Transcript of Best Practice: Developing Bridge Programs from Non-Credit-To-Credit Community

Transcript of “Best Practice: Developing Bridge Programs from Non-Credit-to-Credit Community College Programs,” a presentation by Sylvia Ramirez and Ruth Gay of Mira Costa College for the California College Transitions Summit

SYLVIA RAMIREZ: We’re very pleased to be here, too. We’ve been talking about the policies and partnership level and we’re going to end with what really happen with the classroom, too. So I’m thrilled to have my ESL teacher with us who has really helped us transform how we think about bridging classes. Your question of the day is: How is Mira Costa’s ESL program like a pear? Or used to be like a pear? Okay.

A little bit about the program. We are from one of the best community colleges in the state and certainly one of the best non-credit programs. We’re medium-sized. We have the adult high school, ABE, GED, and FTES is like ADA. We’re on nine-week terms and then we have a non-credit ESL program which has seven levels. We have vocational ESL, digital storytelling, we’re twice as large as the ABE, and of course we have we have other non-credit for older adults, which is kind of shrinking a little bit, but what’s probably unique about Mira Costa is that we make anywhere about 15% to 20% of the total college FTES, and the non-credit ESL program is the fourth largest program college, so we give a lot of attention that way.

Another thing is that we’re very large non-credit ESL and our credit ESL program is smaller so there’s always been a discussion about how do we bring more non-credit ESL students to credit and also ABE and high school diploma. Well, this is what our students see every time they come to a program orientation. You can probably see it better from your side but they’re told from the minute they come to any one of our orientations, “Welcome to College”. We don’t say, “Welcome to our non-credit ESL program” or “elcome to ESL.” We say “Welcome, You’re a student at Mira Costa College. You have many opportunities.”
They start on Getting Started street, which is where they do all their registration and then they travel along the level . They have an OptionsBoulevard, where they can go to VESL digital storytelling or Citizenship, and then they have a Decision Circle, where they can kind of decide, “Well, I’m not done yet” because you’re not. That’s the message we’ve been hearing all day. This is just one part of your journey. And then we talk about what courses they can take at our center and what they can take a two different campuses.So the message is always, you know, you’re in college.
How many people here are from a community college, OK, that have non-credit programs? Because this question… you’re going to smile… how hard can it be, then? It’s college. We’ve got it all together, transition should be easy. You just take them here and move them over here. Gretchen’s shaking her head. It’s hard, guys, and it’s hard for a lot of reasons.There’s different locations to register for different programs. There’s different applications. There’s different tests, as the cohort heard yesterday and the cohort’s going to hear tomorrow. At our college our credit English has a test, it’s different, not just in content but developers in credit Math. Our ESL program uses CASAS and our adult high school ABE program uses TABE, so how to figure out all this testing information and make good recommendations is tough, too. So when you’re sitting back and saying how can Sylvia have any transition issues, believe me, there’s issues.
I think to make transitions happen what we’re going to focus on is four things. There are things that we felt we had to do to change the structure of our program and I want you to think about the issue about the environment that a student find success that they talked about today. There’s things that we have to do as far as faculty leadership. And then there’s things that we have to do in terms of curriculum. We’ve talked about all this today. The important things that have to happen in the curricula and then there’s the whole transition support and we have decided it’s very high touch. And there’s just no way – we can’t figure out a way around that --- that so given is very high touch, what can we do in this budget climate and with limited resources.

So here it is: There’s Mira Costa. What I wanted to talk about was in 1998 this is kind of what our program looked like. This is not a program if you’re going from the bottom to the top that you’re going to get very many people out. We had a lot of immigration in 1998 and lots of beginning students and every dime we got, we put more beginning level classes. We thought we were meeting the need. We served students anytime they wanted to come for anything they needed, and so students were kind of floundering through and then at the top that was our advanced club. These students have been with us for years now in this wonderful comfortable zone. Every year they got better and their skills got higher so nobody could get in the club. It’s not possible to get into the advanced club.

So we definitely had to look at those problems. We talked to our students, too and they didn’t really know how to move through the program. They were certainly happy in their classes but if you asked them…They said to us in focus groups, Well how do we get out of this program or how do we go to the next program?

And remember, that our advanced students never left. We didn’t, even though we were ten miles away to our credit program, we didn’t talk to each other, so we tried but we were really busy and different things, and we weren’t really communicating well and I take just as much responsibility for that at my credit college. So what did we do? Everything I’m talking about, if you go to our website, ESL, is up there. We’ve got our outcomes, our assessments--we might have stolen them from you. If we did, we put your name on them, but please steal them from us, because I love adult education. We’re a very sharing group.

But first thing that we did was we said “Our students aren’t so different than some of the students we’ve been talking about in terms of they don’t have forever to go to school either.” So we decided that we were going to our program into terms, nine-week terms, and the purpose of the terms was to take a look at them every nine weeks and say: “Are you ready to go or not? You don’t have to go but we have assessments, let’s take a look and see if you’re ready to go.”

What came out of that is of course our persistence went way up because students can commit for limited periods of time just like at the college. They can commit to that and then they have to stop out and then they can come back. Also we promoted about 50% of our students a week. We found out. Not at all levels. The beginning levels we promoted a lot quicker. At the higher levels, they’re going slower and that’s okay but we’re looking at them. The other thing that we did was we all talkedtogether and we figured out only happen at Mira Costa but we have actually within one level had different standards. It couldn’t happen anywhere else, right?

So we had to meet together by levels and say what are our student learning outcomes for level. We had to agree on them and we had to put our assessment benchmarks with them, and we had to make decisions. Okay, this is how we’re going to promote. This is still a teacher decision but real strong guidelines so when a student comes and talks to me, I can say,“Well, I looked at the guidelines, you know, and you’re falling within this area.”

And then the biggest thing is what helps our advanced students understand this is not home, that they were actually going to leave the program. That was a really big culture difference. We told them about what it means to leave the program and “Congratulations, you’re going to leave the program.” In the beginning it was shock. You know, “They’re sending us out and where would we go?”
But now actually 100 to 150 ESL students finish our program every year and it’s a very conscientious thing we do. For Level Six and Level Seven students, on the fourth week of every nine-week term, a counselor comes in and talks to them and tells them they’ll go over that thing again. You know,“You’re going along this road. Let’s talk about your options. How close are you to making decisions? Let’s talk about that.” The conversation is there.

Level Seven students… every nine weeks they meet individually with a counselor if they’re going to be promoted, and if they’re not going to be promoted, they know it’s coming so they’re meeting with a counselor. The language is all success. So, the conversation is not: “You have to go” but it’s “How successful you are!” We recognize that some students that leave our program, we might not be able to serve in some ways, but we have our program so that Level Five, Sx can come up and be in that.

So now we’re not a pear, if you remember me for the pear. Try to think of me more as a cylinder, where we actually have students moving pretty regularly and actually we have more now at our higher levels than at our beginning level. The next part of it, so we changed the program structure.
The next part was the committed faculty part. We’re like most non-creditand adult school programs, we mainly have part-time faculty. But we have a commitment to have full-time faculty, It’s really important and we worked with our credit colleagues.

At our college you have to go and advocate for full-time faculty members all the departments, non-credit and credit. So you have to get buy-in your credit colleagues because if they can get two Biology people they might not want a non-credit ESL so the credit ESL person and I lobby together and we convince the college that there’s a pull-pull factor. Non-credit has to push out. We were happy to do that, but somebody has to be pulling on the other side. And so, because we were bigger, we got the push first so Ruth is the push. But we went in together, credit and non-credit ESL, saying “We need this faculty person. We need this leadership.”

The following year, I went in with a credit counselor to advocate for the pull faculty to say “Now we work together.” It was a tremendous message to the college because just like you talk to the adult school/community college, believe it or not within the community college there can be some – yeah I think so, there can be some turf first issues in just about non-credit/credit, so when a department comes in united, and says “This is how we can help you for the students” it was a really different message.

Then Ruth’s role was really to meet regularly with the credit faculty and work on our curriculum, to make our curriculum make sense to our students. And she’ll talk more about that. We piloted a set – we couldn’t do anything about changing the test. There’s always going to be, right now, the credit program wants to use Compass ESL, we need to use CASAS, we couldn’t change that. But we did a dual assessment so all of level Four through Seven we tested using the credit CompassESL at the end of the nine- week term. This gave us assurance that our Level Seven students that completed could actually go to the next level with assurance. We had that score comparison. It also helped us this way, sometimes students are going to one of the campuses saying “I want an ESL class” and they test and they’re too low. So instead of telling that student, “You’ve got to get into your car and you’ve got to drive ten miles down the road, and do another assessment,” and you know the normal thing… we have their test scores, we’ve already done the comparison, we just put them up in a level. “Welcome to Mira Costa College. We’re just going to be at a different campus. We’re going to help you here and then we’re going to move you over there.”

So that was a really important piece, if you have those, to do that. We had a credit faculty member who visited regularly and now, Ruth, you’re going to talk about curriculum.

RUTH GAY: So we’ve heard a lot about great ideas this morning and this afternoon also. Talking about curriculum, I’m going to sort of show you what the Level Seven class look like. It’s kind of the practical side of a lot of what we’ve heard this morning. First, there’s a focus on academic study skills. And that’s with preparing the students for college and that includes study skills, like note-taking skills, and that can be done-- I’m sure each instructor does not-taking skills differently, in their own way. I’ve done it where I would present the students with a note-taking sheet that has blanks where they have to fill in the information based on what they’re hearing whether it’s lecture. I’ve also used it as a revision tool, where if it were reviewing a point, let’s say a grammar point that the students already know, I would give it to them first and let them fill in the information that they already know. And then I do my class and they see just how much they may remember based on what they may have studied in a different level. I also reinforce the importance of those note-taking skills by sometimes allowing them to use those notes on tests. So here they see if they took these great notes, they probably will do really well on the test.

So, practicing skills like that: note-taking, reading and writing, we heard earlier how those two should go together. I think it makes sense because if we’re talking about reading and talking about identifying the main idea, it’s really easy to link the main idea to show how it’s connected to a proper sentence in a paragraph, or supporting detail is connected to supporting sentences and your concluding sentence, and so on. Also, with reading skills we talk about learning how to make inferences, we talk about vocabulary, the importance of how to guess the meaning of a word in context. ESL students have that little electronic dictionary that’s very much their friend. But we try to pull them away from that as much as possible. We say, OK, look at the entire sentence, we look at a paragraph and see if you can guess the meaning before you go to your electronic dictionary. So focus on those types of academic skills, homework, time management.There was a lot about self management, also time management. Those skills are important not just for school, just in life in general. Teaching something like this we try to have that built in to our Level Seven class, Teaching something like that helps them if they do want to go on and continue but also helps the ones who may say well I want to be able to work with my kids homework. I want to be able to talk to my kid’s teachers.They need to have these skills also.
The next point is EL Civics. At Level Seven we do the education unit and this is tied in with looking at a college schedule. Here we also try to use the college schedule as text. We give each student a college schedule and they can look at it. They learn how to read it. They learn how to choose a course. They practice speaking to a counselor, that is done…Sylvia mentioned that our terms are nine-week terms. That’s usually done at the term that’s closest to the end of the credit semester, so at the end of that particular nine weeks, if a student has done the placement test, they can go directly to a credit class. With this particular EL Civics unit, also, in Level Seven, it is tied into a class project that we are working on, where students are writing, creating a flyer about themselves and in this flyer they do three main paragraphs: one paragraph talks about their goals. We’ve heard a lot about goals.The second paragraph talks specifically about their career, a particular career that they’re interested in. At that point, we bring in some great resources. We have a librarian who is a great resource, and he comes in class and he shows the students how to find information about specific careers using a library database. This is also getting them started with research, so they’re doing a tiny bit of research on career and using that information to a second paragraph to flyer and then the last paragraph talks about the educational path to get to that career. So they write about that classes that they need to take, probably how many units they will need to complete this particular career, this certificate, and they create this flyer with their picture on it and at the end of the term, they have a very clear idea of where they want to go and possibly of how to get there.