Colleges > Fall 2011 Partner College News
Innovations from the Field
Training Programs
Hartne ll College has lead the way bringing ACE curriculum into Career Training Education (CTE) programs. Students in Sustainable Green Construction, Nursing, Health, and Ag Diesel (vehicle training for agriculture) take ACE courses to focus their learning behaviors and build team management and leadership skills. Mike Thomas, Director of Hartnell’s Center for Advanced Technology, has been a real hero to the ACE program by seizing on Hartnell’s strengths and successfully tapping into new funding resources that have emerged for job training during this economic downturn. Other innovations from Hartnell were featured in our Spring 2011 ACE Newsletter
Freshman Experience Programs
Berkeley City College (BCC) is expanding their ACE program to reach new populations of students. The ACE program is now under the umbrella of their “Freshman Year Experience” to set new students on a strong path for success.
This fall, BCC continues to offer two Social Justice ACE cohorts for developmental ed students (called Persist) while also experimenting with new cohort designs for transfer level students. Krista Johns, Vice President of Instruction at BCC championed the use of ACE curriculum in an environmental literacy program linked to a community green jobs certificate program. In addition, BCC is experimenting with portions of the Foundation Course being used in the front-end of the cohorts for two other programs: the Program for Adult College Education (PACE), with evening and weekend classes for working adults pursuing a liberal arts degree, and the Public and Human Services (P&HS) program for students pursuing one of three "health support" careers. For P&HS, key modules of the 56-hour Foundation Course have been combined to provide about 17 hours of content in the first two to four weeks of the semester. The ACE Center is evaluating results for these BCC students, ash shown by their responses in the CSSAS evaluation. Results from these pilot designs help ACE understand how content from the Foundation Course may be adapted to benefit transfer level students, as well as those in primarily developmental ed cohorts.
Pilot to Combine Foundation Course (FC) and Team Self-Management (TSM)
Southwest Virginia Community College (SWCC) is innovating a new design that combines two core ACE courses into a single course. ACE has provided support for understanding how the energy flows for students in these courses informed the design process, ensuring that integrity to the ACE curriculum is retained, while working with the constraints of block scheduling. Scheduling became a driving force for SWCC because their students in rural areas have exceptionally long and difficult commutes to school, limiting the school’s scheduling options. To fit the ACE program to their community’s needs, the dedicated ACE team of Susan Hagy and Dyan Lester worked skillfully with Diego Navarro and master mentor, Vicki Fabbri to combine the Foundation Course and Team Self-Management course into a single course format.
Curriculum Integration
ACE faculty tell us that one of the most enriching aspects of ACE is that they get to connect on a regular basis with their colleagues, while integrating ACE curriculum across the cohort. This is sometimes the only opportunity faculty have to collaborate with instructors of other disciplines. Curriculum integration is an important aspect of the ACE Model.
From a standpoint of content, curriculum integration helps students connect concepts and recognize how the work they do in one area of school (and in life) can help with efforts in other areas. In terms of supporting student success, faculty coordinate lesson plans and separate major due dates to reduce students’ overwhelm, especially as many students carry additional obligations at home and work. The ACE Behavior System furthers the integration of the cohort by providing tools to help faculty set uniform and consistent expectations and consequences to deal with student behaviors.
A popular nexus of curriculum integration happens between the ACE Social Justice Research Course (SJRC) and English courses. At BCC, when ACE students do primary research for the SJRC, it is reinforced in their English class, where they focus on secondary research, based on their SJRC readings. Students are given an assignment in their SJRC to use a newspaper article to report on an issue that matters to them and that is made into a fuller English-based writing assignment because they also annotate a bibliography. Students also put together their own “reader” with five to six sources that they had used as the basis of their presentations and they evaluate the value of their sources. Chris Lebos, BCC’s ACE Coordinator says, “We’re having students do accelerated work in English and holding them to a transfer-level standard, consistent with ACE’s high expectations.”
We will continue to bring you other examples of curriculum integration in future issues of the ACE Newsletter.
Accelerated math AND English at the same time
Simultaneous acceleration of math and English is a powerful model for moving students toward completion. At Los Medanos College, Tue Rust is testing an ACE cohort design for a single semester that integrates the Social Justice Research Course, an English class and an accelerated math class. The following semester, students attempt non-ACE transfer-level math and English. For this ACE cohort, students enroll in an accelerated 6-unit math class, a 5-unit reading-writing-critical thinking class, and the three ACE core courses, for a total of 15.5 degree-applicable units. For the first half of the semester, students study social justice issues in the English and math classes. In math, they look at STAR test scores and A-G completion rates disaggregated by ethnicity, city, income level, and other demographic factors. This is local data and thus leads to very rich discussions on issues of equity and the achievement gap. Having modeled how to examine local data using Key Curriculum Press' Tinker Plots, students gather their own data for their SJRC class. Much of the last half of the semester is spent creating graphs from students’ own data. This is used to introduce new topics, create custom homework assignments, and assign short presentations on their results. These graphs are further explored in the SJRC class. Students create 20-30 graphs, then choose the "top 5" and drill down, creating even more meaningful analysis. The finished projects are a highly sophisticated portrait of local community needs.
According to Tue Rust’s analysis of students at LMC, “ACE considerably improves student success for those who concurrently attempt pre-transfer-level math and English. There is also emerging evidence that ACE students continue to perform well above average in terms of success and persistence, after completing the ACE program.” Tue has a deep passion for teaching and is excited about what his students are achieving, “These results are in line with the beliefs of many progressive educators, that high rigor and high love will lift students in all measures of excellence. Our research department at LMC is enthused with my preliminary results and will create a formal report.” For information on the ACE program at LMC and to watch videos of student social justice research presentations, visit www.losmedanos.edu/ACE.