Volume XLV, No. 16 | November 2, 2023

Improving Student Outcomes Through Collaborative Partnerships

Faculty and staff at community and technical colleges demonstrate every day the ability to think with care and nuance about how to best support the students who walk through the doors of their institutions. Community and technical college faculty and staff recognize the importance of focusing intently on students’ particular contexts, identities, knowledge, and the experiences that shape who they are and how they can best be supported in attaining their goals. In fact, this awareness of the uniqueness of one’s students and their context can sometimes lead to the sense that each college is so different that everything must be built from the ground up for these students in this place. The thinking is very reasonable—our students are our students, and we will support our students with our strategies, our programs, our lessons, and our processes, designed just for them. However, while it is absolutely necessary to tailor programs and instruction to students’ unique identities and characteristics, there are opportunities to learn across multiple institutions that can lead to better opportunities and outcomes for more students, in more places, and can make the work of faculty and staff easier and more effective.

In my work as an education researcher and coach, I have had many conversations with faculty and staff who have expressed a deep feeling of institutional isolation, seeing the college as a self-contained environment in which any work that needs to be done must be done there, and anything that needs to be learned must be learned there. In fact, this may seem like the only possible approach: if there is work that needs to be done, we need to do it. However, evidence shows that many of the day-to-day challenges that community colleges and their faculty and staff face arise similarly in different institutions, and similar questions around teaching and supporting students more effectively are being asked on many different campuses. Adapting our work to fit our students’ needs is essential, but before that final nuancing is done in the delivery of instruction, there is much that can be shared, collectively accomplished, and discovered across multiple institutions.

Briefly consider a set of 15 colleges in a particular region, each different but asking fundamentally similar questions: How do we build and strengthen bridges with employers to provide our students the best opportunity for a meaningful career path that matches their talents and interests? How can I add something fresh and new to content that students may have seen multiple times to help them better engage with the material in productive ways? What are effective ways to connect with students that are genuine, particularly given the number of students I see every day and their wide range of experiences and interests? And how can that be done given my limited time and host of other demands? In what other ways can we provide students the best chance to be successful?

If some or all of those questions sound familiar to you, it is probably not because you and I have spoken specifically about them. Much more likely, it is because these are fundamental issues that faculty and staff at many colleges are also asking as they create lessons, identify strategies, and build programs and processes. The uniqueness of an institution may cause its faculty and staff to feel that they must answer these questions alone, for themselves specifically, and from the ground up, but there is not a binary between crafting every aspect of the work that we do from scratch and indiscriminately applying other people’s solutions in ways that do not take the specific students here into account. Taking the time to answer every question oneself when there are many people who are working to understand much the same thing represents an enormous loss of time that could be spent advancing what we know in new ways. For these reasons, cross-institutional networks and partnerships focused on shared learning can enable community college faculty, staff, and leadership to develop answers to the biggest questions we face regarding students and how to support them in more efficient, effective, and fruitful ways. The odds are good that someone, somewhere, perhaps not too geographically far from you, has a great answer to a question you’ve been puzzling over and working on your own to address. By building connections for shared learning, we can build pathways so that more great ideas reach those who can use them—and when solutions are not yet clear, we can join forces to collaboratively investigate and answer questions that would be difficult if not impossible to answer alone.

Many useful resources and ideas are already available to support the work happening in colleges, but lists of resources cannot bring about the same outcomes as a group of individuals actively working together to identify and solve the issues their own students, communities, and institutions face. Sitting down, or virtually sitting down, with a group of colleagues and focusing on fully understanding and addressing a set of challenges can enable us to survey systems and processes in our institutions from multiple perspectives and create better answers than we could have identified on our own. I have witnessed the powerful response to such conversations when participants realize the questions their colleagues at other institutions are asking are, in many cases, the same as their own. I have also witnessed the excitement that comes with identifying others working through the same challenges and talking through their own experiences and ideas.

The problem with these networks and partnerships is that they do not simply appear out of thin air. They must be designed and built, and they must be maintained, and we already know that the vast majority of community and technical college faculty and staff are stretched about as thin as they possibly can be with all of the work they need to do to effectively support the students they see every day. Nonetheless, we live in a world of increasing opportunity to connect with others quickly and easily, and as networks and partnerships are implemented they can begin to save faculty and staff enough time to expand and improve the work they are able to do. An informal discussion group can beget a meaningful learning community as its initial work begins to materialize in ways that free up time for some members and create more opportunity to support the work of the group. This works even better if there are resources–even limited resources–available to support the management and continuation of the work of the group in some way.

Just as with the challenges in teaching and supporting students, the development of professional learning communities and similar partnerships is ultimately unique to the individuals who participate in them. Still, they can nonetheless follow a set of useful patterns and best practices, including:

• Plan out the focus area(s) and goal(s) of the group before beginning the work to ensure that participants understand and agree why they are here and what they plan to accomplish.
• Identify roles and responsibilities within the group in ways that take into account the work that members already do and incorporate and complement that work (in other words, align what people will do in the group to what they do in their normal job to avoid extra work that can cause participants to drop out or disengage).
• Ask group members to suggest others who would make excellent additions and to reach out to those people to ask them to join.
• Ensure that participants have the time to fully share their challenges and possible solutions, so that the group can incorporate many different perspectives on the present and then identify high-leverage changes for the future.

Whatever the level of formality and particular content of focus, collaborative partnerships that reach across institutions can enable us to apply great ideas to our own work and to develop solutions that lead to improved outcomes for many different students. There is no textbook for creating such networks, but thoughtful professionals can come together to collaborate in ways large and small to discover new strategies for learning from one another and translating their joint work into more dynamic and relevant classroom experiences and greater levels of institutional success—all in service of the students they support each day.

Max Altman, Director, Research and Policy at the Southern Education Foundation, maltman@southerneducation.org