Inside the Launch Window

It was more than twenty years ago, but remember my first year of college like it was yesterday. In August of 1997, my parents drove our navy blue Chevy Tahoe five hours north on I-81 to Syracuse University and dropped me and countless boxes of my belongings into an “open double” in Day Hall.

Three weeks later, I was already “in the thick” of my first semester, which was primarily filled with prerequisite courses needed for my liberal arts core: Biology, Psychology, Probability & Statistics among them. Each of these classes met in large lecture halls about the size of my high school auditorium.

Dr. Druger was my biology professor. I remember him as a great guy… passionate. He required each of his freshmen to meet him in pairs or groups of three for lunch at a dining hall of our choice. This was his way of connecting with each one of us personally, and he was the only professor I had who did this. Most other 100 and 200-level courses were taught by professors who probably couldn’t pick me out in a lineup, and I don’t recall their names.

Probability and Statistics. Ugh. Let’s just say that I ended up dropping this course, but the truth was that, past midterms, I could barely maintain a D plus. Math was ALWAYS my struggle in high school, but at least in high school I had the benefit of caring teachers who were looking out for me. My Stats lecture probably had 80 kids in it, and while I remember going to weekly recitation (led by graduate assistant in the math department), I don’t remember a thing about it. The sad part was that I knew I was lost, and I also felt helpless as to what to do about it. Luckily my faculty advisor found me a data analysis class that satisfied my math requirement, otherwise I would have been in real trouble.

College and Career Readiness for Success (CCRS)

This phrase was a mere sentiment in the mid-90s, and to credit my parents, they did what they could to adequately prepare me for college, but not all families can (or do). In fact, many of my high school friends did not complete their four-year degrees as planned. Some even dropped out after their freshman year.

What happened? We all went to the same high school and took the same classes. Why were some of us able to function in college while others did not?

I’ll come back to that…

Somewhere in the mid 2010s, the U.S. Department of Education published this document that articulated a growing problem: too many of this generation of college students are forced to take remedial classes because they haven’t mastered the academic skills needed for college coursework. At the same time, employers across the nation began to grouse about ill-prepared candidate pools, which can be used in defense of outsourcing. The CCRS “movement” gained momentum along with the Common Core State Standards, which were fashioned as academic learning standards that would ensure that all students would be equally prepared to face the rigors of college and beyond.

I’m going to temporarily ignore the “career” part of this phrase and instead focus solely on college readiness. As secondary educators, we can ensure that our grade level curricula teaches the necessary prerequisite skills so that students do not need to waste their first semesters of post-secondary education taking non-credit remedial courses. We can work with our students to teach them the academic norms related to critical reading, annotating a text, submitting a properly-formatted research paper. We can predict their academic success based on their performance on standardized exams, and if they perform poorly, we can implement interventions.

But what are we doing to help students attain the non-academic soft skills they need for college?

One of the better explanations of what it means to be “college and career ready”, in my opinion, comes from Dr. David T Conley, a professor of the University of Oregon who led the Educational Policy Improvement Center (EPIC), which is now called Inflexion. In a presentation created for Edweek, Conley advocated for a more whole-student approach to CCRS. This includes the notion that students must “take ownership of their learning and become proficient with a range of learning strategies.”

In my own experience as an undergraduate, graduate, and now a post-graduate student, I can attest that college professors do not always take attendance (if at all). They do not march up and down classroom rows to check if students have done the previous night’s homework. They do not call home to tell mom and dad that a struggling student should seek extra help. Rarely in experience have I had a professor give me timely (and useful) feedback on my writing assignments. College students really do NEED to “take ownership of their learning,” as Conley says.

Through the lens of my own experience, I came up with three nouns that can either be innate personality characters or acquired behaviors: Gumption, Prioritization and Focus.

Gumption. I could have used some of this is Probability and Statistics. I was hopelessly lost and too intimidated to raise my hand to ask for clarification in such a large class. My attendance started to wane, and I feel even further behind.  I simply gave up.

What can we do, as educators, to teach students how to advocate for themselves when they feel lost? What can we do to ensure that they WANT to advocate for themselves rather than to simply give up, as I did?

Prioritization. I fell into the rabbit hole of my freshman year. I made a ton of new friends, I joined the marching band, and I participated in Greek life. It was “very difficult to find the time to study” when there was so much else going on. Band practices were from 6-8pm 3x a week, and more often than not my friends and I followed with some sort of social activity such as dinner on M Street, or simply “hanging out” at someone’s off-campus apartment. When was I going to study or do homework? Sadly, many of my class assignments were done in the late-night hours, and my sleep suffered. I’m certain I handed in many assignments that didn’t represent anything close to my best work. Though I “effortlessly” excelled in English classes, I got by in college with a lot of “fake reading.”

What can we do to help students value their education enough to put schoolwork ahead of social distractions? How do we help students develop time management skills for out-of-class work in an era where the value of homework is being questioned in elementary and secondary settings? 

Focus. Let’s be honest, we administors cringe when we observe teacher-focused, teacher-directed lessons that involve little or no student-to-student interaction. We WANT to see the teacher stepping aside to allow students to direct their learning. The old “chalk-and-talk” model of class lecture is outdated; instead, students should be working primarily in groups, right? Many of our classrooms have been re-worked to eliminate the front-facing rows in favor of desks arranged in collaborative-clusters of four. Many of us who are financially capable of doing so have adopted a flexible-seating policy where students can opt to enjoy class from a comfy bean-bag chair or a stool behind a high-top table. Many of us work hard to discourage districations by having students drop their cell phones into a numbered cubby upon entering a classroom. I myself used to take my students’ phones away when I caught them texting in class and wrap them with paper and masking tape, a practice that never got me into trouble (but certainly could have).

I wish there was a way that high school administrators and teachers could relive college as a freshman, just for one week. How many classes are held in large lecture halls with 100+ students listening to a sage-on-the-stage talking through PowerPoint presentation? How many professors may be brilliant minds in their fields but poor teachers? How many freshman classes follow the accepted structural pattern of a lesson with a clearly definable Anticipatory Set, Direct Instruction, Guided Practice, Independent Practice, and Summary/Closure? How many professors use classroom management techniques to ensure that students are attentive and participatory? How many professors ask students to check their cell phone use in class?

I don’t think I need to ask any more rhetorical questions on this one. The subtext should speak for itself.

Please don’t misunderstand me; my intention is not to be critical of our practices as secondary educators. My criticism, instead, is in the concept of College and Career Readiness and its buzzworthy omnipresence that focuses so much on academic learning standards and assessments.

The beauty of public education in New York State (and throughout most of the nation) is that educators value good teaching practices and professional development. While many college professors may be brilliant minds in their  respective fields (as evidenced by terminal degrees, accolades, research grants and publications), how many are able to teach in the manner that today’s students are accustomed to learning?

To circle back to a question I posed earlier: If we examine a pool of students who have similar family backgrounds, similar socio-economic prowess and the same educational experiences, how can we predict who will compete four year degree and who will not?

Obviously there is no simple answer to this question, and as my St. John’s professor Dr. Rich Bernato would say, “There’s a dissertation in that.”

But I honestly think it has to do with those personal characteristics and associated behaviors. Perhaps this is why Carol Dweck’s Mindset became such a popular read around the same time that CCRS and CCSS shifted into gear.

Still, while CCRS is a well-intentioned initiative, there may be an imbalance between the focus academic skills over the development of soft skills for universal success. Educators (and parents) may need to do more to help students become persistent go-getters who can thrive in any academic setting.