City College of San Francisco - California Competes

THEME I
One form of professional development will center on structured, interdisciplinary conversations using
CCSF’s Reflective Teaching Project of its ESL and Transitional Studies Departments as a way to facilitate
discussion. These conversations will provide a setting in which faculty and staff across disciplines can
grapple with how to implement what they learn through all professional development experiences in
the student learning environment. Participants will also receive encouragement to visit each others’
classrooms (both within and across disciplines) to provide feedback to each other and to learn from
each other. All conversations and interactions will have the overall goal of improving student success
in basic skills so that students can better advance to college-level courses.
The faculty, Chancellor, Trustees, and the entire administration are committed to continue researching
basic skills issues to document progress and identify areas for improvement, including organizational
changes.
The level of commitment to basic skills at CCSF is unusually high, and it arises from the College’s recognition
that changes it makes now, when grounded in the analysis of data, will have effects far into the future
for generations of students to come. CCSF administrators, faculty, and other staff dedicate significant energy
and time to resolving issues related to basic skills.
IV. Conclusion & Future Directions
While the College has not solved the problem of basic skills, this essay has attempted to demonstrate that
the College is committed to delivering high-quality education at all levels of the institution, using basic
skills as an example. The choice of basic skills for the case study rests on the fact that issues relating to
basic skills are not confined to the basic skills sequence. That is, students entering the basic skills sequence
most often have the goal of continuing on to college-level work, whether to attain a certificate, degree, or
transfer to a four-year institution. At the same time, some students who place into basic skills courses do
not actually enroll in those courses, instead electing to enter college-level courses directly. To demonstrate
a genuinely substantive commitment to high-quality education, the College must now tackle how issues
relating to basic skills impact the entire curriculum at all levels and in all areas. Given these factors, the
institution’s commitment to high-quality education is a commitment to addressing not just basic skills
courses but basic skills students wherever they are in the institution—and addressing not just their
cognitive needs but also their affective needs. Doing so will require that the College find ways to
make resulting interventions and changes sustainable and far-reaching, without having to rely
heavily on external funding as it has in the past.
The College’s goals and objectives should embrace plans that highlight professional development
(supporting the direction taken with the Carnegie/Hewlett grant); improved and new programs and
services targeting basic skills students accompanied by efforts to raise awareness of available services
(through greater communication and collaboration between counseling and instructional faculty
to widen the range of student learning outcomes in both the cognitive and affective areas of student
development); and the creation of administrative structures and departmental resources to synthesize
and support basic skills College-wide. An emerging set of recommendations by the Basic Skills
Subcommittee is, in fact, following this line of thought, the seeds of which are contained within the
College’s Strategic Plan.
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