Dear Staff/Professional Development Coordinators:

At this week’s Student Success Initiative Steering Committee meeting, we agreed to act immediately on the following two key recommendations of the LACCD Framework for Student Success:

1.       Focus Professional Development on Student Success  To help faculty integrate practices into their courses designed to enhance the development of essential academic skills, the colleges should focus professional development efforts on topics related to improving basic skills development and student success outcomes.   In addition, college professional development coordinators should meet at least twice a semester to discuss and coordinate their activities.

2.       Create a District-wide Student Success Network   “Create a district-wide “Student Success Network” modeled on the STARS program in order to raise consciousness about the student success effort, involve more faculty and staff directly in the initiatives and activities related to student success, and spread more SSI best practices across the district.  Within the first year, this network should:

o        Recruit and enroll 1,000-1,500 LACCD  faculty and staff

o        Establish a Student Success website to serve as a forum for the exchange of information and best practices

o        Design and implement District-wide workshops and events dedicated to improving basic skills and student success outcomes. 

To help coordinate these efforts, Deborah Harrington has recently joined us downtown as the District Dean of Institutional Effectiveness & Student Success.  Deborah will be in touch with you next week to bring all of us together as a taskforce  to accomplish these two extremely important goals. 

Institution and district-wide efforts to facilitate innovative teaching and learning practices need the dedicated and coordinated efforts of our Professional Development experts, and we look forward to working with you as we put our Framework for Student Success into action. In case you have not received a copy of the entire Framework for Student Success document, I’m attaching it to this email for your convenience.

Please keep an eye out for follow-up details from Deborah.  And if you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to send them along or to give me a call at 213-891-2152.

Thanks much!

Gary Colombo

Vice Chancellor for Institutional Effectiveness