching and
Learning
can—and
should—play a
role as an anchor
for excellence
across the
institution.”
12 NC State College of Education
full range of instruction, from designing effective courses and fostering productive learning
environments to promoting higher order thinking and assessing to inform instruction and
promote learning.
To support these expectations, some institutions are turning to groups like the Association of
College and University Educators (ACUE), AVID for Higher Education, and Faculty Guild to
help build capacity. For example, Amarillo and Odessa colleges in Texas both worked with
AVID to implement a series of high engagement strategies through professional development
tailored for specific faculty groups, including newly hired faculty; those teaching math,
science, and developmental courses; and career and technical education staff.
Others, like Davidson County Community College, are focusing internally on developing a
shared understanding of what teaching excellence means for their institution. At Davidson,
faculty, staff and administrators, including the college president, worked together over
several months to develop a set of principles to guide that common understanding of
teaching and learning. Once the principles were clearly articulated, Davidson used them as
a guide to redesign all professional development efforts for faculty.
Second, leaders can position the center as a unique agent for organizational
change. Centers can expand their focus from supporting individual faculty to activities
that support improvements at scale, such as fostering faculty networks studying common
practice to address both individual needs and create substantive curricular change.
Year-long faculty learning communities, study groups, departmental action teams, groups
focused on accreditation and program review, and faculty involved in campus-based reform
work such as ATD all represent avenues to position the center as a first point of support for
faculty—and an avenue for broader improvement. Presidents and provosts can reinforce
this role of influence by placing center leaders at their leadership tables giving teaching a
prominent voice in larger institutional discussions.
As Peter Felten and his colleagues point out in The Undergraduate Experience, it means
approaching faculty development from a narrative of growth rather than constraint. “An
institution operating within a narrative of constraint considers faculty development to be
something done to hostile or disengaged faculty; requirements and a check-box mentality
often rule the day. A narrative of growth, on the other hand, leads to faculty development
initiatives emerging from the professional goals and habits of a busy faculty who willingly
seek the expertise and perspectives of peers.”
Third, leaders must ensure that inclusive pedagogical practices are extended to
the center itself, so that diverse needs of all faculty—novice and experienced
instructors, women, and faculty of color—are met. Centers also should provide
faculty with opportunities for leadership, which, along with their roles in faculty senate
and unions, allows them to set the direction of an entity with an organizational perspective
on the core of what they do—teaching and learning.
2018 Dallas Herring Lecture by Dr. Karen A. Stout 13
Beyond adopting continuous improvement models and investing
in Teacher Learning Centers and connecting the teaching to
the student success agenda, leaders must support faculty in
developing a new approach to teaching. This is the third building
block: Leaders must support faculty to approach their work from
the diverse set of lived experiences, skills and knowledge that
their students bring to the campus and into the classroom.
A myriad of recent research has confirmed what those of us in the community college
community know firsthand: the challenges many of our students face and bring with them
to campus. Research from the Hope Center at Temple University has shown that food and
housing insecurity, childcare, transportation and healthcare needs, and simply not having
enough money to make it from month to month are widespread in communities of all
kinds—urban, rural, suburban.
We also know that for many of our students, the college process is filled with unknowns.
While our institutions may seem logically organized to those of us who work within those
systems on a regular basis, our students—particularly first-time students with little
knowledge of what to expect at college—often encounter what appears to be a maze of
disconnected courses, services, and technologies they must navigate to find the supports
they need.
We have always known that many of our students need these additional supports.
But our work suggests that few institutions have reoriented their missions, policies
and practices to address these issues in concrete ways. Nor have they implemented
strategies for continually assessing, improving, and developing the capacity to address
these challenges in an ongoing and sustainable way.
Given these realities, we need to transform our institutions to better meet the needs of
our students, including connecting students to a wide array of services that we once may
not have thought of as the work of our institutions. We need to create what some of our
colleges have come to describe as a “culture of caring” that address our students’ needs
holistically.
While much of our ongoing work has focused on nonacademic supports for students,
these persistent needs also have a direct impact on how we think about teaching and
learning. We can no longer think about what often gets referred to as nonacademic
needs as separate from students’ academic needs.
As I said earlier, college faculty have always been and will always be the first and most
frequent point of ongoing contact with students. They are our “scalers.” Yet we have left
many of them behind. We need to engage and support faculty in their role as a critical
link between students and the services and supports they need to be successful. This
14 NC State College of Education
requires collaboration and coordination with others across the
institution in supporting student success. This goes beyond
what we think of as the traditional role of teachers operating in
isolation in the classroom. Our faculty are the ones who often
know students the most and are best positioned to intervene
when a student is falling off track, but traditionally we have not
provided the structures, processes or professional development
for them to fulfill this role.
Instead of providing faculty with a dense handbook of services
each academic year, we could be forming care teams so a faculty
member knows who to call to make sure a student has a “warm
handoff” and gets the supports they need rather than directing
students aimlessly from office to office. Instead of asking faculty
to raise early alert flags that seemingly go into a void, we could
create a transparent and integrated process and communication
flow, so the faculty know the impact and actions that resulted
from the flag and can follow up with the student if necessary. To
be successful, institutions must be strategic about articulating
how student supports fit with other institutional priorities,
including teaching and learning, and ensure that there is strong
faculty engagement throughout the process. Institutions must also provide the necessary
support and professional development—accessible for full-time and adjunct faculty—so
faculty can feel confident in their role as a part of the student support system. With the
proper support, faculty can play important roles in advising and supporting students,
identifying the points at which they are likely to lose momentum, and direct them to the
non-academic resources they need to remain in schools.
This integrated approach is a far cry from where our institutions are today. We know
that not enough of our faculty members are actively engaged in student success efforts
and are not getting regular professional development support to improve their practice.
Likewise, we have found that institutions that use early warning systems that identify
students struggling academically rarely, if ever, bring faculty into the process, so only a
limited number of faculty know what to do when students are flagged.
Delta College in Michigan and Renton Technical College in Washington state have both
made great strides in creating online resources providing information about early warning
systems and student supports for faculty to access as the need arises. This approach
has proven more effective than explaining these sorts of systems during new faculty
orientation, when instructors often are overwhelmed with information and may not think
to use early alert systems until several weeks into the semester. These resources also are
an especially effective way of making this information available to adjunct faculty.
“We need to
engage and
support faculty
in their role
as a critical
link between
students and
the services
and supports
they need to
be successful.”
2018 Dallas Herring Lecture by Dr. Karen A. Stout 15
We cannot expect faculty members to know how to identify needs, coach students, and
ensure they get the services they need unless we change how we think about faculty-
student interactions and provide the tools and resources they need to do this work.
The alternative is to continue to watch students stop out and drop out and wonder why
students don’t persist and complete.
The fourth building block for creating a culture of teaching
excellence is that leaders must develop and invest in an explicit
adjunct faculty engagement strategy.
Research shows that over two-thirds (67 percent) of faculty at community colleges
worked as part-time, adjunct faculty and nearly six in 10 community college courses
(58 percent) are taught by part-time faculty. Adjuncts often report feeling professionally
isolated from the institutions they work for, with limited outreach to orient them to
culture and, quite often, limited access to campus resources. Uncertainty about schedules
from semester to semester also contribute to their feelings of professional isolation. Yet
adjuncts have the potential to connect with our students in unique ways. As one said, “I
feel like I’m a lot like my students. I’m trying to kind of like scrape together a better life.
I mean, we have very similar, very complicated life structures. I think that’s one of the
reasons a lot of us really enjoy what we’re doing and why we make connections with
students—because we understand a lot of the struggles that they’re going through in a
really tangible way.”
While economic realities have shaped our institutions’ reliance on
adjunct faculty, I would submit we have an obligation to support this
significant portion of our teaching and learning workforce and bring
them more fully into our institutions’ academic and student success
mission.
Some of the ways in which our institutions can do this involve structural
changes, such as offering earlier course assignments or providing
adjuncts with a plan for the full academic year or basic supports, such
as office space and access to copying and other services that full-time faculty often
take for granted. The Community College of Baltimore County, for example, created
Centers for Adjunct Faculty Engagement on each of its campuses. These Centers provide
workspaces for adjunct faculty to prepare for class and grade student work. They also
provide adjuncts with access to computers and copiers, as well as comfortable spaces
to meet with students and for cohort-based professional development. Other center
activities are cultural, such as providing orientations for adjuncts—something only 54
percent of the adjunct faculty we surveyed said they had been exposed to.
But I would submit that the strongest lever for engaging adjunct faculty is to bring
them more fully into the culture of teaching and learning I have been describing. To
that end, Harper College in Illinois has developed an adjunct faculty engagement model
“
67%
of community
college faculty
are part-time,
adjunct faculty
16 NC State College of Education
which intentionally addresses the professional isolation adjuncts often face. It brings
adjuncts into the college’s clearly defined community of practice model for professional
development—both as participants and with training and support for them to serve as
facilitators. And the college negotiated a promotion and compensation policy with its
adjunct faculty union that recognizes and rewards adjuncts who participate in sustained
professional development that connects to classroom practice with additional pay,
seniority, and the opportunity to interview for full-time positions.
These kinds of practices and policies don’t only benefit our adjuncts. By bringing them
into broader efforts to create a culture of continuous improvement and inquiry around
inclusive pedagogy, they place adjuncts in a role that can benefit all teaching and
learning on our campuses. At Delta College in Michigan, for example, full-time and
adjunct faculty are engaged together in Teaching Circles, which spin off into team-
teaching partnerships. In this way, full-time and adjunct faculty are continuously learning
from each other and supporting each other’s work in the classroom, including innovating
and taking risks.
Fifth, and finally, to create a culture of teaching excellence
leaders can drive the design of a truly student-centered
institution through teaching and learning. This requires community
college leaders to ask themselves a question: What would it take to put
teaching and learning at the center of our capacity-building efforts?
This is the same question we are considering as we begin to update
our own ICAT model. While we don’t have all the answers, I believe this requires us to
look far more broadly at all of our institutional efforts, as captured in the ICAT measures
shown in the chart on the next page and align them with teaching and learning.
“While economic realities have shaped
our institutions’ reliance on adjunct
faculty, I would submit we have an
obligation to support this significant
portion of our teaching and learning
workforce and bring them more fully into
our institutions’ academic and student
success mission.”
2018 Dallas Herring Lecture by Dr. Karen A. Stout 17
ICAT
Measure
What it Measures Relation to Teaching
and Learning
Leadership
and Vision
The commitment and
collaboration of the institution’s
leadership with respect to
student success and the clarity
of the vision for desired change.
• Guide analyses and planning
• Establish goals, priorities, and
incentives
• Empower teams, including
instructors, to take leadership
• Coordinate initiatives
• Insist on data
• Use bully pulpit
• Recognize and reward
collaboration, risk-taking,
outstanding teaching
Data and
Technology
The institution’s capacity to
collect, access, analyze, and use
data to inform decisions, and
to use powerful technology to
support student success.
• Identify and strengthen data
about teaching and learning
• Explore new technologies for
academic support, advising,
delivery and motivation
• Identify personalization
technology that connects
student interests, success,
advising, career mapping
Equity The commitment, capabilities
and experiences of an institution
to equitably serve low income
students, students of color, and
other at-risk student populations
with respect to access, success
and campus climate.
• Demonstrate equitable
teaching
• Support diversity in faculty
• Instructors aware of barriers
that low-income and first-
generation students face and
refer to interventions/supports
Teaching
and Learning
The commitment to engaging
full-time and adjunct faculty
in examinations of pedagogy,
meaningful professional
development, and a central
role for them as change agents
within the institution. Also,
the college’s commitment to
restructuring developmental
education to facilitate student
learning and success.
N/A
18 NC State College of Education
Engagement
and
Commuicaton
The process of enabling
key external stakeholders,
such as K-12, universities,
employers and community-
based organizations, and
internal stakeholders across
the institution to participate
in the student success agenda
and improvement of student
outcomes.
• Establish meaningful
engagement with faculty and
students
• Develop tools for faculty to get
student feedback
• Communicate new policies/
improvements
• Encourage collaboration among
faculty
• Connect instructors to student
supports
Strategy and
Planning
The alignment of the
institution with the umbrella
goal of student success and
the institution’s process for
translating the desired future
into defined goals and objectives
and executing the actions to
achieve them.
• Identify assets
• Develop comprehensive plan
• Explore strategies for
strengthening PD, teacher
center
• Identify costs of
implementation
Policies and
Practices
The institutional policies and
practices that impact student
success and the processes for
examining and aligning policies
and practices to remove barriers
and foster student completion.
• Review and update policies
for hiring, evaluation and
retention, professional
development, and tenure
• Identify and promote evidence-
based teaching practices
• Conduct research on effective
teaching practice and student
success
2018 Dallas Herring Lecture by Dr. Karen A. Stout 19
This alignment work represents a heavy organizational lift across many areas and raises
many questions for the future design of our colleges and the supports required for the
evolving and more central role of faculty leadership.
One of the biggest challenges leaders will face is that
often each campus or even academic department has
its own approach to how it hires, develops, retains,
evaluates, and rewards and promotes faculty members.
These systems need to be brought into alignment with
each other and the overall student success goals of the
organization.
At the same time, leaders will have to support and guide
the development of an evolving role for faculty. In an
era when we need to encourage active learning as a
means for students to own and apply what they learn
in different contexts and pathways, we need faculty to
understand their students in context—where they are
struggling, what they don’t know, what is hindering their
progress.
Already faculty members are taking on new—and
increasingly differentiated—roles as coaches, advisors,
mentors, course developers and facilitators of student
success. A growing number of the professoriate are
developing courses and degrees aimed at communicating
content with students in new ways or are teaching in
science labs or writing and math centers. Often, these
faculty have mastered a broader set of skills to support
students. We need to bring them more intentionally into
broader efforts to reshape the culture of learning on our
campuses.
At the same time, we need to emphasize and support ways to bring our institutions’
ongoing efforts to collect and make use of student data much closer to the classroom.
As I suggested earlier, strengthened Centers for Teaching and Learning and their faculty
developers have an important role to play in building faculty capacity and practice in
using data to catalyze changes in course design and pedagogy.
Taking on these five building blocks for creating a culture of teaching and learning
excellence—adopting continuous improvement models for pedagogy, investing in
Centers for Teaching and Learning, helping faculty to approach their work from the
lived experiences of their students, developing and investing in an explicit adjunct
“In an era when we
need to encourage
active learning as a
means for students
to own and apply
what they learn in
different contexts
and pathways,
we need faculty
to understand
their students in
context—where
they are struggling,
what they don’t
know, what is
hindering their
progress.”
20 NC State College of Education
faculty engagement strategy, and driving the design of a student-centered institution
through teaching and learning—will not be easy. This work cannot be taken on by a
community college president or a senior leadership team in isolation. Creating this
culture will require that we build new and deeper relationships and expectations for
all of our leaders—our CAOs, academic deans, department or division chairs—and for
our individual faculty members, full-time and adjunct. In fact, in our work at ATD, we
have found the institutional spark for systemic change to be in the “middle”—with the
academic deans and department chairs and through the strategic connection of teaching
and learning reforms with shared governance processes that value faculty voices and
leadership.
Conclusion
There can be a tendency at inflection points in any major educational reform movement
to want to surface the next big idea for transformational change. There is a temptation
to move past what we think of as old approaches in favor of bold action, because
no signature student success initiatives or policies have yet led to the magnitude of
improvement we seek in our outcomes. I suggest that the bold action is right in front of
us and is at the core of our being as community colleges.
As Dr. Eduardo Padrón, president of Miami Dade College, puts it, “If we are to meet the
challenges of learning in this time of change, teaching must be central to our success.”
We can no longer afford innovation on the margins, or continued working outside and
around faculty, and still expect to see greater and more equitable gains in learning and
completion. We must recognize that in our focus on completion outside of the classroom,
we are in danger of leaving behind the achievement of our fundamental enduring charge,
student learning.
New players are jumping into the vacuum we have created. As a recent article in the
Chronicle of Higher Education states:
It’s game on for the business of improving faculty learning. No really. For-profits see
our pain point and are jumping in. One founder of a company focused on improving
faculty learning said of colleges, “they’re either actively focusing on the classroom,
or they know they have to.”
This represents an opportunity for our institutions, but also a danger. Our faculty must
be at the center and leading our instructional improvement efforts. We can’t outsource
our way to a solution on teaching quality. Tactical efforts to improve specific facets of
instruction, either with strategic partners or built internally by ourselves, will only work
if nested inside a strategically and intentionally built and nourished culture of teaching
and learning excellence. As I’ve outlined during these remarks, creating that culture isn’t
the result of one action, but built on three foundational principles with intentional and
explicit efforts around the five building blocks required to create a culture of teaching and
learning excellence.
In this next generation of reform work, the big idea is not new and cannot be another
magic bullet that offers to solve all of our problems. Instead, the big idea is the hard
work required to place teaching and learning, and the strategic and intentional building a
culture of instructional excellence, in the center of all of our work.
These changes will drive the sustainable and scaled results our students and our
communities need and deserve. It is up to all of us to step up and focus forward to build
the institutions capable of delivering on this promise.
“We must recognize that in our focus
on completion outside of the classroom,
we are in danger of leaving behind the
achievement of our fundamental enduring
charge, student learning.”
22 NC State College of Education
References
• Achieving the Dream (November 2018). Institutional Capacity Assessment Results, Silver Spring, MD.
• Adjunct Faculty Quick Facts. Achieving the Dream: https://www.achievingthedream.org/sites/
default/files/initiatives/quick_facts.pdf
• American Association of Community Colleges (2014). Reclaiming the American Dream:
Community College’s and the Nation’s Future, A Report from the 21st Century Commission on the
Future of Community Colleges.
• Beach, Andrea L., Sorcinelli, Mary Deane, Austin, Ann E., and Rivard, Jaclyn K. (2016). Faculty
Development in the Age of Evidence: Current Practices, Future Imperative. Stylus Publishing,
Sterling, VA.
• Bickerstaff, Susan and Chavarin, Octaviano (November 2018). Understanding the Needs or Part-
time Faculty at Six Community Colleges. Community College Research Center, Teacher’s College,
Columbia University.
• Blumenstyk, Goldie. “Is Teaching Quality the Next Front for Education Investors?” Chronicle of
Higher Education, October 30, 2018, https://www.chronicle.com/article/Is-Teaching-Quality-the-
Next/244954
• Community College Research Center Frequently Asked Questions Sheet, https://ccrc.tc.columbia.
edu/Community-College-FAQs.html
• Dougherty, Kevin. (2017). Summary of Reforming the American Community College: Promising
Changes and Their Challenges. Community College Research Center Teachers College, Columbia
University.
• Felten, Peter et al (2016). The Undergraduate Experience:Focusing Institutions on What Matters
Most. Josey-Bass: San Francisco, CA.
• Griffiths, R., Gardner, S., Lundh, P., Shear, L., Ball, A., Mislevy, J., Wang, S., Desrochers, D.,
Staisloff, R. (2018). Participant Experiences and Financial Impacts: Findings from Year 2 of
Achieving the Dream’s OER Degree Initiative. Menlo Park, CA: SRI International.
• Institutional Commitment to Teaching Excellence: Assessing the Impacts and Outcomes of
Faculty Development (2017). Edited by Catherine Haras, Steven C. Taylor, Mary Deane Sorcinelli,
and Linda von Hoene, Washington, DC: American Council of Education.
• Jenkins, J. (1987). Radio Interview with Dallas Herring, Southern Oral History Program Collection,
https://docsouth.unc.edu/sohp/html_use/C-0035.html
• Kezar, Adrianna (2018). How Colleges Change: Understanding, Leading and Enacting Change, 2nd
Edition. Routledge, New York and London.
• Long, Katherine. “How Pierce College is helping more students succeed” Seattle Times Education
Lab, March 17, 2017, https://www.seattletimes.com/education-lab/qa-how-pierce-college-is-
helping-more-students-succeed/
• Mellow, G., Woolis, D., Klages-Bombach, M. & Restler, S. (2015). Taking College Teaching
Seriously: Pedagogy Matters! Sterling, VA: Stylus Publishing.
• Stommel, J. & Morris, S.M. (2018). An Urgency of Teachers: The Work of Critical Digital
Pedagogy. Hybrid Pedagogy, Inc.
• Struthers, Brice, MacCormack, Penny and Taylor, Steven C. (2018) Effective Teaching: A
Foundational Aspect of Practice that Support Student Learning. American Council on Education,
Washington, D.C.
• Supiano, Beckie. “Traditional Teaching May Deepen Inequality. Can a Different Approach Fix
It?” Chronicle of Higher Education, May 6, 2018, https://www.chronicle.com/article/Traditional-
Teaching-May/243339
• Wyner, J. (2014). What Excellent Community Colleges Do: Preparing All Students for Success.
Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard Education Press.
2018 Dallas Herring Lecture by Dr. Karen A. Stout 23
About Dr. Dallas Herring & The Power of Education
Dr. W. Dallas Herring made it his life’s work to build a
system that would serve all of North Carolina’s residents by
preparing them for productive work and active citizenship.
As a teenager, he established a 75-book community library
in the local general store of Rose Hill, his home town. He
later developed a statewide system of technical education
institutes that eventually became the North Carolina
Community College System. He also served for 20 years
as chair of the North Carolina State Board of Education.
Throughout his career, he was always guided by his vision
of educational “opportunity for all the people.”
Please consider powering education with a gift to honor Herring or to support the College
of Education’s research and scholarship.
Gifts can be made in the following ways:
By Check: Please make checks payable to the “NC State Foundation” with a memo
notation that it is for the “William Dallas Herring Professorship Endowment, 077000” or
the “College of Education Excellence Fund, 140158”
Mail to: College of Education Development Office
NC State Campus Box 7801; Poe Hall 208; Raleigh, NC 27695-7801
Online: To make an online gift by credit card to the Herring Professorship, please use
the following link:
• give.ncsu.edu and click “Choose a Fund”
• Scroll down and click “Other - I would like to give to a different area”
• Click “Continue”
• Type the name of the fund into the box: “William Dallas Herring Professorship
Endowment, 077000”
• Enter the amount, click “Next,” and follow the instructions to complete the transaction.
OR
To make an online gift by credit card to the College of Education’s Excellence Fund,
please use the following link:
• give.ncsu.edu and click “Choose a Fund”
• Scroll down under “College Gifts” and click “College of Education Excellence Fund”
• Click “Continue”
• Enter the amount, click “Next,” and follow the instructions to complete the transaction
Please contact the NC State College of Education’s development office with
questions at 919-515-7017.
24 NC State College of Education
About the Belk Center for Community College
Leadership and Research
With a $10.86 million grant from the John M. Belk Endowment, the NC State College of
Education will establish the Belk Center for Community College Leadership and Research to
enhance and strengthen its support of community colleges in North Carolina in three ways:
• Further the preparation of future community college presidents. The college will
integrate executive leaders as professors of the practice into the redesigned Doctor of
Education in Community College Leadership. These professors of practice will provide
first-hand insights and experiences, field-based leadership opportunities, and examples
of how theory and research inform practice.
• Provide ongoing leadership development to community college executives
and trustees. The Presidents’ Academy—a partnership between NC State College of
Education, N.C. Association of Community College Presidents, N.C. Community College
System, Achieving the Dream and Aspen Institute’s College Excellence Program—
will provide ongoing support to community college presidents in order to help them
strengthen their institution’s performance with post-completion outcomes. Working in
tandem with the Presidents’ Academy, the Trustees Institute will partner with the N.C.
Association of Community College Trustees and N.C. Community College System to
develop programs targeted at assisting community college trustees in learning about
their roles in supporting higher levels of institutional performance.
• Build capacity for evidence-based decision-making and applied research.
The college will develop an infrastructure to identify the most critical needs facing
community colleges, as well as facilitate sustainability and responsiveness to those
needs. By conducting and disseminating action research, the college will support
community college leaders in making evidenced-based decisions for enhanced
institutional performance.
Belk Center Project Team
• Audrey J. Jaeger, Ph.D., PI and Alumni Distinguished Graduate Professor
• James Bartlett, Ph.D., co-PI and Associate Professor
• Reynaldo García, Ph.D., co-PI and Professor of the Practice
• Robert Templin, Ed.D., Senior Advisor and Professor of the Practice and Senior Fellow
with The Aspen Institute
• Diane Chapman, Ed.D., Grant Evaluator and Teaching Professor and Director of the
Office of Faculty Development
As a research-driven college of education
grounded in its land-grant mission, the NC State College of Education
leads the way in transforming the practice of teaching,
learning, and leading and improving the educational outcomes
of learners across all stages of life.
Sources: U.S. News and Academic Analytics
in Rankings in Scholarly
Research Activities
in Active Grants
Top 12%
Nationally
ced.ncsu.edu
Belk Center
for Community College
Leadership and Research
NC State University promotes equal opportunity and prohibits discrimination and harassment based upon one’s age, color,
disability, gender identity, genetic information, national origin, race, religion, sex (including pregnancy), sexual orientation and
veteran status. 700 copies of this public document were printed at a cost of $2.46 per copy.
