Register | Hotel | Conference Highlights | Sponsors & Exhibitors | Main Conference Page

Kick off your participation at the Strengthening Student Success conference by attending one of our Leadership Intensives from 9am-12pm on Wednesday, October 7. Get an in-depth understanding of how you can become a leader in strengthening student success at one of the following pre-conference sessions:

SLO Coordinators/Researchers Workshop & P.O.W.E.R. Awards | Assessing Ourselves: Past, Present, and Future
In 2002, the focus in higher education shifted from teaching to learning. Over the past few years, SLO Coordinators and researchers have been more involved in learning assessment efforts in the community colleges. Where are we now? Where are we going? This session will reflect on the past achievements, recognize exemplary processes, and look forward to 2012. The 2009 Promising Outcomes Work and Exemplary Research (P.O.W.E.R.) Awards recipients will be honored and a set of these individuals/teams will present their methods and strategies. Bring a sketch of your college's assessment plan and be prepared to discuss them in small groups. Rested and with provisions filled, we can begin the next leg of the journey in learning assessment.

BSI Leaders Workshop | Designing an Evidenced Based Basic Skills Program: A Systematic Approach
Many colleges have implemented a variety of programs, resources, and services intended to improve the success of basic skills students. While these activities may be innovative, and even successful in the short term, can they be sustained? Can they and should they be "scaled up"? Is there a coherent thread that ties disparate activities together into a programmatic approach? Join BSI coordinators from the inaugural Summer Leadership Institute in exploring a tool for systematic program planning and evaluation: logic modeling. You will learn how you can use this tool in your program, and how other colleges have used it to clarify their goals and systematically provide evidence that their activities and programs are leading to greater student success.

Faculty Inquiry Workshop | Faculty Inquiry and Developing Professionally
Faculty Inquiry is taking hold in California community colleges. As a form of professional development, Inquiry engages faculty in looking closely at their own students and then making changes based upon what they learn. Why, for example, do so few students make it through the long sequence of developmental courses in English and Math? Do the sequences themselves need to change? How can attention to students’ basic skill development be embedded in the context of general education classes, or inside career-technical programs? In this workshop, members of the Faculty Inquiry Network, eighteen college teams across the state, will share moments from their own Inquiries into student learning and engage participants in “trying on” Inquiry themselves. Participants will leave with a sense of the spirit and texture of Inquiry, ideas for integrating it on their own campuses, and approaches to guide this work, such as: student voices, lesson study, using classroom and institutional data, and “making visible” what we learn about students. 

Data Analysis Workshop | Tools for Data Driven Decisionmaking
As an educator, would you like web-based access to your institution’s data to assist with program review including, student success, retention, graduation and load?  Would you like the ability to aggregate by demographics and institutional variables? The California Partnership for Achieving Student Success (Cal-PASS) has been working on Business Intelligence (BI) applications and technologies to provide our members answers to the questions above.   Business Intelligence is the gathering, storing, analyzing and displaying of data to assist with decision-making and has been used in other industries for a number of years but has not been applied extensively to education.  This three-hour workshop will train users on technology that is available to all Cal-PASS members in the community colleges.

CCCSE Workshop | The 2009 Center for Community Colleges Student Engagement Workshop for California Community Colleges
The Center for Community College Student Engagement (Center) focuses on helping colleges improve quality by engage them in the types of meaningful activities and relationships that correlate positively with learning, retention, and success. Since 2002, the Center has gathered information about students’ experiences and relationships from more than 1.4 million students at 711 community colleges across 49 states, British Columbia, Ontario, Nova Scotia, and the Marshall Islands. Christine McLean, Center Senior Associate, and Thomas Greene, Associate Vice President of Enrollment and Student Services at Sacramento City College and Center Associate, will facilitate this workshop. The workshop facilitators will highlight what matters most for student success, with a particular focus on 2009 Center data from students at 36 California Community Colleges and faculty from 19 California Community Colleges. This workshop will include opportunities for attendees to learn about and work on their college’s data and take away practical strategies for improving student engagement in their specific roles. This workshop also will include examples of promising practices from colleges across the nation and student, faculty, and administrator voices in focus group interviews on topics surrounding engaging entering students. Workshop attendees should come prepared to discuss what we’ve learned about student engagement in California - from both students and faculty; apply practical uses of data to inform decisions in their roles; believe all students can achieve; and realize that in their individual roles at their colleges – regardless of position or status – that they can help improve student success. Workshop attendees can expect an informative and engaging session.