by Bruce Watson
In the seminar led by Max Eirich on January 27 and 28, we discussed the issue of why developmental students tested into the courses they did. Max identified several possible explanations, which could be grouped as follows: personal problems, attitude and motivational problems, and academic problems.
Although we may deal with these problems more less satisfactorily as individual teachers, I am convinced this is not enough. I think we need to confront these problems on a program-wide basis. Only then can we develop realistic strategies for dealing with the students we have before us in the classroom.
What I have to suggest here has nothing whatever to do with lowering our academic standards; in fact, it may lead to strengthening them. What we need to do is braoden the resources available to us as teachers and to our students.
Firt of all, when students come to us with such personal problems as rearing children, coping with both classwork and a job, or low self-esteem, we need to bring into contact with members of our Counseling Department. We should begin the contact before classes start by asking counselors to address groups of students during orientation. As follow-up, we can invite counselors to make a brief presentation in our classes during the first three weeks of the semester, in order to make clear exactly what kind of help a counselor can offer the students, e.g. job placement, contacts wiht outside social agencies, career orientation, or one-on-one counseling.
Secondly, as we all know, many of our students arrive here with problems in attitude and motivation. They may lack clear goals for themselves and they may feel more less resentful about being here. They often see not connection the work we ask of them here and the work they seek in the job market. They may not even believe that attendance in class is connected to success in class. Attitudinal problems of this sort are often best addressed nto by us or counsleors, but by peers who have succeeded in thier work in the classroom here at Community College of Philadelphia. An approach of thei kind, called the Peer Academic Leader Program (PAL), is already being tried by the Collaborative Learning Community (CLC). Here a few advanced students offer information, advice, reassureanc, and above all, role models to incoming students. As they talk with PALs, new students often discover that the experience of their peers directly parallels their own.
Finally, our students bring with them rather weak scademic backgrounds. Some may be felling a bit rusty because they have been out of the classroom for many years. The majority have simply fallen behind in the Philadelphia schools for a variety of reasons. Remedial courses are, by definition, designed to remedy these deficiencies. Nonetheless, we ought to explore new strategies for dealing with our students' academic deficits; that is, we should include learning lab tutors and peer teachers in the design of ur programs and in some instances have them in the classrooms with us on a more regular basis. We need to talk more with each other in seminars and to invite speakers from outside the college to help us develop additional approaches. For the underlying academic problem will remain; namely that most of our students simply do not read or write well enough, and we must find ways of encouraging them to do both.