This conference kick-off workshop will help colleges turn things around for students who have failed. Instead of sending out dismissal letters, learn how to challenge these students to prove they want to continue by obtaining an “A” in a course titled Achieving Academic Success. Click to learn more!

Research shows that increasing numbers of students who enter college are at risk of failing to succeed academically or dropping out of college. There area a variety of factors many college students are at risk of academic failure due to a variety of personal, background and environmental factors that negatively impact their educational journey. There are twenty high risk factors that impact their persistence and success. Understanding these risk factors benefits educators in helping students acquire the learning skills that will enable them to become proficient in addressing them and achieving academic success. In this interactive session, participants will identify key risk factors that they experience in their campus. Working in teams, participants will propose solutions for identified factors, issues or behaviors in round robin fashion. At the end of the discussion, all identified solutions will be compiled for presentation later in the conference. This session is intended to extend research and scholarship on factors that place college students at risk of academic failure or dropping out of school.

Handout (in the notebook): Risk Factors form for submission; each team shares their recommend approach on the PE Conference site  (collect folders)

A session originally scheduled for this time slot, Accelerator Model: Raising the Bar by Jim Morgan has been moved to be part of the 2016/2017 Workshop Series. It will be an online workshop, open to all Academy Members. Don't miss it!

Researchers and practitioners of Process Education are familiar with designing learning exercises that assist students in growing as learners. They also have plenty of assessment and evaluation tools that they can use to determine whether students are growing as learners. Yet many practitioners of Process Education are not acquainted with the philosophical presuppositions of their preferred pedagogy. After reading the Learning to Learn textbook and several articles on Process Education, two of these presuppositions become evident. First, students are more than the sum total of their past and present experiences; rather, they possess the potential to transcend their past selves and grow as people in the future. Second, students can change themselves by actively committing themselves to follow a different life vision than they presently follow. Participants in this session will analyze how these two presuppositions work in Process Education by first answering a few exploration questions from the Learning to Learn textbook, then discussing those answers in small teams, and finally analyzing those answers.

Faculty see a wide variety of incoming capabilities in their students, often with 10 to 30% of their students struggling to keep up. This symposium focuses on practices that individual faculty have found that help these students succeed (thus improving pass rates, especially in difficult courses). Five different refereed papers will be shared in the program notebook where short presentations and facilitated discussion of participants will identify 20 principles that are used to increase student success in individual courses.

Best Classroom Practices of Process Education

Each conference participant is invited to share their best practices in increasing student success in the classroom (poster materials will be available on-site). The goal of this poster session is to eventually create an online gallery of each poster session so that it becomes a reference for conference attendees and for academy members that were not able to participate.

This panel will have leaders in Higher Education who have years of experience and expertise associated with helping faculty improve their performance in the facilitation of learning, the design of curriculum, the assessment and mentoring of learner development and the measurement and documentation of learning outcomes. Different approaches and systems for certification will be shared by different institutions and a discussion will lead to a collaborative approach for the certification of Process Educators.

This workshop will explore the student perspective of a variety of academic learning camps help on the campus of Grand Valley State University. Students on this panel will talk about what they discovered about learning as well as what they discovered about their ability to be a successful college student. A facilitated panel will be followed by a Q&A session with the audience.

Process Education (PE). What is it? At its most superficial level, PE takes a stance on what education should be all about. More than 20 years ago, and similar to the much more recent “LEAP” outcomes, it pointed first to the necessity of developing abilities such as problem-solving so that one might “process life,” rather than the inverse.  But it is more.

At a slightly deeper level, teaches the power of methodologies – profound learning tools for sure, they reveal that a “how to manual” is near at hand, thus facilitating students’ development of the abilities revealed at the most superficial level. But methodologies can always be improved. Peeling deeper, assessment came to be understood as the fundamental PE mechanism to link intended outcomes, methodologies and performance. Assess strengths – and we learn how to retain the critically useful aspects of performance. Assess areas for improvement – and alter the steps, their sequence, their approach. Assess insights – and dig deeper into the meaning, purpose and execution of acts of learning. Finally and most recently, PE has come to be understood as a philosophy of growth and empowerment.  As a branch of systems thinking, it examines and suggest interventions into the educational system at every level for the sake of empowerment. Is it enough? Have we arrived? Perhaps. Perhaps not.

This plenary session will explore the philosophy of Process Education as it stands today and – as a system of thought, method and ethics - attempt to reveal its strengths, areas for improvement and insights.

A session originally scheduled for this time slot, Using an Activity Book by Wade Ellis has been moved to be part of the 2016/2017 Workshop Series. It will be an online workshop, open to all Academy Members. Don't miss it!

This largely participant driven workshop will empower those attending to elevate their own performance, their colleagues’ performance, and their students’ performance by applying performance criteria to multiple contexts. Participants attending the workshop will be able to articulate the value of writing and using performance criteria, practice using a methodology for writing performance criteria, and assess performance criteria to improve quality. The workshop will connect individual participant goals related to areas of performance of particular interest to them with specific performance criteria written during the workshop that can clearly illuminate key components of that performance. The workshop will begin with an overview of how performance criteria add value to a variety of activities in higher education. Next, participants will practice extracting meaningful information from example performance criteria. Then, the facilitator will lead the group through an example of using the methodology for writing performance criteria before participants practice using the methodology to create their own set of performance criteria which they will take home to use in their own context. Finally, participants will provide assessment feedback on each other's performance criteria and for the session as a whole.

Facilitation is at the center of what faculty do in a Process Education environment since learners must construct their own knowledge and meaning and take responsibility and ownership of their learning and growth. The facilitation process, facilitation planning, and then the execution of an improve approach to meet the needs of the current specific audience is what a quality process educator does. This workshop will share how the theory can be used to increase the performance of facilitation. A profile of a quality facilitator will be examine with multiple practices shared for each important facilitator characteristic. The shared experience in the room will address 10 hardest situations for facilitation and how to go about making those situations work.

In the 1990’s the debate surrounding the issue of college success quickly exploded. Controversial claims about unacceptable graduation rates, exploding funding. and the mission of colleges across the land were common place. There were few metrics to research about the subjects. And, yet with a national 50% drop-out rate parents, politicians and pundits were putting on the pressure to examine practices and improve college graduation rates. Madison Area Technical College embraced student success in the mid-90’s and quickly realized that the challenge of refocusing the issues surrounding the lack of student success included “us”, the faculty. There was resistance to this project, and that’s when we turned to Process Education for help. Along with teaching practices, curriculum development, technology, and academic freedom Professional Development and support was at the heart of this discussion. With wisdom, and wandering Madison College has come far in the 20 years since to offer a highly developed and maintained Professional Development system that had solidly cemented the concept of student success. This workshop will explore the fruits of this journey, including active learning, self assessment, goal setting, and role clarification by actively demonstrating some of the innovations in professional development that have emerged from this continuing journey.

As educators, when we think about Quality Learning Environments (QLE’s) we usually picture our ideal classroom. We may be picturing the physical arrangement of the classroom, with tables for collaborative activities, or state-of-the-art electronic aids. Or we could be picturing the student-teacher, or peer-peer interactions that are part of a vibrant learning community. This workshop will expose participants to the existing methodology for creating QLE’s, and challenge them to assess their past performance across the 10 steps in the methodology. As part of a small-group activity, participants will use the steps in the methodology to identify key similarities and differences between a QLE in a traditional classroom, versus an online/distance environment. Additionally, each participant will leave with 2-3 personal changes they plan to implement to improve a learning environment that they will create/maintain, and they will be challenged to apply the methodology for creating QLE’s in contexts besides a traditional classroom. A Process Educator should be skilled at adapting proven principles to new contexts.

David Hanson will describe his journey from a successful atoms-and-molecules researcher to a process educator. When he announced the beginning of this journey in 1995 to his colleagues at Stony Brook, some responded, "Dave, our job is to teach chemistry not process skills." These detractors now have joined as leaders in active learning and Process Education at Stony Brook. Dr. Hanson will describe what prompted his change in focus, the design of learning activities, his growth as a facilitator, the importance of scholarship in teaching, and the success in obtaining educational grants. In addition, he will share his role in starting the POGIL movement, contributing to institutional change (Stony Brook's new Learning Communities Program and even newer Undergraduate Colleges), experiences in teaching at-risk chemistry students, and the key lessons learned about increasing student success.

A session originally scheduled for this time slot, The Transformation of Education: Transforming ME! by Denna Hintze has been moved to be part of the 2016/2017 Workshop Series. It will be an online workshop, open to all Academy Members. Don't miss it!

The workshop will start with a brief interactive lecture, followed by critical thinking done in small teams, and end with a discussion. Intended outcomes include: 1) A review of the Learning Process Methodology and its connection to other models of Learning and Instructional Design (this will be realized with a brief interactive lecture), 2) Determine how the LPM can be used to turn failure and risk into academic success (this will be realized by answering critical thinking questions in small groups), and 3) Discuss the connections between the LPM and classroom best practices, instructional design best practices, assessment, and research (this will be realized by a discussion of the results found from each group).

Culminating activities are not new phenomena in higher education. For decades such activities have been used to represent the metaphorical bridge between undergraduate education and student’s professional careers. Ideal culminating activities represent realistic problems that have multiple constraints and require the application of current standards and accepted practices in order to be solved. They require students to apply the multiple skills central to the educational program of their study. Such activities enable the institution to gauge program level student learning outcomes and can be used to improve instructional practices.

David Kaplan, Carol Atnip, Janet Vigna, Ehren Bucholtz (represented by a concept paper)

Every college has initiatives in an effort to improve first year and second-year gatekeeper course completion rates. Additionally, organizations like NSF keep an eye on graduation rates and they are aware that the number of STEM degrees granted depends upon student performance in these core and required courses. The panel was carefully selected of success stories of significant improvement. The outcome of this session is to produce 15 key effective strategies and practices that can be used to improve any gatekeeper course at any college.

Two sessions originally scheduled for this time slot, Self-Assessment by Chris Sweeney and Universal Mentoring for Self-Growers: Methods for Multiple Contexts by Steve Beyerlein and Dan Cordon has been moved to be part of the 2016/2017 Workshop Series. It will be an online workshop, open to all Academy Members. Don't miss it!

The workshop will highlight the current research on the key risk factors that exists for matriculating college students. The participants will rank existing identified risk factors with additional factors that should be added from their individual institutions. In the analysis, the weighting of how significant each factor is to the total risk will be determined. The resulting data will be analyzed and contributed to the proceedings where a final synthesized set of risk factors with contribution weightings will be determined.

Process-oriented activities can be written to emphasize different skills in learning. One type of activity in chemistry is focused on development of problem solving skills and has been supported by the National Science Foundation as the Process Oriented Guided Inquiry Learning In Context or POGIL-IC pedagogy. Examination of a POGIL-IC activity, discussion of its implementation and an exercise in writing an activity will be the focus of this presentation.

This workshop is designed to introduce participants to the workings of the Academy of Process Educators and motivate them to become actively involved. The desired outcomes are 1) ability to navigate the Academy website to discover its hidden treasures; 2) assess the 10 performance criteria of an active Academy member; and 3) identify the barriers to active involvement in the Academy. I will divide the participants into 4-6 person teams and perhaps do a scavenger hunt for Outcome 1, an SII for outcome 2, and a brainstorming session for outcome 3.

Best Institutional Practices of Process Education

Each participant team from a college who attends the conference is invited to share their Institution’s best practices in increasing student success at their institution (poster materials will be available on-site). The goal of this poster session is to provide a starting place for the college to submit a Process Educations case study for the special edition of IJPE that will highlight a number of case studies in how Process Education positively impacts the institution's programs, faculty & staff, and students. These posters will be highlighted in an online gallery so that conference attendees and for academy members can share with their institutions.

PE Academy Business Meeting

Each year, a new set of officers are nominated and elected for the coming year. The positions include: President Elect; two at-large board members; Treasurer; Professional Development Coordinator, Research Coordinator, --- Conference Chair; Before elections a summary of last year’s accomplishments, key strategic initiatives for this year, and a treasurer’s report.

A session originally scheduled for this time slot, Developing Self-Growers by Being a Self-Grower by Dan Apple has been moved to be part of the 2016/2017 Workshop Series. It will be an online workshop, open to all Academy Members. Don't miss it!

Proactive advising helps at-risk students to succeed by encouraging them to seek out help using resources (Earl, 1988; Cannon, 2013; Varney, 2012). Because the skills necessary to be successful are learnable (Apple, Duncan, Ellis, 2015), as academic success coaches, we wear multiple hats, including teachers of learning strategies, motivators, and advocates. The purpose of this session is for the Indiana University South Bend Titan Success Center (TSC) team to explain how we teach learning strategies to college students. In the presentation, we will review the literature on study and learning strategies, share case examples of students’ experiences learning in college classrooms. Then, we will discuss the content of our academic coaching sessions with students, including basic study strategies and referrals to campus resources. Finally, we will discuss the development of a partnership with faculty members and the TSC team to support our students’ learning inside the classroom.

The Nursing and Allied Health (NAH) programs at Hinds Community College share a common readmission procedure which focuses on readmission eligibility. Prior to 2009, students had only one opportunity to repeat a program course, with limited exceptions. Realizing many of these students still have a desire for program success, Hinds NAH piloted a recovery course for students who were ineligible for readmission. The pilot outcomes justified a change in the readmission procedure and led to a dynamic recovery course (Learning to Learn Camp) that is contextualized for health related programs. The Learning to Learn (L2L) camps provide rigorous and diverse activities to develop and enhance cognitive, social, affective and academic skills. Students who successfully complete the camp are eligible to apply for readmission. The L2L camps also serve as a teaching laboratory for faculty to implement process education activities. In an interactive dynamic environment, this workshop will relate the challenges, training, facilitation, mentoring, assessment, and follow up that will transform approximately two-thirds of the students so that they successfully complete the program.

Quality is the most differentiating factor between alternatives in any context. Accordingly, the strive for continuous improvement and better quality is expanding to all aspects of human life including higher education. However, Success of any quality improvement effort depends on having the right understanding, the appropriate skills for identifying the correct quality indicators, and the proper measurement of these indicators. In this workshop, identifying, defining, & measuring quality will be discussed. New definitions and concepts will be presented and demonstrated through samples of quality frameworks across different contexts. For quality improvement in higher education, these introduced concepts, definitions, and frameworks will be applied to educational program and institutional accreditation examples.

Team-Based Learning (TBL) is becoming extremely popular in higher education, particularly in the health sciences. Focused on helping students developing knowledge at higher levels in the Bloom’s Taxonomy, it is a marked improvement on traditional lecture-based courses. Team-Based Learning is founded on the “flipped classroom” concepts and is augmented through the strategic use of evaluations. For example, the “individual readiness assessment test, “iRAT”, is used to motivate students to complete preparatory reading, and the team evaluation – done at the end of the semester – is used to motivate students to collaborate productively. However TBL has two critical drawbacks. The first is that it inculcates an evaluation culture that is inimical to self-growth. The second is significant lost opportunity – for example the omission of team roles simplifies things in the planning stages, but makes it much more difficult for facilitators to intervene in anything but content and content application. We will use TBL as a context for workshops participants to enrich a learning environment with Process Education.

College students benefit from curriculum and instruction that intentionally incorporates cultural intelligence (CQ) -- the capability to function effectively in any multicultural context. This is because CQ equips them with the skill set to make sense of the world and their role in it while preparing them to engage in meaningful and productive relationships with diverse others. Although many teachers, faculty and administrators acknowledge the value of cultural intelligence in teaching a diverse population of students, they often find it challenging because of their comfort level and/or their knowledge of how to create a culturally intelligent classroom environment.

This engaging and interactive session will provide participants with research-based solutions and culturally intelligent strategies for leveraging diversity to create a high quality learning environment for all students. In addition, a case study of how institutions, such as the University of Michigan, have integrated CQ into its programs will be highlighted.

In support of effective POGIL processes and the development of a collaborative learning environment, it is essential science educators know the mechanisms of positive interdependence.  Science educators must learn how to create and develop successful learning teams.  Students must learn how to successfully work with other students in order to construct knowledge and develop process skills.  By utilizing the “We are a Learning Team”  and meta-activity at the beginning of the academic year, the foundation for the students to understand how to participate in an effective Learning Team will established and will guide the educator in the development of successful learning teams.  Throughout the academic year, positive interdependence and process skills are continually expand upon, as a result students learn and understand how to collaborate and to be effective members within a Learning Team.

The Book, Reframing Organizations by Bolman and Deal has become a classic text with which to understand how different leaders analyze, lead and solve institutional challenges. In this session, the book’s “Four Frameworks” will be presented and discussed in the context of higher education administration and Process Education. Attendees will participate in exercises to build an understanding of their personal leadership styles and collective viewpoints. A realistic case study will be shared and analyzed by the group to apply the knowledge gained. The newly-gained insights and knowledge will be used as a lens to understand and “reframe” the 10 Principles of Process Education for Administrative Leadership.

Over the last 25 years, colleges have instituted special programs for bringing in conditional admissions, for multiple reasons. This means that many schools have created programs to increase their first year and graduation success to match or exceed the current performance rates of the college. Five selected special programs will be highlighted and the overall discussion will identify the key reasons behind the success of these program and establish a set of performance criteria and potential measures for any program helping to prepare students for collegiate success.

Dr. Muse, president of Hinds Community College, will address a variety of topics, all of which are part of Hinds Community College's commitment to student success. (Topics include: a description of the students that Hinds CC serves, Hinds' Orientation Process - 2 credit course, Hinds' Transitional Studies program - why and what was its purpose, change in financial aid distribution, the array of personnel committed to support student success throughout the organization, professional development - national leadership in conferences and internal programming including being Pacific Crest's first RPDC, the Nursing and Allied Health Recovery Camp, Hinds' STEM UP and SMACC Programs, the role of Hinds in supporting NADE from its early days, and the latest efforts, including an Academic Recovery Course.)

A session originally scheduled for this time slot, Classification of Learning Skills by Masila Mutisya has been moved to be part of the 2016/2017 Workshop Series. It will be an online workshop, open to all Academy Members. Don't miss it!

This 90-minute session will immerse you in the theory and practices regarding reflection practices. Our lives today are so busy often we just perform our daily routines without stepping back for a moment to consciously think about what we did, why we did it and what did we learn from the experience. To improve our own lives as well as make a better world for all of us, the art of reflection is very powerful. We will practice some of these techniques in this hands on approach. You will leave with a personal plan to develop your reflective practices.

Click to take the pre-activity survey

In this workshop, participants will review and use available Process Education Methodologies to address scenarios where assessments are ineffective, lack direction, or are locked in differences. Process Education Methodologies will be used, when possible, to create just in time solutions to the intractable situations that are typical of those faced in higher education.

Educators often begin in the middle. They undertake assessment well after programs and courses have been designed and implemented. Process Education, on the other hand, recommends a design process that is integrated and linear interconnecting conceptualization, implementation, and assessment. So what happens when assessments stall in contexts where Process Education methodologies have not been followed in whole or in part?

In July 1990, around the time Process Education was getting off the ground, the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) was passed that “prohibits discrimination and guarantees that people with disabilities have the same opportunities as everyone else to participate in the mainstream of American life.”  To be protected by ADA, a person must have a recognized disability, with ‘reasonable accommodations’ available based on the documentation. 

The implementation of ADA in its early stages caused challenges for higher education as students moved from K-12 where students were entitled to a possibly modified education based on disabilities to having the same education through the provision of reasonable accommodations for alternate processes for learning.  To add to the complexity of the issues, early lawsuits included those from non-disabled students who sued for discrimination because accommodations were given to others without proof of the need.

This workshop will expose the participants to an emerging trend of Universal Design, defined as the design of products and environments to be usable by almost all people without the need for adaptation or specialized design; with a particular focus on Universal design of instruction. Included in the workshop will be the complementary ways Universal Design and Process Education support each other.

This workshop is designed for participants to clearly separate assessment process from evaluation process. This session will assist all higher education stakeholders use more assessment practices, thereby improving learner performance. A set of principles of assessment will be inventoried and shared to help guide effective design and use of assessment tools and strategies. The participants will get an opportunity to uncover the barriers they have had in shifting evaluation to assessment throughout their university or college as well as into their own courses. The participants will brainstorm a set of current assessment practices and strategies that they can use to increase student learning and success. A tool will be shared to help the systematic design of a course assessment system to address these barriers. Additionally, tools and strategies will be identified to support faculty members increase the effectiveness of a course, thereby increasing student learning outcomes, growth, and success.

Among the participants there are individuals on the panel and within the room who have participated in more than 25 different Learning to Learn Camps. Learning more about these camps is an important goal of most participants at the conference. This plenary provides participants an opportunity to perform research and share their experiences. Each panel member will add to the discussion based upon their one-to-two page personal analysis of "Why the Learning to Learn Camp worked." These presentations are in the program notebook for participants to read. Each panel member will take 5 minutes to share key principles and/or questions for the panel and participants to discuss, as they work to figure out what it is that makes a Learning to Learn Camp work.

The panel participants have years of experiences with Learning to Learn Camps from a variety of programs across the country. Wendy Wenner has supported the use of Learning to Learn Camps within the Honors College at Grand Valley State University: The Scholars' Institute, The Freshmen Academy / Academic Success Institute, and the recovery course. Patrick Barlow represents Madison College's use of the Learning to Learn Camp as part of their professional development program and additionally helping more than 100 traditional age students transition into college successfully, each year. Libby Mahaffey was instrumental in getting Learning to Learn Camps into Hinds Community College especially with an emphasis on helping students transform academic failures into life successes through achieving professional placement. Carol Nancarrow, author of the Learning to Learn Camp facilitator Guide, will share her years of experiences leading camps at different institutions. Wade Ellis has authored a variety of articles and papers focused on the Learning to Learn Camp, the concept of Learning to Learn, the profile of a collegiate learner, and the 25-year retrospective of Process Education.

How often do conferences involve 200 people, actively learning and producing pages and pages of discoveries, but never offering time for reflection and the possibility of elevating this learning? Not at this conference! We will reconvene in the same teams as on the first day, producing the top 5 collective discoveries. This will give us, as a community, more than 100 new discoveries that can form the basis of future publications within the IJPE and other disciplinary journals. These discoveries will be posted as part of the proceedings.

PE Academy Meeting

Location: KC2250

Agenda items:

1. Conference Assessment (using performance criteria)
2. Program Planning for Professional Development 2016/2017
3. Research Plan for Sunday leading to a Research Program 2016/2017
4. Special Edition planning for Case Studies for the fall

Research Dinner

Location: Off-Campus (contact Dan Apple for information)

Teams for Sunday will start sharing interests with each other to make the Sunday times more productive – tables will be set up for effective discussions around the topics for Sunday.

Research Groups

Mentor

Research Groups

Mentor