By Kathy Witkowsky
Milwaukee, Wisconsin
WOULDN’T YOU LOVE to work with people who knew how to, well, work with people?
If they went to Alverno College in Milwaukee, chances are they do.
That’s because social interaction is one
of eight skills that students at this all-women’s Catholic college have to master
before they graduate. Students also learn
how to communicate well; think critically;
identify and solve problems; develop and
adhere to values; consider and respect
global perspectives; contribute to their
community; and appreciate art. All the
while, they learn to critically and accurately
identify their strengths and their weaknesses.
Alverno incorporates the teaching of
these skills into traditional disciplines,
including nursing, education and the usual
array of liberal arts courses of study. Ideally, students at other liberal arts schools pick
up similar skills en route to their degrees.
But the Alverno administration believes
that students learn better when they are
aware of what they are supposed to be
learning. So the school has turned the
usual approach to education on its head:
The disciplines provide a framework for
teaching the skills, rather than the other
way around.
“You’re not going to college just to stuff
your mind with bits of trivia so you can be
on Who Wants to Be a Millionaire,” said
Sister Joel Read, Alverno’s feisty and passionate
president. Read, a founding member
of the National Organization for Women,
decided education was the way to
improve women’s lives. She was at the
helm when Alverno unveiled its revolutionary “ability-based” curriculum in 1973,
and has helped bring the school international
recognition since then.
The philosophy behind Alverno’s
curriculum—that students should be able
to do something with what they know—is
hardly revolutionary. It’s Alverno’s practical
and supportive approach that distin-guishes
the school and keeps students
commuting to its modest, 46-acre campus
on Milwaukee’s south side.
Traditionally, education has focused on
critical thinking and reasoning, said Marcia
Mentkowski, director of Alverno’s Educational
Research and Evaluation department.
“What we’ve learned through our
research is that it’s equally important to
focus on performance.
“We all understand [the notion of] intellectual
development—years of schooling
to develop reasoning,” continued Mentkowski.
“Now imagine performance development.
That needs as much teaching
and learning as does intellectual development.”
So on a chilly Febru a ry night in Milwaukee,
Sara Duelge sat at a round conference table and entered into a lively discussion
with four of her Alverno classmates.
The group had 25 minutes to reach
a consensus on a recommendation for an
environmental post.
Twenty-two-year-old Duelge favored a
politician with environmental leanings,
someone she thought “understands the
relationship between politics and the environment.” But she couldn’t persuade her
peers, and in the end she agreed to lend
her support to a woman with a long history
of environmental research.
The endorsement was meaningless; this
was only an exercise for Alverno’s Social
Interaction class. What Duelge and her
peers were really doing was displaying
their social skills to some 30 observers who
sat at surrounding tables taking copious
notes. The observers, many of whom were
Alverno alumnae, had been given a list of
11 typical behaviors, good and bad—from
“leading” to “challenging” to “blocking”—
and kept track of how often the students
displayed them.
Afterwards, Duelge unclipped her microphone from her overalls and compared
her analysis of her behavior with that of six
observers who had been assigned to focus
specifically on her. While all were Alvern o
alumnae, and there fore familiar with the
assessment process, none had ever met
Duelge prior to that night.
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Alverno’s unique “ability-based” curriculum has attracted thousands of students
to the college’s Milwaukee campus. |
“We thought you did very well,” assessor
Jeanine Maly told Duelge. And the
longer Duelge stays at Alverno, the better
she will get at these group interactions,
Maly added. Maly was Duelge’s main
assessor, while the other five observers
were just learning their roles. Alverno
regularly uses more than 200 volunteer assessors to help students understand
what will be expected of
them once they graduate.
In painstaking detail, the
group told Duelge what they
had observed. They had recorded three instances in which
Duelge demonstrated “leading”
behavior—meaning that she had
taken charge of the discussion—
and encouraged her to do so
more often. They agreed that
Duelge did well at “information
giving” and “reinforcing,”
though they wished she had
stood up more for her preferred
candidate. Then they asked
Duelge to choose two behaviors
that she would like to improve
on. She picked “summarizing”
and “information seeking.”
It might sound clinical, but
former students say the method
is effective. “I take my abilities
for granted,” said assessor-in-training
Joan Schneider, 41, who
graduated from Alverno in 1998
and is now a cost accountant for
an insurance company. “It’s my
supervisors who will point out,
‘Not everyone can do this.’ And
I think a lot of it is because of the
abilities I learned at Alverno.”
Schneider, who spent ten years pursuing
her degree in business management and
computer studies before graduating in
1998, said the school taught her how to
provide evidence to back up her point of
view. Now, she said, “When I present issues
or concerns to management, they
can’t ignore it—it’s concrete.”
Even assessors who never attended
Alverno say there is something to it .
“We’re learning as well,” said Rod Johnson,
who has been a volunteer assessor for
Alverno for 17 years. A former manager at
an electronics company, Johnson said that
simply perf o rming the assessments made
him aware that he often took the lead and
wasn’t listening enough to his co-workers.
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| “You’re not going to college just to stuff your
mind with bits of trivia,” says Sister Joel Read, who has been president of Alverno College since
1973. | |
Duelge, who wants to be a teacher,
acknowledged that it was a little nerveracking to be under such close scrutiny.
During the discussion, she was too focused
to worry about the fact that she was on the
hot seat, but “I shook as soon as I left,” she
said. But she also said she thought it was a
very valuable exercise. “I will take things
away from what I learned tonight more
than [I would have gained from] a letter
grade or a test,” she said. “You can apply it
in your everyday life.”
The Wall Street Journal called Alverno
“a kind of post-feminist finishing school.”
But actually, its performance based approach feels more like a hybrid of the traditional
liberal arts college and a vocational
school. The course catalog even offers
suggestions for career choices related to
different fields of study.
Director of Research Mentkowski said
that’s exactly what is needed to prepare
students for today’s world. “I’m saying we
have to integrate the liberal arts and the
professional school,” she said. “The liberal
arts have to do what the professional
school does; the professional school has to
do what the liberal arts school does.”
That is why Alverno students are constantly
being asked to demonstrate their
skills at assessments like Sara Duelge’s .
Presentations and group projects are incorporated
into classes, and sometimes
video-taped so the student and faculty can
review their performances and see their
improvement over time. Students don’t
take tests or receive grades. Instead, they
receive elaborate critiques, or “assessments”
from their teachers and their peers,
and they also have to “self-assess.” That
way they develop a realistic notion of both
their strengths and their weaknesses.
“We believe in criticism,” said Austin
Doherty, a longtime faculty member and
now director of the school’s outreach
program. “A lot of people think that’s a
negative word, but we don’t.”
During a recent nursing class, sophomore Carol Strem and two of her class-mates
were critiquing a tape-recorded interview she had conducted with a mock
“client” about his health practices.
“Boy! I learned a lot about myself!”
said Strem, 42, after listening to the tape.
She noticed that she had tended to with-draw
when the interview wasn’t going well,
and that her voice dropped in pitch when
she was frustrated. “I can use this as a tool
now,” said Strem, who immediately began
to consider a visualization technique to
overcome her weaknesses. “When I get to
this point [again], I have to picture myself
getting bigger and bigger and bigger.”
“Being able to interview effectively is
the whole basis on which nurses make
good judgments,” said Nursing Professor
Zita Allen, explaining why she has her
students practice. “We talk about being
socialized into the profession of nursing—
that by doing it, you get it. By having [the
students] experience this in a controlled
setting, we can avoid mistakes.”
Allen has been teaching at Alverno for
30 years—since before the curriculum
changed. “In some ways it was easy being
the expert on the stage,” said Allen. “This
takes a lot more thinking.”
It also takes a lot more collaboration.
Faculty members must belong to two
departments: one representing their
academic discipline, the other representing
a skill or ability fundamental to that discipline.
That way Alverno discourages the
interdepartmental rivalries that exist on so
many campuses, and ensures the cohesiveness
of the curriculum. And like the
students, faculty also have to submit to
teaching assessments by their own peers.
Teaching is considered more important
than publishing; and when they are
published, much of what Alverno faculty
write is related to teaching.
Students said the Alverno approach
occasionally gets tiresome. But they also
said it works. Over and over again they
credited the small class sizes, public
presentations and self-assessments with
changing the way they relate to their
family, their peers and their co-workers.
“Business people will say that in a group
they can always point out who’s an Al-verno grad,” said Vice President for Aca-demic
Affairs Kathleen O’Brien. “They’ll
often say, ‘She can solve a problem,’ or
‘She’ll take the initiative.’”
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Alverno College nursing students Carol Stern (left), Mary Beth Slavick (center)
and Kelly Martin. “I used to think this was a lot of baloney,” Slavick said, but
“I’ve actually used some of the techniques.” |
Deborah Kozina agreed. As director of
communications and special events for
Catholic Knights, which sells life insurance
and other benefits, she’s had half a dozen
Alverno students work for her as interns.
“While all college students these days
are more grown up and professionally
equipped than in years past, there’s a difference” between the Alverno students
and students from other colleges, said Kozina,
who has gone on to hire two of the
interns for her Milwaukee office and
would have hired all of them had there
been job positions available. The Alverno
women “have a professional poise” that is
noticeable, she said, and enables them to
jump right in during staff meetings.
“There’s a sense of self, and they’re able to
think well on their feet,” Kozina said.
“I used to think this was a lot of baloney,” said sophomore nursing student Mary
Beth Slavick. But in fact, said Slavick, 36,
“I’ve actually used some of the techniques.”
She is more apt to listen to her children
now, she said, and less inclined to block
them out or dominate the conversation.
Senior Jessica Ginster, 31, used the social
skills she had learned at Alverno to
confront an abusive boss. Once so lacking
in self-confidence that she almost failed a
class due to repeatedly poor self-assessments,
Ginster calmly explained to her
boss that his explosive behavior was costing
him productivity.
“Before, I would have thought, ‘You’re
being a girl. You’re being too emotional,’”
said Ginster, who is getting a degree in
philosophy and plans to study bioethics in
graduate school. “I would have thought he
was absolutely unfixable. And I probably
would have quit.” Instead, her boss is now
in counseling, and she meets with him on a
weekly basis to discuss his behavior
modification.
There is no end to the dramatic success
stories. Still, it takes time for the Alvern o
approach to work—and it may not work
for everyone. (Seventy-nine percent of
first-year students return for a second year,
and 57 percent graduate within six years.)
Even though there are no grades at the
college, students can fail a course if they
don’t prove they’ve mastered the abilities
that it is designed to teach.
During a Natural Science, Math and
Technology course, about 15 students were
performing pendulum experiments with
metal balls and string. Working in small
groups, they were learning how to develop
hypotheses and make observations, predictions
and inferences. But Professor Ann
van Heerden reminded them of what they
really were learning. “What I’m hoping
you’ll get out of this class is learning what
goes into problem solving,” she told them.
Problem solving wasn’t coming easily to
freshmen Jessica Kacz, 18, and Angie
Branson, 19. They couldn’t grasp why van
Heerden had instructed them to clock ten
swings of the pendulum, then divide by
ten, rather than trying to clock just one
swing, which was too fast to time accurately. And they also had difficulty graphing
their results, until van Heerden coaxed
them along.
Neither Kacz nor Branson had done
particularly well in high school, and they
were just beginning to adjust to the concept
of learning for learning’s sake.
“In high school I would just get a D,
and I wouldn’t worry about it anymore,”
said Branson. But at Alverno, there aren’t
any grades. She can’t move on until she
actually masters the skill. “In high school, I
went because I had to. Here I’m going
’cause I want to learn,” she said.
Added Kacz: “In high school, they just
graded my paper and that was it.” But at
Alverno, she said, her teachers point out
her strengths and her weaknesses—so she
knows what she needs to work on. “I think
they’re concerned with our welfare,” she
said. “It makes you try a little harder.”
After class, Professor van Heerden said
she knew Kacz and Branson were struggling.
But she also believed that Alverno
could help them. “I’ve seen students like
this before, and I’ve seen where they can
go,” said van Heerden, who has been at
Alverno seven years. “Seeing the way that
the students grow in confidence and ability — that’s what sold me on the curriculum.”
While most colleges measure the success
of their alumni by income, Alverno
actually wrote a book analyzing its graduates’
post-college lives. The result, Learning
That Lasts: Integrating Learning, Development,
and Performance in College
and Beyond, offers an in-depth look at the
school’s alumnae, based on a study that
charted the progress of 358 Alverno graduates.
The results proved what Alverno administrators
had believed all along. Five years
after graduation, 95 percent of the alumnae
were employed; 60 percent were working
in professional positions in their area of
study; another 26 percent held higher level
positions. And 88 percent of those working
were in jobs that required a college degree—a significant figure since most of
them worked in jobs that didn’t require a
degree before entering Alverno. So it
wasn’t surprising that 79 percent improved
their economic status compared to their
mothers, and 66 percent compared to their
fathers.
Twenty-five percent had enrolled in
graduate school; another 26 percent had
pursued further education in other ways.
The numbers looked good. But Alverno administrators wanted to look deeper, to evaluate how their former students
solved problems, interacted with others,
communicated and expressed their values.
“If we compare our graduates to graduates
from other institutions, that would not be a
high enough standard for us,” said principle
author Marcia Mentkowski. “In general,
the public is not satisfied with graduates
of other institutions. So we have to set
higher standards—that is, ‘What are outstanding
contributors to society like?’”
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| Austin Doherty is director of the
Alverno Institute, which offers workshops in the college’s approach to teaching and learning. | |
The Alverno alumnae did well by those
standards, too. The authors concluded that
the Alverno graduates “were deeply collaborative,
sensitive to differences, caring
and balanced in how they approached the
perspectives of others. They often used a
wide range of intellectual and interpersonal
abilities to find and solve complex
problems. By combining their interpersonal
abilities and intellectual abilities in
distinct ways, they kept learning through
their ongoing performance, and they found
ways to make meaningful contributions to
the lives of others.”
Alverno’s success with its students is
perhaps more impressive given their diversity. Thirty-seven percent of the students
are minorities; more than 67 percent
are first-generation college students; and
89 percent receive financial assistance to
help pay the annual $11,400 tuition (which
is slightly more for nursing students, slightly
less for the school’s weekend program).
Though some students enroll directly out
of high school, the vast majority are over
23 years old; many are married with families
and other responsibilities. And while
the school is Catholic, its students represent
a variety of religious backgrounds.
An additional challenge is the students’
varied, in some cases poor, academic
background. Alverno will accept C, even,
in some cases, D students, if they appear
able to handle college work. Administrators see that as part of their mission.
“We’re educating people who are what the
world’s like today—and who will be in that
world,” said O’Brien, vice president for
academic affairs.
Alverno also is educating educators.
Outside interest in the curriculum led to
the creation of the Alverno College Institute,
which offers day-long and week-long
workshops that explain the school’s approach to teaching. Every year, dozens of
schools from all over the nation and numerous foreign countries send representatives
to the Institute. But Institute director
Austin Doherty said she does not believe
that all schools should necessarily
adopt the same approach. “We spread the
word,” Doherty explained. How other
schools decide to reach their goals is up to
them, she said.
In March 2000 the Pew Charitable
Trusts gave $1.1 million to Alverno so the
Institute can work with 26 other colleges
that want to make student learning the
organizing principle of their campus. The
18-month project will culminate in a
book.
Ironically, while Alverno’s academic reputation
continues to grow among its peer
institutions, the school is not particularly
well-known among potential students or
their high school counselors. Most of the
students come from the greater Milwaukee
a rea; only 4 percent are from out-of-state
or overseas.
The college actually has lost student
population in the past few years, from a
high of more than 2,400 to its current enrollment
of about 1,930. It is trying to reverse that trend by appealing to younger
students, with athletic programs and other
on-campus activities. Like other are a
schools, Alverno also has an aggressive
marketing campaign.
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Alverno students ponder a question posed in Professor Ann van Heerden’s Natural
Science, Math and Technology class. |
Undoubtedly, though, Alverno’s best
promoters are its students, who universally
love the place. The only downside to attending
the school, according to Stephanie
Duelge (no relation to Sara Duelge), is
that “not everyone has gone to Alverno!”
After seeing the changes in Duelge, her
boyfriend also would like to attend Alverno. But that is not likely to happen anytime
soon. Aside from a small co-educational
graduate program, Alverno administrators say they plan to keep the college
single-sex until and unless the world treats
women fairly.
Students said they liked the single-sex
aspect, which they said adds to Alverno’s
safe, caring atmosphere. “They make you
feel like there ’s nothing you can’t do,” said
senior Nina Hughes, 21.
Still, according to Alverno President
Read, “Alverno graduates are not sought
after because they’re kind, nurturing, compassionate
people. They’re sought after
because they can perform.”
