Greetings!
Entering the 44th year of our organization, we continue our efforts guided by our essential values, including embracing diversity through inclusivity and promoting an ongoing collaboration across our peers and partners in this profession.
We do our work at institutions of all kinds, from small private, rural colleges to flagship community colleges in one of the largest metropolitan regions of the country. We work in different roles, from senior administrators overseeing service delivery to thousands of undergraduates to adjunct faculty who work intimately with two dozen students each semester.
We are all different in many ways, but we are all PA-NOSS. We adapt, and we support each other, and we grow. This year, we have adapted - most notably in the rescheduling of our annual conference. We listened, and our conference has been rescheduled for April 20 at the DoubleTree in Lancaster.
Our hope is that the new one-day format will allow even more of you to attend, and to encourage your entire departments to attend. A day talking about the big-picture, about the value of the work that we do day in and day out, would be an excellent staff retreat, professional development day, and a way to bond with each other while continuing our dive into UDL, led once again by our fantastic keynote speaker, Dr. Janet Bertoni!
About those new connections - we in the Marketing & Communications Committee would love to help you invite your colleagues, and your peers at nearby schools. If you’re interested, reach out and we can work together on ways to tell the valuable story of PA-NOSS.
Celebrate the work that you all have accomplished this past semester! --Jonathan Kadjeski, Director, Marketing & Communications Committee
Conference Registration!
Our theme for this year’s conference continues the theme of “Universal Design for Learning (UDL) and Social Justice: How they are intertwined.” For those unfamiliar, UDL redefines teaching and learning by removing obstacles to learning. UDL, by definition, gives all students equal opportunity to succeed within the diverse framework of K-12 and post-secondary education.
Our keynote speaker is Dr. Janet Bertoni, an Associate Professor in the Department of Early, Middle & Exceptional Education at Millersville University. She is also a Board-Certified Behavior Analyst. We have been fortunate to have Dr. Bertoni lead our two previous Town Halls. Dr. Bertoni will share the history of UDL, its overarching rubric to support all students, as well as practical examples we can use immediately. Based on her previous presentations for PA-NOSS Town Halls, you will surely be impressed with UDL, its ability to support students, and Dr. Bertoni’s clear, enthusiastic, and research-based presentation.
New Book Note
Rethinking College Admissions
Student Success begins before students matriculate, during the recruitment and enrollment process. Praise for this edited essay collection from Don Yu, Chief Strategy and Product Officer for Scholarship America, describes Rethinking College Admissions as “essential reading for those who believe that college can dramatically change the trajectory of a student’s life.” We know this to be true, and those who work with enrolled students are so often in opportunities to shape enrollment policies that we do not always fully understand. This collection promises to engage us in the current admissions approaches, hot topics such as race-conscious admissions and the no-test movement, and institutional programs for low-income communities.
Rethinking College Admissions, edited by OiYan A. Poon (Spencer Foundation) and Michael Bastedo (University of Michigan) is available for purchase for $36 (or 20% off with the sales code RCAF22 through April 13) from Harvard Education Press.
Practitioner Spotlight: Dr. Beena Patel, Community College of Philadelphia
Students Learning from Students
At our September 27 Town Hall, many in attendance shared techniques and approaches they have developed since the beginning of the pandemic, and one of the most intriguing was Dr. Beena Patel, who began having previous students come speak to her classes about what success required. We were eager to learn more and even more grateful for her time speaking to us.
Dr. Patel is an Assistant Professor of Biology at Community College of Philadelphia, teaching General Biology and Microbiology. She was motivated to try new approaches when she noticed the absence of certain kinds of student-student interaction during the earliest months of the pandemic, and she looked for a way to create opportunities for students to learn from other students. Enter her Biology Student Mentors. Using her institutions LMS, Canvas, it was easy to identify and reach out to previous students who had struggled with, and then overcome, challenges to the content of her classes. Dr. Patel then invited these students to come speak to and answer questions from her current students. Between the second and fourth weeks of the semester, these student mentors would join the class and provide advice focused not on the content but on the kinds of learning and studying strategies that worked best for them in that very course. These 15-20 minute sessions are student led, with a supportive and helpful tone that the Dr. Patel said she gets as much out of as the students themselves. Each semester, more than 200 General Biology and more than 200 Microbiology students benefit from this, and the data speaks for itself. On their student satisfaction surveys, 85% of students indicated that these Student Mentor visits motivated them to become more studious and effectively modeled learning strategies.
Dr. Patel, thank you for sharing some insights about this creative new way to promote student success, through students learning from students!
Do you have a new initiative, or a colleague you’d like to recommend? Reach out today!
Helpful Resources
PHEAA’s PA State Work-Study Program, which provides students an opportunity to gain career-related work experience while helping to pay for their educations:
“How to Teach a Good First Day of Class” from the Advice Guide at The Chronicle of Higher Education - a helpful article that contains something for everyone, including theory, logistics, and practical tips.
Check out this wide-angle webcast of a special report, “Adaptation Across the Higher Ed Landscape,” on February 8. Register Here to listen as Inside Higher Ed editor Doug Lederman explores how institutions have been responding to the challenges facing the field, including enrollment, employee turnover, and selling the benefit of college.
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Best wishes as we head into 2023!
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