Won't Lose This Dream by Andrew Gumbel

Author:Andrew Gumbel
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The New Press
Published: 2020-12-14T16:00:00+00:00

9

BIRTH OF AN IDEA

When Ron Henry was provost at Miami University in Ohio, the job he held before coming to Georgia State, he couldn’t help noticing that members of fraternities and sororities graduated at a rate 10 percentage points higher than the rest of the students. How so? He could only conclude it was because they were tight knit, talked to each other about their classes, and spent much of their study time together. So when he first heard about freshman learning communities and the positive effects education researchers thought they could have on academic performance and graduation rates, he knew right away he had to bring them to Georgia State. “I don’t remember where I first heard about them,” he said, “but I thought, that’s a great idea.”

The timing seemed propitious, because Georgia State in the late 1990s was going through a rough transition from a quarter to a semester system and students were struggling to schedule enough classes to graduate in four years. The idea was that the semester system would offer greater flexibility to the growing numbers of full-time students at Georgia State, but for those who did not live on campus it created all sorts of headaches, as the old block schedule was broken up and they were expected to come to class as often as five days a week instead of three. Henry saw learning communities as a vehicle to help freshmen support each other—by organizing car pools, covering for each other’s absences by sharing class notes, and collaborating on homework assignments. Henry never developed the program much beyond a pilot, but it worked, leading to vastly improved first-year retention rates among those who participated.

Henry was unusually well attuned to cutting-edge ideas in undergraduate education. He made a point of following the work of think tanks like the American Association of Higher Education, which worked to improve outcomes for lower-income and minority students, and the National Center for Academic Transformation, which harnessed technology to develop new classroom techniques. One idea of AAHE’s that Henry particularly liked was assessing faculty members on whatever they were good at; if someone was a gifted classroom teacher that would be valued in itself and they didn’t need to face the usual pressure to crank out peer-reviewed books and journal articles on the side. From this idea came an initiative Henry launched with Ahmed Abdelal, the dean of arts and sciences, to create a career path for nontenure-track teachers. Georgia State found it could provide greater classroom consistency at lower cost if it identified the best of its adjuncts and offered them a fixed salary, plus benefits, to do all their teaching in one place instead of driving around Atlanta picking up classes here and there.

NCAT, meanwhile, had a study suggesting that if a university focused its efforts on improving the twenty-five or thirty most popular intro classes, it could have a huge knock-on effect on retention and graduation. NCAT’s executive director, Carol Twigg, was one of the first people

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