• Reading
  
• Writing
  
• Mathematics below college level
  
• Student support services, testing and placement, tutoring, and adaptive services
  
• Non-teaching support services that support student success.

Unfortunately developmental education continues to be a major part of the "cooling out process," meaning students who start at the lowest levels of developmental education curricula are less likely to complete even a certificate or Applied Associate's degree, let alone an Associate degree or transfer to a four-year institution. However, much has improved over the last twenty years since the "cooling out" notion was advanced by Burton Clark (1960), partly because developmental education has enhanced its professional and curricular development.

Today, we know that successful developmental education programs

• are context-specific and highly valued by the learning community,
  
• are centrally structured and well coordinated with the organization,
  
• use instructors committed to the students and the field,
  
• provide multilevel curricula with credit options and exit criteria,
  
• ensure the integration of a variety of instructional methods,
  
• integrate learning and personal development strategies and services, and
  
• employ an evaluation system focused on outcomes as well as continuous program improvement (McCabe & Day, 1998, p. 22).

Create Learning Communities Among Developmental Faculty

Faculty in other cultures, such as Japan, meet at the school level to develop teaching and learning curricula review, present specific lessons, and critique the lesson for improvement. They share their knowledge of teaching and learning technology. Placing the teacher in the role of both learner and researcher is integral to their success in teaching and learning mathematics and science. It is not by accident that, of the students who complete high school level education, 90% complete some calculus and high-level science.

In America, these kinds of faculty learning communities are less common. They require a great deal of institutional and faculty support. Merely creating a task force and producing a report will not engender a learning community. Faculty members need to feel safe before they expose their classroom and teaching to other faculty. A teacher's peer needs time to examine curricula in light of student needs and adult learning models, and not just discipline-specific issues.

Detailed questions have to be developed, asked and answered. For example: "How do students learn the concept of fraction most effectively?" This may seem somewhat simple: teach the appropriate algorithm and have students practice the algorithm until they do it correctly. To be taught effectively, however, the student must understand the fundamental concepts of fractions and many other related concepts. Students may do the algorithm correctly for the test but still not be able to take the idea outside the classroom for more then a few days after the test.

To enhance learning, student learning modes must be taken into account. Research on adult learning suggests that the student must be provided with an appropriate context for learning. How, where and when would the student use the concept and skills? Faculty working together can create, observe, critique, refine and improve a specific classroom set of activities focused on faculty and student outcomes.

Community college educators can no longer view teaching as a lone teacher behind closed doors with students, where grades magically appear on transcripts, and students have learned the necessary content to continue to their next course. Political forces outside the college are bringing pressure to bear on the college's functions. The issues of merit, equity, access, and workforce preparation continue to push and pull the institution in conflicting directions. By merit is meant increased accountability of which performance-based funding and statewide testing are two current examples. Equity and access, as well as compulsory placement testing, are seen in the many support services directed toward the under-prepared student. Workforce preparation continues to find funding at both the state and the national level via Tech Prep, the Workforce Investment Act, and the regular technical programs of the comprehensive community college. Within the college these issues often compete for funds, faculty, and support, yet in the best developmental education programs all three expectations are met in important and significant ways. Faculty learning communities can reinforce the college's pursuit of these objectives.

Create Contextually-based Curricula

Improvement of classroom teaching through faculty learning communities can be beneficial to adult students who learn best in contextually relevant educational settings. Isolated chunks of content delivered on a conveyor belt of discrete lectures, papers, and testing should no longer suffice. Research tells developmental educators that there must be context, content, and andralogical (adult learning) theory for adult students to succeed. Context must be provided within the immediate education setting, rather than at some later time.

How should content and context be incorporated into the classroom without creating a 'dead' curriculum? One person working alone cannot hope to fill each course with contextually relevant curricula. Faculty learning communities offer a solution to this problem by facilitating connection and integration between disciplines within the college and the local community outside the college. Context must be built into the curriculum by using the local community as a resource to provide for the special contextual needs of the college. In our local community, we have both industrial and agricultural businesses. Faculty learning communities can use Tech Prep and Workforce Development activities of the college to find and produce appropriate contextual learning problems for students. These contextual problems are not easy. In my classroom students sometimes call them "fuzzy" problems because there seems to be little directed faculty teaching occurring.

For the group to succeed, students must be given opportunities to write and plan small similar activities prior to attempting a difficult task. Students can ask other faculty to assist.

• The horticultural faculty can provide specific information about plants, soils, and other materials.
  
• Building trades and drafting faculty can provide insight into reading and interpreting an architectural drawing and materials.
  
• Speech and English faculty can provide content on communicating with local businesses and gaining appropriate information from the businesses to prepare their bid as well as how to present their bid in an appropriate format to the whole class.
  
• Business and computer information faculty could provide technology and training to help make the process less cumbersome.

Clearly, the task of the faculty is formidable. But within the framework of a faculty learning community it very possible to create contextually based curricula.

Final Thoughts

Developmental education can be the funnel to greater academic and technical learning, but it must come from a different perspective. The principles of faculty learning communities and contextually based content provide developmental education with a vehicle to change the very culture of the community college on behalf of the students. It takes a commitment not only from the college's developmental educators, but from the entire faculty, staff and administration. This commitment is evident when the college uses faculty time and resources creatively, and when the program develops into a long-term part of community college education.

Change is difficult, and it is nearly impossible without leadership from faculty in the daily act of teaching. In the words of Whitehead, "the first requisite for educational reform is the school as a unit, with ... curriculum based on its own needs and evolved by its own staff." By creating faculty learning communities among developmental education faculty, and by emphasizing contextually based learning, community colleges can offer students a better chance at obtaining the academic skills and knowledge they need for our modern society.

References

Chark, B. (1960). The 'cooling out' function in higher education. The American Journal of Sociology, LSV(6), 569-576.

McCabe, R. H., & Day, R. D., Jr. (Eds.). (1998). Developmental education: A twenty-first century social and economic imperative. Mission Viejo, CA: League for Innovation in the Community College.

Whitehead, A. N. (1929). The aims of education & other essays. New York: The Macmillan Co.