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.

Maryland’s CTE is part of a larger alignment plan, with dual enrollment options offered at community colleges.  That’s why AACC began using the Significant Discussions Guide. Kathleen M. Beauman, long-time applied-learning advocate and director, Business Education Partnerships, Division for Learning, was originally hired by Anne Arundel to work on “tech prep” education, connecting career and college pathways.  The connection between CTE and liberal education is no mystery to Kathy.  She says, “It’s all about liberal education in the twenty-first century. These programs can demystify learning for all students and make learning lively and relevant, despite the heavy influence of high-stakes testing.”

Kathy tells a story of an “ah ha” moment some years back, when she first started working on alignment programs at Anne Arundel in the 1990s.  A group of angry school leaders in the county responded to her invitation to a meeting. They identified a problem.  The county high school students were doing poorly on the college’s examination for computer basics.  Many were failing.  Ensuing discussion brought some facts to light.  First, the college had changed the course textbook three or four times, without telling the high schools.  Worse, the test bank of questions contained numerous items about punch cards.  Punch cards!  In the 1990s!  No wonder students were having trouble with that test.

The realization motivated Kathy in her new work as the liaison between the two systems.  She could see why her work mattered. She eventually found her way to the College and Career Transitions Initiative (CCTI, 2002-2008; see my blog post of June 6, 2011). Through the CCTI project Kathy began to get a national perspective on alignment.  Among best outcomes of the project was a new advising practice.  Anne Arundel hired “transition advisors” to work on-site in county high schools.

Picking up the Significant Discussions Guide, Kathy found further help to redesign program articulation with partner high schools and to improve leadership for the shared work.  Traditionally, the college had controlled decisions on credits accepted from schools. The Guide and connections with other colleges in CCTI suggested a different approach.  AACC began to use the Sinclair Community College model for proficiency assessment. That model worked with shared learning outcomes and expectations for performance.  To reach agreement, the college and schools organized a pilot project for professional development, involving high school and college faculty and staff.  The meetings began with a gap analysis; participants then worked together to design assessments and set policies and procedures for awarding credit.  This kind of work requires frequent communication and commitment to a sustained relationship. AACC is in the process of reformatting existing articulation agreements into a proficiency framework through their work with Anne Arundel County Public Schools.

The assessment tools include rubrics and portfolios. For example, a high school student may seek proficiency credit in architecture and interior design by submitting an original portfolio of work, which is assessed according to a rubric.  The rubric addresses quality, accuracy, complexity, and completeness of the drawings.  For each of these components of the student work, performance-level descriptions address such outcomes as quantitative reasoning, clarity of notations, and goals of complexity. No doubt about it, these outcomes mirror AAC&U’s LEAP essential learning outcomes.

Looking at the program materials from AACC, I’m struck by their integrity.  There is no line separating career-focused activity from liberal education.  The two are one.  From this vantage point, I have trouble understanding why policy makers persist in approaching vocational education as if it were the polar opposite of what one would do within the liberal arts. The more I explore what is happening on the ground when schools, colleges, and universities collaborate on behalf of the future workforce and the future well-being of locales, the more starkly false that dichotomy appears to be.  The best and most innovative alignment work is thoroughly integrative—career and technical and liberal education, including the liberal arts, coming together to advance essential learning outcomes.  It has been refreshing and affirmative to meet people like Kathy Beauman all over the country who brighten when I say career and technical education is part of liberal education.  Of course, they say, how could it be anything else?

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.

Maricopa decided to use Significant Discussions to guide the process as it brought people to the table.  Rick Hansen, associate director of the Center for Workforce Development and head of the project at Maricopa, was surprised to discover that such a meeting had never occurred before.  In April 2010, it finally did.

Maricopa aims high.  They are intentional in providing to all students high-impact educational experiences through a variety of initiatives, including an Engineering Learning Community. They ground intellectual and practical skills in hands-on activity.  They emphasize the practice of critical thinking. They foster capacity for personal and social responsibility.

MCCD has developed their more engaged and practical curriculum quite intentionally, assessing students’ needs as they enter college and attending to the evolving demands of the workforce. Hansen observes, “The jobs of the future are not labor intensive, they are brain intensive. Technicians and engineers no longer wire circuits or assemble a chip from scratch; they use software to run modern equipment.”  A thirty-year-old curriculum in electrical wiring simply cannot address digital circuitry design, much less anticipate change. Technical skills alone are insufficient.  Hence the attention to critical thinking and to personal development for individuals who will work in an increasingly diverse and globally connected world.

It was obvious, Hansen says, that MCCD needed conversations across sectors. In April 2010 MCCD hosted a meeting to review the draft of the Significant Discussions guide.  The participants believed, modestly enough, that they could use the guide to help P-16 educators facilitate curriculum alignment.  The result of these conversations, they imagined, would be a smoother and more seamless transition from school to college to university. Participants in the review session included administrators and faculty from local high schools, from community colleges, and from a four-year university. Also in attendance were representatives from industry.

The review session provided valuable feedback on the Significant Discussions guide. It also yielded some surprises. The most revealing comment came from a key representative from industry. An ardent advocate for education, he remarked that in all his years of engagement with secondary and post-secondary systems in Arizona, this was the first time he had seen them in the same room at the same time. Another surprise: when all sectors were at the table, curricular details emerged in unforeseen ways.  Curricular shortfalls appeared where no one expected.  People around the table realized that they need to start with discussion to find common ground and then proceed to alignment.  It was critical to have employers at the table, and insufficient to have only P-12 and post-secondary educators talking to each other without wider community and employer involvement.

MCCD is pleased to report that a second, new NSF grant will apply the lessons of that April 2010 discussion. They now know how to do a realistic gap analysis. They recognize the gaps among groups of educators and employers.

MCCD and partners are now using summer faculty externships in labs of emerging tech firms.  They include both secondary and post-secondary faculty in the externships.  They figured out how to use learning modules to connect school, college, university, and work.  Hansen observes that in the first NSF grant, they used externships not to look forward but to catch up.  The new grant is looking ahead to working up to speed with emerging technology.  They are thinking of it as a future-edge process that can be sustainable.  The future-edge process imagines the curriculum as a set of aligned learning outcomes that evolve over time.  That kind of curriculum will stay in sync, and it will serve the community. In this sense, workforce education is a form of civic responsibility, led by the community college.

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.

The Significant Discussions Guide is a useful tool, and it offers resources and models that are convergent with many activities now being created by individuals and collaboratives participating in LEAP. The guide is particularly helpful to those who want to take the leap into applied learning and alignment as part of reinventing liberal education for the twenty-first century.

The Significant Discussions Guide grew from a project called the College and Career Transitions Initiative (CCTI, 2002-2008)—a partnership for alignment joined by fifteen community colleges. CCTI was supported by the United States Department of Education Office of Vocational and Adult Education; it addressed the goals of the Carl D. Perkins Career and Technical Education Improvement Act of 2006. The Perkins Act, for those unfamiliar with it, requires that secondary, postsecondary, and business partners collaborate to develop programs of study in career and technical education as a way to engage larger numbers of students and keep them in school and college. The League for Innovation in the Community College administered the CCTI.  For those new to the League, it is an international organization dedicated to the renewal and success of two-year institutions. In the United States, such institutions serve nearly half the undergraduate population. Both career and technical educators and liberal arts community college educators are strong proponents of integrative and applied learning and essential learning outcomes, including the LEAP areas of knowledge, skills, and personal and social responsibility. Their partnership with educators at four-year institutions will enable us collectively to aim higher and to be more systemically collaborative than ever before.

Among the discoveries of CCTI, however, was something unfortunately familiar: it is difficult to make alignment happen on the ground. As we know, few incentives exist for collaboration across educational sectors, few learning-centered curricular tools exist, and few well-illuminated signposts point the direction. Yet without collaboration for learning, the doors to college are going to remain closed to large numbers of poor and minority students—the very students on whom our future depends. Facing this challenge, the League decided to commission a handbook. It turned to MetLife Foundation for support and invited nine of the CCTI partner colleges to contribute materials, which are now published as the Significant Discussions Guide.

Why is the Significant Discussions Guide promising to those of us engaged in transformational change through LEAP? The answer lies in its approach to applied knowledge and integrated learning. The guide shows how to cross difficult boundaries for the benefit of student learning.  It is full of practical, actionable advice and tools. We at AAC&U have used the guide’s graphic model for collaboration as a way to frame the activities of the LEAP States initiative. We have posted the materials as a resource to the community colleges involved in our new sponsored project Developing a Community College Student Roadmap (a project made possible by MetLife Foundation; www.aacu.org/roadmap). We see potential in a community college-centered approach to alignment and want to share the best work from the guide.

My hunch is that the insights garnered from CCTI and described in the Significant Discussions Guide have much to say to an audience of advocates for liberal education. Some of the strongest advocacy I have heard of late for liberal education has come from career and technical educators at two-year colleges who are working in partnership with schools. Examples will follow in future posts in this series.

With thanks to Laurance J. Warford and Marsha VanNahmen. Warford is principal investigator, Significant Discussions project, and senior workforce consultant, League for Innovation in the Community College. He served as project director, College and Career Transitions Initiative. VanNahmen is project assistant, Significant Discussions, and interim director, Center for Teaching & Learning, Indiana University-Purdue University Columbus.

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?

To move forward, college and high school faculty ought to work together much more than they do now. The effort could use more grassroots activity. Evolving work on K-12 standards and assessments could be woven into the now active work on learning outcomes in colleges and universities. We see that potential within the Common Core State Standards and the two multi-state consortia now developing means to assess college and career readiness for school graduates. The consortia, Smarter Balanced and the Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers (PARCC), include development of summative tests, but these projects also place a heavy emphasis on examining the work of students in a formative process encompassing many of the components of portfolios. The attention to student work means assessment of learning may be grounded in the classroom.

At this moment, we have within grasp an opportunity to connect and bridge ourselves as faculty, as educators, in localities, regions, and states. We can join in work to design and practice assessment that is rooted in the classroom, attentive to student work and performance, connected to the curriculum, portable across the difficult terrain between grades 12 and 13, feeding useful data and information back to faculty on both sides.

Those of us who have been both school teachers and college faculty can find ways to facilitate this work. P-16 or P-20 councils have soldiered on over the years. Perhaps their moment has come. Alignment is happening on the ground when faculty come together to discuss student work.
Research conducted to support this claim is finding continuous or continual activity for school-college partnership in California, Florida, Kentucky, Massachusetts, New York, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Texas, Virginia, Washington State—to mention but a few easily identified examples. The activities are more numerous and varied than we can describe here, but a few examples make the point. The National Science Foundation Math and Science Partnership Program has been supporting P-20 partnerships since 2002. Achieve’s American Diploma Project is actively under way in 35 states. A promising initiative sponsored by the League for Innovation in Community Colleges, titled Significant Discussions, offers a blueprint and tools for creating collaboration anchored in community colleges and reaching back to schools and ahead to four-year institutions (see http://www.league.org/league/projects/Significant_Discussions/index.cfm).

Relationships prompted by these projects do not dissolve as quickly as funding, in its two- or three-year cycles, may disappear. The human side of the work, the satisfaction and reward of collective endeavor for the benefit of all students, definitely endures. Now is an especially good time to build durable structures and pathways on this foundation.

What now is different in higher education that makes such an endeavor imaginable? Faculty members are taking more seriously the challenges of developing and assessing learning outcomes. The Association of American Colleges & Universities’ 2009 member survey found that about 80% of campuses have identified learning outcomes for their students. Nearly all colleges and universities are working to improve their assessment of those outcomes. It is possible to align school and college benchmark expectations and to share assessments—and to attract faculty use and engagement of them, especially by general education leaders. Many willing partners on college campuses can now enter a conversation about learning outcomes and assessments and find common ground with colleagues in schools.

Think of this: we no longer need to rely only on high-stakes standardized tests to assess learning and set expectations for the smooth transition between school and college. If we share expectations—including learning goals or outcomes and benchmarks for achievement of them–and document performance through valid and reliable assessment, we can embed assessments in the curriculum in ways that will improve learning at the same time as providing data about student progress. We can share assignments and assessments electronically, through e-portfolios. We have the means to work together. AAC&U will explore these means in a series of upcoming blog posts. Stay tuned.

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.

We will also use this blog to draw attention to important items in the news you may have missed—the good, the bad, the ugly, the funny, the sad—but especially those news items that college administrators and faculty members need to know about in order to ensure that today’s college education provides every student the opportunity to learn what they need to know to thrive in today’s world.

About LEAP

The “position” of this blog and its contributors is very clear.  The LEAP initiative and this blog are both designed to champion the value of a liberal education—for individual students and for a nation dependent on economic creativity and democratic vitality. LEAP focuses campus practice on fostering essential learning outcomes for all students, whatever their chosen field of study.  LEAP seeks to engage the public with core questions about what really matters in college, to give students a compass to guide their learning, and to make these essential learning outcomes the preferred framework for educational excellence, assessment of learning, and new alignments between school and college.

For the purposes of this blog, we use the term “liberal education” in the following way:  liberal education is a philosophy of education that empowers individuals with core knowledge and transferable skills and cultivates social responsibility and a strong sense of ethics and values. Characterized by challenging encounters with important issues, a liberal education prepares graduates both for socially valued work and for civic leadership in their society. It usually includes a general education curriculum that provides broad exposure to multiple disciplines and ways of knowing, along with more in-depth study in at least one field or area of concentration.

While this is what we mean by “liberal education,” we understand that many people on and off our college campuses use the term in different ways.  We welcome comments on all the blog postings and look forward to a respectful but lively dialogue about national debates and issues of importance to our shared future—and the future of each and every college student or aspiring college student.

Welcome to the liberal.education nation LEAP Blog.