This project, led by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, furthers the reach of the Statway and Quantway Pathways through Networked Improvement Communities (NICs) of colleges and universities. Initial implementation of these pathways has shown significant success rates for developmental math students in only one third of the time typically required for college-level math credit. This project is scaling and sustaining the initiative through the design, development, and improvement of a rigorous Advancing Quality Teaching (AQT) program for faculty. As the Pathways initiative expands beyond those faculty and colleges that collaborated in the original co-development, a much broader range of faculty, including adjuncts, working in varied college work conditions is included. The AQT system is designed to maintain high levels of efficacy as the initiative is taken up more broadly.
The project, with the college and research partners in the Networked Improvement Communities is working towards the following: an experience which introduces new members into the network through a Deep Study of Instruction; Pathways Toolkit of Professional Development Resources; the Advancing Quality Teaching Rubric, a formative tool to guide individual faculty development; an Improvement Science Workshop that introduces faculty to the discipline of improvement science and supports their improvement work in their own classrooms; leadership development to identify and support the project's National Faculty who will take on significant roles in this NIC; and a Regional Infrastructure of lead colleges associated with the National Faculty to provide a local base for the collaborative work of the improvement communities.
The project transforms and elevates developmental math instruction where faculty employ the discipline of improvement science to continuously enhance their teaching within a networked community of researchers and practitioners. It creates a sustainable system for improvement. The Pathways are anchored in ambitious math learning goals and deploy research-based pedagogy to make deeper learning common in classrooms. The project's integration of a Productive Persistence initiative explicitly addresses the many deep-seated psycho-social barriers that students face. The project aims to demonstrate how to learn what works, for whom, and under what conditions and to provide for the spread of this knowledge.
Not only do the project's strategic organization and processes provide for the implementation of the Pathways in other settings, they also provide a means of addressing two critical needs in the STEM community: the ability to implement successful innovations reliably at scale, and the capacity to organize for and see to its own improvement as a natural embedded aspect of programming. Finally, the project looks to address the problem that fewer than 20 percent of community college enrollees will reach college-level math within three years.
