Compassion Coalition and Pellissippi State

A few years ago, my dean approached me about serving as the Student Success Coordinator for Pellissippi's English Department.  The Student Success Program allows faculty members to send the names of struggling students to a Coordinator, who can then connect these students to resources that might help them navigate whatever difficulty they have encountered.   My work in this capacity has given me the opportunity to learn a great deal about the PSCC student body.

Pellissippi State is an open admission institution, which means anyone with a high school diploma or GED will be accepted.  This fall, our total enrollment is approximately 10,000,students spread over five site campuses located at Hardin Valley, Magnolia Avenue, Division Street, Strawberry Plains, and Blount County.  As you can imagine, the students who make up this number represent a wide cross-section of the greater Knox area community:

* some are fresh out of high school and some are returning to college after time in the military or workforce; 

* some are focused solely on schoolwork, and others work up to 60 hours/week while in school;

* some live at home, some are self-supporting;

* some are in a partnership or marriage, and some are parenting one or more children;

* some students’ have parents or siblings familiar with the expectations of college level work, and others are the first in their families to enroll in college; 

* some students come from affluence, others are barely getting by financially;

*  some have ACT scores which indicate high academic preparedness; others—many—are in need of courses that will prepare them for college-level work.

By providing any high school graduate with an opportunity to get a college education, Pellissippi and other such schools are meeting a significant need for our community.  And our students have tremendous promise and potential.  As I tell them at the end of each semester—whether they recognize it or not, every one of them bears the loving fingerprints of a God who has created them with unique gifts and abilities that they can offer to their families, friends, coworkers, and communities.

However, like each one of us here today, these students are a mixture of abundance and lack.  Many of our students—so full of potential—also come to us as “the least of these,” which creates challenges for them as they pursue their academic goals.

Some of those challenges stem from insufficient economic resources.  Specifically, last year at Pellissippi, just under 40% of our students received the Pell grant, which is need based financial aid.  This year, that number has increased to just over 46%.  That means 4300 Pellissippi students qualify for need based aid.  In addition, 3300 students fall into the “zero expected family contribution” category.  This number is up from last year’s 25%.  In addition, an estimated 18 students have faced homelessness during the Fall 2014 semester. Clearly, a significant number of PSCC students face real economic hardships.

Although many of our students' difficulties stem from low economic resources, their struggles are also connected with other kinds of deficits including 

* poor academic preparation (going by ACT scores, in 2013, only 21% of Knox County high school graduates met all four College Readiness Benchmarks.  This means that 79% of our high school graduates were not fully prepared for college level work.);

* inadequate connection with friends and family members willing and available to provide relational and practical support;  

* still-developing communication and interpersonal skills that are so vital for interacting with members of a college community and in the workplace;

* an incomplete understanding of the time and energy it takes to complete college level work.

And this is where our partnership with Compassion Coalition comes into the conversation.

Through a series of events that I couldn’t have orchestrated if I’d tried (which, at least to me, looks suspiciously like God’s hand) I was asked by a colleague to meet with Compassion Coalition about strengthening the partnership between CC and Pellissippi.  This makes sense for two important reasons:

1).  Pellissippi has a growing Service Learning program, which allows students to earn college credit while volunteering for existing organizations in our community. Because Compassion Coalition has its finger on the pulse of justice and compassion ministries that already exist in our community, it is an excellent place for our Service-Learning students to locate organizations for whom they would like to volunteer.  This not only allows students to give their time to Christ-centered organizations, but also increases the chance that they will encounter and be impacted—perhaps in a life-changing way-- by the volunteers who are living the Christ-life day in and day out.

2).  As I mentioned earlier, a significant number of Pellissippi students find themselves needing the kinds of services Compassion Coalition partners provide. And Pellissippi is in the process of becoming a “hub” for Compassion Coalition, so that we can more effectively connect our students with needs to the appropriate Compassion Coalition resources. In order to make this a possibility, Compassion Coalition graciously shared two of its staff—Jessica Bocangel and Gina Whitmore—with a group of faculty and staff eager to attend a Bridges Out of Poverty workshop to our campus in June.  The materials were extremely well-received by those who attended—so much so that our college’s president caught wind of it and mentioned it to the entire faculty at our fall in-service gathering.  Now the college will offer the training to a larger number of faculty and staff in the next month or two, and also in the works is a semester-long reading group in which faculty members can delve more deeply into the process of understanding and better equipping our student population.  Another outcome from the workshop that Compassion Coalition provided is this:  A few weeks after the training, Jessica Bocangel told me about Faith Gilley, a Compassion Coalition volunteer who has co-facilitated three Getting Ahead classes in the Knoxville community.  Faith—a wife and mother—had decided to return to college as a non-traditional student, and she is now co-facilitating the college version of the Getting Ahead materials.  The college has plans to offer additional sections of this same course in the spring semester.

The very fact that Pellissippi State—a public community college—is open to such a partnership is, at the least remarkable, and from my perspective far more spiritually significant. 

By coming alongside Pellissippi’s students, faculty, and staff in meaningful, redemptive ways, , Compassion Coalition looks an awful lot like Christ — the word that became flesh and blood and moved into the neighborhood that is Pellissippi State.  I think I speak for many of us when I say how encouraged and excited we are by Compassion Coalition’s presence in our community.  I hope you are as well.

bargain education

Below is a paragraph from a student's discussion of why we crave technology.

Smartphones give students the ability to accomplish basic skills.  When texting or writing an online post, if there is a word that is not spelled correctly, auto correct helps spell the word out right.  Also, there are voice activated translators that help sound out words.  The reason we have "'allow me'' databases, is "Because to misspell is human; to have no idea of correct spelling is to be semiliterate" (Gelernter).  When smart phones correct every misspelled word, it is hard to learn commonly missed mistakes.  Students regularly rely on spell check that smartphones provide.  They like it because it is a shortcut to learning the simple words and makes life easier.  Basic skills are important abilities to learn, but having shortcuts for spelling and grammar is convenience smartphones provide.

This paper prompts two observations:

The cost for an app to correct errors in writing and pronunciation is free.

But what of the literacy and intellectual debt being mounted by education's heavy reliance on these popular "helps"?
 

E is for . . . .

Recently, I opened a discussion about the difficulties that are often inherent in school assignments such as science projects and research papers.  I ended the post with a question:

If requiring students to complete challenging projects (like a research paper) creates so much misery, why are we still doing it?

Today, an observation:  In many cases, educators aren’t requiring such projects anymore. 

Why?  Because so many students describe these kinds of assignments with words like this:

Time-consuming

Inconvenient

Challenging

Unpleasant

Uninteresting

Unnecessary

Perhaps one word builds upon another in this way:

Such projects are time-consuming, 
which makes them inconvenient.

This inconvenience creates a challenge,

which causes students to experience a certain amount of unpleasantness.

Unpleasantness causes students to grow uninterested.

And if students are uninterested,

such assignments must be, by definition, unnecessary.

In short, such projects aren’t engaging.

And, because the world of education has put such an emphasis on creating classwork which engages our students, teachers are working from a new set of criteria.  If an assignment is to be considered engaging, it must at least minimize--or, better yet, complete avoid--being labeled with one or more of the above-mentioned traits.

Yet as I work to meet this new set of criteria, a troubling question keeps emerging: 

Despite (and perhaps as a result of) all of our efforts,

are educators undermining the very skills we claim to be cultivating?

I hope not,
but I'm afraid so.

In our efforts to engage our students,
we are unintentionally but actively 
enabling their sense of entitlement
rather than encouraging their sense of efficacy.

Catching the Apple

For a few semesters now, I’ve taught a course known as College Success, a class that equips students with the skills and information they need to achieve their academic goals.  Our catalog describes it this way:  “A course designed to empower students to reach their educational, career and life goals. This class introduces students to a wide range of strategies, techniques and self-management tools commonly recognized to lead to success.” 

This semester, we started by reviewing a wide range of study skills: test-taking strategies; memorization methods; time management skills; reading comprehension and retention; note-taking practices; and even classroom civility, which involves effective communication. 

One day I brought a plastic apple to class, and the students and I played catch with it for a few minutes. While tossing it around, we discussed the two primary roles in any communication exchange:  the sender, who conveys information, and the receiver who, well, receives it. Then I made what's probably an obvious comparison:

“Communication is like our game of catch: The one tossing is the sender, the apple is the information, and the student catching it is the receiver."

"Sometimes, a student tosses the apple, and it's the teacher's task to catch it.  Other times, students are the ones catching the apple.  And during class, the apple is the subject matter being covered."

We then talked about the many kinds of “apples” students encounter during their college courses, and the variety of ways in which the apples will be "tossed" — in the form of assignments, lectures, videos, classroom discussions, and handouts, to name a few.

Depending on a student’s preferred learning style, some information is easier to “catch” than others.  A visual learner watching a video, for example, often engages instinctively with that method of delivery, while an auditory learner may prefer a lecture.

What happens, though, when the apple is tossed in a way that makes it a little more difficult to catch?  What happens when the instructor’s delivery, or perhaps the medium in which the subject matter is conveyed (like via a reading assignment, or through a Power Point lecture) doesn’t align with the student’s preferred learning style?

In other words, if the apple is tossed in a way that makes it a little tougher for a student to catch, what then?

Our education system has done a less-than-admirable job of equipping students with the skills they need to catch the more challenging "tosses" they will encounter in the classroom.

In fact, many of today’s students seem to feel that if the apple is tossed in a way they don’t prefer, or if it’s a little difficult to catch, the teacher — not the student — needs to adjust.  And it's our educational system that has reinforced this response.

I'll be the first to say that educators should present subject matter using strategies that can connect with a variety of learning styles.  When we “send” information, we need to consider our methods carefully and take our students into account.

And just about everyone agrees:  it’s a great feeling when the toss makes it easy for students to grasp the information being conveyed.  Teachers like it, students love it, and the world of education calls it “effective student engagement.” 

But what about when the delivery is on the challenging side?  What if the apple is tossed in a fashion that makes it a little tougher to catch?  The world of education often views this kind of experience as “ineffective.”  And what's the remedy?  The teacher is urged to toss the apple in a way that makes it easier for students to catch.  

This is problematic in at least a few ways.

First, when we demand that teachers always make the toss easier for students to catch, we are leading students to believe that the only information worth knowing is the kind that is easily understood.  And we're cultivating their expectation that their employers — not to mention everyone else in their lives — will accommodate their preferred learning styles. 

This sounds to me like we’re telling our students a lie about the world, not to mention setting them up for disappointment and frustration at best, and maybe even outright failure.

What’s more important, though, is this:

When we teach our students to expect the information apple to be tossed in a way that is easy for them to catch, we're telling them that it's not really important for them to learn how to learn.

We're also sending the clear message that students just aren’t capable of doing the hard work required to make different kinds of catches.  

We aren't just lying to our students about what to expect from the world.  

We're lying to them about the importance of learning.

What troubles me the most, though, is this:  
We are lying to students about what they can expect from themselves.

Ideally, every student’s goal should be this: to learn to do whatever it takes to get hold of the apple. 

Students don’t always like to hear this.

Neither do some parents.
It complicates the world of education in significant ways.

But it's worth it.  If you don't believe me, maybe you'll listen to Google's Laszlo Bock, who's quoted in a recent issue of New York Times as saying this: when Google considers potential employees, "the No. 1 thing we look for is general cognitive ability, and it's not IQ. . . . It's the ability to process on the fly.  It's the ability to pull together disparate bits of information."

In short, "It's learning ability."  

In the end, a good education isn't one that settles for tossing the apple of information in ways students prefer.  A truly valuable education is one that teaches students how to catch all kinds of tosses. 

Learning this skill makes everyone uncomfortable sometimes.  It requires what a colleague of mine refers to as “productive struggle.” 

More on that soon.