How Learning Communities Can Keep Higher Ed’s Most At-Risk Students on Track

Nicholas Coronado was the student in high school who always sat in the last row so the teacher wouldn’t call on him, and the bullies would leave him alone.

When he enrolled at San Jacinto College, he naturally gravitated toward the back. The placement test that left him clinging to the lowest rung of the remedial ladder just made him mad.

Before long, he was resenting the work and thinking about dropping out. “Why waste my time and money for a class that doesn’t count for my degree?” he asked himself. “I didn’t want to be one of those developmental students. It was embarrassing, and I was stubborn. I figured those job opportunities are going to be gone by the time I finish.”

What turned him around, Coronado said, was getting involved with a learning community that offered academic support, mentoring, and career guidance to students who struggle with basic academic skills.

Educators have long recognized that the barriers that trip up disadvantaged students are as much social and emotional as academic. Learning communities, which have been around for decades at both two- and four-year colleges, are designed to give students a sense of belonging and shared purpose along with intensive academic support. Now, as colleges seek to graduate more first-generation and underprepared students, some have found ways to make these learning communities more effective.

When done well, they offer a valuable tool for community colleges that face high dropout rates and pressure from lawmakers to eliminate remedial courses. When they fall flat, it’s often because they’ve been folded into a flurry of reforms without enough faculty training and curricular integration.

San Jacinto’s one-semester Intentional Connections program shows what’s possible when a campus commits to meeting the needs of some of the most challenging students knocking on the doors of colleges that are open to all.

For Coronado, taking three classes — in reading, writing, and study skills — with the same 20 or so classmates made him feel like he belonged in college. As he let his guard down, he got to know students who were persisting despite hardships more formidable than his — parents struggling to put food on the table, teenagers being abused by their parents, students who’d spent time in jail. If he dropped out, a classmate warned him, “you could end up at a Whataburger flipping burgers.”

A few years ago, an English instructor who saw potential in Coronado asked him to be a student ambassador for the learning community. Now, in addition to working in its study center, Coronado circulates in English classes, passing out papers and helping stumped students. He expects to graduate this spring and hopes to transfer to the University of Houston. He’d like to pursue a fine-arts degree and become an art director and maybe a part-time drone operator.

Helping the Least Prepared

Most of the debate swirling around developmental education in recent years has been over the placement of students who just miss the cutoff score for enrolling in college-level classes. The national push toward corequisite remediation reflects a widespread belief that most students could, with enough support, make it through a credit-bearing class. In a corequisite approach, students simultaneously take a remedial and a credit-bearing course in the same subject. But what about the students on the other end of the remedial scale — the ones with the most severe academic deficits? These are the students San Jacinto was worried about when it created Intentional Connections in 2011.

The least-prepared students often end up in long sequences of remedial classes that deplete their motivation and money. Many repeat the classes several times before giving up and dropping out.

In Texas, colleges are advised to place students who score below high-school level into adult basic-education classes. If the path from remedial classes to a college degree is rocky, the path from adult basic education is strewn with boulders, not the least of which is the confidence blow a high-school graduate suffers when told he or she lacks basic literacy skills.

Rebecca Goosen, associate vice chancellor for college preparatory at San Jacinto. said she fought for the Intentional Connections program as a way to keep these students on the college track. “For me, this is a moral issue,” she said. “How can I turn my back on these students?”

Instead of entering a traditional remediation sequence, students at San Jacinto are placed in a three-course community. Based on tests that measure career and noncognitive skills, they’re assigned mentors who help them map a route to a certificate or degree.

Instructors for the student-success course become their academic advisers. Students who have helped each other out during their first semester, providing rides when cars break down or sharing notes when someone’s sick, often sign up for the next semester’s classes together.

Sitting in on a class where students with high-school credentials are confounded by basic subject-verb agreement can be jarring. For their instructors, the explanations for why many are functioning below a sixth-grade level are obvious. Some were passed along by failing schools that must promote students or risk losing state funding. Others had modified workloads in high school because of learning disabilities or emotional problems that placed them in special-education classes. In both high-school and college classrooms, recent immigrants speak broken English and struggle to follow along. Others are overwhelmed with financial, work, and family problems, and some are just immature and don’t know why they’re in college.

During a recent reading class on San Jacinto’s south campus, a substitute instructor reminded students that the skills they were learning were more than just classwork: They’d need to write concisely and clearly in their jobs, whether they were writing up notes on a patient or on a car being repaired.

The day’s lesson covered the basic structure of a paragraph. The instructor showed one student how to use an index to look up a topic in his textbook and suggested that another, who had left his paper in his truck, use a binder to keep his schoolwork together.

A few students who drifted in late without their assigned work looked bored with the discussion. Finding out why they’re in college and if they’re really ready to be there is one of the goals of the Intentional Connections program.

Early in the semester, “We have a ‘come to Jesus’ meeting where I ask them bluntly, ‘Why are you here?’” said Gwendolyn Berry, who coordinates the learning communities at San Jacinto’s north campus. If she assigned the question as a writing prompt, the students would respond with what they thought she wanted to hear. She wants the honest, unfiltered truth.

It’s easy to say that students with severe literacy gaps will end up all right if they’re steered into a technical career, Berry added. But what happens when someone who wants to study air-conditioning repair or auto mechanics is handed a technical manual two inches thick that he or she can’t read, let alone understand?

‘I Feel Pretty Unstoppable’

Hayleigh Reuther missed school a lot growing up as she struggled with bipolar depression and a tumultuous home life. Raised by parents who are Jehovah’s Witnesses, “I kind of get eye-rolled when I talk about college,” said Reuther, who has a 5-year-old daughter. “According to them, I’m only supposed to be a mother and a housewife.” Her mental-health struggles compounded her insecurities.

“When I’m up, I’m motivated and I have grandiose ideas, and I want to do anything and everything,” she said. “When I’m down, I can’t sleep, can’t eat.” What helps, along with medication, is “staying around positive, like-minded people” — the kind she has found in her learning community.

She’s always had trouble with English — especially with verbs — but on her first day of class, she met two nonnative speakers she could actually help — one from Puerto Rico and another, Peru.

“Sometimes it surprises me when other people ask me for help and I tell them; it helps me understand it more,” Reuther said. Soon, she and her new friends began visiting their instructor’s office hours together after class, and from there, they’d head to the gym to work out. About five of them regularly stay in touch on Snapchat. Not wanting to let them down “helps you stay motivated and involved and coming to class.”

In the gym, they coach one another through abdominal workouts and cardio sessions. In group-study sessions, they tackle subjects and verbs. “When we’re together,” Reuther said, “I feel pretty unstoppable.”

She plans to major in life science with the goal of eventually earning a graduate degree and designing drugs for people with mood disorders.

Her friend Shade Segay, 21, moved to the United States from Peru seven years ago. In high school, “I was afraid to speak because people would make fun of my English,” she said. “I felt like I was the only one having language problems.”

She actually has plenty of company. Nearly two-thirds of public-school 12th graders scored below proficient on a reading achievement exam, according to a 2015 report by the National Assessment of Educational Progress. The average score for those classified as English-language learners was 17 percent lower than that of native speakers. And while English learners represented just 9.4 percent of all public-school students nationwide, they accounted for 15.5 percent in Texas. Segay, who works 30 hours a week as a manager at a McDonald’s franchise, aspires to become an interior designer.

Josmel Rodriguez Santiago, who wants to become a veterinarian, graduated from high school in Puerto Rico, and regularly joins Segay and Reuther for study sessions and workouts. “I met Hayleigh the first day of class. She asked me how I was doing and I said a little nervous,” he said, adding that he hopes the group will remain friends after college.

Such connections improve the chances that even if financial or family stresses force them to drop out for a while, they’ll return. Bob Sandhaas, another coordinator and instructor with San Jacinto’s learning community, said that during a Texas oil boom several years ago, he lost a student who went off to make $100 an hour digging ditches to lay pipe. “When that dried up, he came back,” Sandhaas said.

A Connection to the Campus

Learning communities like San Jacinto’s can be effective as part of a broader student-success strategy, especially for students who would otherwise end up in long sequences of remedial classes, said Bruce Vandal, senior vice president of Complete College America, a nonprofit that has aggressively promoted remedial revamps that call for eliminating nearly all prerequisite remedial courses. “These students don’t build any connection to the campus.”

He particularly likes the Accelerated Learning Program, developed by Peter Adams while Adams was teaching at the Community College of Baltimore County. The corequisite model, which has since been adopted by more than 300 campuses, places 10 writers who would otherwise be in an upper level of remedial coursework into a section of English 101 along with 10 college-ready students.

John Everett for The Chronicle

The same small group of remedial-level students who are in the college-level class are enrolled together in a companion class that meets right afterward. It is taught by the same instructor, and basically serves as a workshop to help them with the college-level work. The students bond and help one another, but because they’re enrolled in college-level work, they don’t feel stigmatized, advocates say.

Such bonds are some of the biggest benefits of learning communities, according to Joshua Wyner, executive director of the Aspen Institute’s College Excellence Program.

“Students get to know one another, and individual professors, more than they would in a typical cafeteria approach where they go to different classes Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, with different professors and different classmates,” he said. “When you see people with equally challenging lives working and going to school, it gives you a sense of what’s possible.”

Lake Area Technical Institute, in Watertown, S.D., promotes learning communities as a way to improve retention and encourage collaboration. When students apply to the program, they’re automatically placed in a cohort, Wyner said. “Everyone takes classes together. They show up at 8 in the morning and they’re done at 3.” Remedial coursework, for those who need it, is offered during lunchtime or between classes so students can stay with their group.

“All of that is built into the structure of the college,” Wyner said. “We’d call them learning communities on steroids.” The college’s graduation and transfer rate is more than 70 percent — one of the highest for two-year colleges nationwide.

Another institution that has attracted national attention for its effective learning communities is Kingsborough Community College, part of the City University of New York system. Located in the hard-to-reach Manhattan Beach section of Brooklyn, it’s up to three bus lines away for some students who, as a result, need an extra boost of motivation to continue.

Samantha Sierra, director of learning communities for first-year students, has advised colleges hoping to replicate Kingsborough’s success. Too often, she said, colleges will create a group of blocked classes for cohorts of students and call that a learning community. What’s missing, but which Kingsborough and San Jacinto incorporate, are common threads across the courses. Such integration requires close cooperation among faculty members, who are often part-time adjuncts, so that can be a challenge.

At Kingsborough, students who are learning about schizophrenia in a psychology class might be reading a novel in their linked English class by a writer who suffers from the disorder. The third class, focused on study skills and other college-transition challenges, might take them to the library, where a librarian would help them with research for both classes.

During peak times, the college has had dozens of learning communities serving hundreds of students. A study by MDRC, a social-policy research group, found long-lasting benefits for Kingsborough students who participated in learning communities, but only shorter-term boosts for those enrolled at five other colleges it studied.

The intense integration of the curriculum researchers found at Kingsborough requires significant faculty training and strong buy-in from the top — factors that aren’t always found in other programs.

Measurable Results

Since its inception eight years ago, San Jacinto has also seen positive results from its learning-communities program.

Eighty-six percent of those enrolled in the program in the fall or 2017 and the spring of 2018 were taking classes the following semester, and about half of them are still enrolled this semester. That’s a promising retention rate, given where they start out. Even though most are 18- to 24-year-olds, and all have either high-school degrees or GEDs, in placement tests, they generally score at or below the level of the lowest remedial classes. From there, the odds of climbing into credit-bearing classes are razor thin.

Coronado, the San Jacinto student, has come a long way from the angry, insecure person who tried to disappear in the back row five years ago.

Along the way, he thought about becoming a Marine sniper but decided that would require too much math. He might have become a cop or a late-night radio host. But he always carries a sketchbook with him, and he kept coming back to his love of art. Art director struck him as an interesting job that would allow him to live comfortably, especially if he had a side gig operating drones — the kind that located missing people when Hurricane Harvey devastated Houston.

Wearing a black vest and black jeans, white button-down shirt and a bowler hat, Coronado was the picture of cool confidence on a recent afternoon as he fielded questions from first-year students in the learning community’s study center and lounge. He reassured one who was worried about an assignment and escorted another to a tutoring session.

When he was in their shoes, “I thought I wasn’t going to make it, but I had people who had my back,” Coronado said. “Look where I am now — I’m almost done.” The way he sees it, “In high school, it’s every man for himself. In college, it’s one happy family.”

Jacquelyn Elias contributed to this report.