Grant Summary
$300,000 over 24 months to the Colorado Community College System and the Center for Urban Education (CUE) at the University of Southern California. Colorado Community College System, which is comprised of 13 community colleges, is committed to scaling curriculum reform through a “co-requisite” model in which remedial courses in mathematics are paired with college-level courses and other supports. Such efforts can both reduce time for students to achieve college-level proficiency and be more cost-effective over time. In partnership with the CUE, the Colorado Community College System seeks to scale up those efforts in a phased approach and in a manner that links curricular reforms to pedagogical improvements in the teaching of mathematics. CUE has developed a set of faculty-aimed tools to analyze student outcomes data, evaluate curriculum and teaching practices, and benchmark institutional performance over time. This project involves CUE providing a series of webinars open to all Colorado community colleges along with a series of in-person workshops and targeted coaching for a subset of members – Aims Community College, Community College of Denver, and Front Range Community College – to streamline curriculum and strengthen pedagogy in mathematics. The webinars will introduce math faculty to the principles, tools, and methods of institutional self-assessment of curriculum and teaching methods while the workshops will enable faculty from the core project campuses to exchange insights from structured inquiry activities (e.g., syllabi review, classroom observations) and to put those lessons learned into action with feedback from their peers and CUE. This project is co-funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.