Posts Tagged ‘alignment’
My last posting in my series on school-college alignment described how the Maricopa Colleges have been using the Significant Discussions Guide to help them align learning from school to college to university. The Significant Discussions project, as I’ve written in previous posts, aims to improve student success by promoting collaboration on curriculum alignment among secondary schools, community colleges, universities, and employers. Anne Arundel Community College (AACC), in Maryland, has been using the Guide in their own way with high schools in their county. This local work is part of a larger career and technology education (CTE) program for high schools throughout the state.
Maryland, I discover, is a national leader in CTE. The state has merged secondary vocational and college preparatory programs. Instead of the two traditional tracks, Maryland has embedded CTE within the overall high school program. If you choose a career cluster, what you get is an infusion of applied learning, for example, in arts, media, and communication, starting in tenth grade. The goal is to develop and reinforce the more traditionally academic knowledge, skills, and abilities through application and hands-on activity in real-world settings. CTE is particularly attractive to students who are not thriving in the high-stakes testing regimen of No Child Left Behind. This approach clearly aligns with the emerging blended model of liberal education advanced in the LEAP initiative.
How do community colleges serve as centers advancing the education and wellbeing of a region? Insights garnered from Significant Discussions in practice have much to tell. The Significant Discussions project, as I’ve written in previous posts, aims to improve student success by promoting collaboration on curriculum alignment among secondary schools, community colleges, universities, and employers. Let’s start with the Maricopa Community College District (MCCD)—ten community colleges and two skills centers in the Phoenix, Arizona, area. Leaders at Maricopa have launched a project using the Significant Discussions guide, and they report promising results.
Maricopa got into Significant Discussions through a National Science Foundation (NSF) grant program. The program intends to strengthen connections between higher education and schools, and to accomplish that objective by giving priority to emerging knowledge in technology education in a region. In the greater Phoenix region, the economy will increasingly depend on technology, including emerging high tech fields such as bioscience, sustainability, and solar energy. It’s easy to see that outreach to future students in STEM is critical to the wellbeing of Phoenix, and that a diverse community of workers there is eager for employment. Many more applied fields are likely to emerge; the workforce needs to be ready to move and adapt. Attention now to secondary, community college, university, and industry connections will pay off in regional development well into the future. This concept is elegant and seemingly obvious. But it is difficult to enact on the ground.
A few weeks ago, I began exploring school-to-college alignment in a new series of blog postings. What does purposeful work on school-to-college alignment mean and what can it do for student learning? How can work in the Liberal Education and America’s Promise (LEAP) campaign also advance alignment efforts? What does it mean to invoke alignment and focus attention on students’ own work? Educators in both the secondary and postsecondary sectors now have the means to work together on learning-centered alignment—K-16, P-16, P-20—beyond any opportunity we have had before. The urgency that we do so has never been greater.
Why is it important that community colleges are innovatively engaged in alignment? They represent a crucial sector in the current national debate about education, the sector of higher education most critical in my view to the future well-being of our democracy. Centering attention on community colleges, we can see the achievement and promise of alignment that reaches from community colleges back to schools and onward to four-year institutions. To learn about a community college-centered approach to alignment, I strongly recommend Significant Discussions: A Guide for Secondary and Postsecondary Curriculum Alignment, www.league.org/significantdiscussions.
By Susan Albertine, with Terry Rhodes, AAC&U vice president for Curriculum, Quality, and Assessment, and Nevin C. Brown, senior fellow, Siena Italian Studies and former senior fellow for post-secondary initiatives, Achieve Inc.
Spring is nearly here—and as we near this transition from one season to the next, it seems like a good time to address another key transition point in many people’s lives along the educational pathway from school to college—the transition between grades 12 and 13.
The current development of a set of Common Core Standards for K-12 education (adopted by 43 states and territories) presents those of us in higher education with an opportunity not to be missed. The Common Core is a step forward. It is aspirational, detailed, complex, and explicit. Its expectations for student performance extend beyond one-dimensional approaches to skills or content. It may not do all that many of us in post-secondary education would like to see (e.g. covering a fuller scope of outcomes in the sciences, humanities, or the arts). Yet it reaches for higher levels of proficiency than before for all students in English, language arts, communication, and quantitative reasoning. Unfortunately, the Common Core has yet to prompt widespread post-secondary minding and engagement. Can we change that pattern and bring about more connected work with schools on the ground?
This is the first posting to a new multi-authored blog launched by the Association of American Colleges and Universities as part of its national initiative, Liberal Education and America’s Promise (LEAP): Excellence for Everyone as a Nation Goes to College. This blog will be a platform for discussion about the future of college learning—why the outcomes of a liberal education are so important in today’s world and how those within and outside of higher education understand these outcomes and the idea of a “liberal education.”
We will try to shine a spotlight on what a liberal education is in today’s colleges and universities, but also the ways that the term “liberal education” is still misunderstood—even by many students and their own college and high school teachers. Read the rest of this entry »
