René Cabrera helps Chris
Pope with his pre-algebra homework,
then moves to a neighboring
desk to tutor another fellow student at
Pasadena City College’s Teaching and
Learning Center. Cabrera, who is taking
Calculus II after getting an A in trigonometry
last winter, says he, too, started college
“as a student seeking help.” He
knows what it’s like to be frustrated.
In his high school, Cabrera recalls,
“math was portrayed poorly,” and he didn’t
do well, getting low grades in geometry
and algebra. A high school counselor told
him he didn’t need to take a second year
of algebra. “He said I wasn’t going to college,
so I didn’t need it.”
The middle child of five, Cabrera and
his sister are the first in their family to
attend college. He is just two
courses away from getting his
associate’s degree and transferring
to a four-year university,
ultimately aiming for a
Ph.D. in mathematics. He
loves to read math books in
the library and hopes to make
a contribution to that field.
The Teaching and Learning
Center (TLC), which
helped Cabrera and works
with 300 to 400 other students
in its core programs, is an
eight-year-old holistic approach
to guiding underprepared
students through math,
English and other challenges
of college. It is also trying to
revolutionize the way faculty
look at their students and
teach them. The center’s approach
is one that is spreading
through California community
colleges and across the
country, cross-fertilizing as it goes.
With the nation’s largest community
college enrollment, 2.6 million students at
110 schools, California is among many
states working to improve programs for
underprepared students. It established a
Basic Skills Initiative in 2006. Last year
the California legislature allocated $33.1
million to the state’s community college
system for this initiative, making it an
annual program for research and for
implementing changes.
Across the country, 15 other states,
ranging from Washington State to Florida,
and including 83 community colleges, are
participating in an effort, supported by the
Lumina Foundation of Indianapolis, to
improve developmental education programs.
For example, Washington State has
produced a math assessment test to determine
students’ readiness for college-level
work and hopes to administer it to at least
some high school juniors and seniors next
year, budget permitting. California has a
similar test, but only those students hoping
to attend a California State University
take it.
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Pasadena City College President Paulette J. Perfumo hopes to find permanent
funding for the college’s successful Teaching and Learning Center.
(Photo by Axel Koester, for CrossTalk)
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One approach encouraged by the
California initiative and long practiced at
Pasadena City College’s center involves
what educators call “learning communities,”
students who take a series of linked
courses together during their time on campus.
Schools throughout the United States
have turned to this concept. A 2002 survey
by the Policy Center on the First Year of
College, in Brevard, North Carolina,
found that among 341 responding community
colleges, 60 percent offered learning
community programs. That’s the last year
for which data are available, but experts
say the figure is higher now because so
much research has appeared underlining
the value of this approach.
PCC’s center combines learning communities
with a summer program, tutoring
and counseling services, heavy faculty
involvement with students, and built-in
research leading to creation of new programs.
Its work has yielded higher success
rates for its students—a majority of whom
are Hispanic—than those of the overall
campus population, although all of the
students in the core “.XL” program tested
below college-level in either math or
English or both.
The program is called .XL because
that “sounded high tech,” said co-director
Brock Klein. It also means “excel.” Its
three student cohorts from 2005 to 2007
had a 78.5 percent success rate, meaning
students completed classes with a C or
better, compared to a 65.9 percent rate for
all PCC students, including those who
intend to transfer to four-year schools, and
59.4 percent for students in basic skills
classes that are not part of the Teaching
and Learning Center.
The college, located in the San Gabriel
Valley of Los Angeles County, this fall
enrolled 29,857 full-time and part-time
students. The city of Pasadena, about ten
miles north of downtown Los Angeles,
once was considered a white enclave, but
its population has changed. The college
district’s area now has no majority ethnic
group. Today PCC’s student body is 37
percent Hispanic.
Pasadena City College has seen a
surge in first-generation college students,
posing challenges for the school. California
community colleges admit virtually
all comers, and in fall 2007, 61 percent of
new PCC students placed below collegelevel
in English proficiency, and 88 percent
were below college-level proficiency in
math.
“The way we did business in the past is
not the way we can do business in the
future,” said Robert Miller, Pasadena’s
associate dean for academic support. “It
doesn’t matter why” the students lack college-
level proficiency, he added. “They are
here.”
Asked whether high schools should
have prepared these students better, Klein
said, “It’s easy to point fingers. You deal
with what you have.” It would be nice, he
added, “if there were a silver bullet to fix
the schools. But if there were, we would
have found it already.”
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Carlos “Tito” Altamirano (left) joins René Cabrera (right), as he tutors Chris Pope at the
Teaching and Learning Center at Pasadena City College.
(Photo by Axel Koester, for CrossTalk)
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The Teaching and Learning Center
staff doesn’t wait for students to come to
them—it recruits actively. Outreach coordinator
Melva Alvarez works with 11 area
high schools, telling students what is available
to help them, and making sure “they
are on the right path from beginning to
end.” Typically, Alvarez receives 300 to 350
cards from high school students indicating
their interest in attending PCC; of that
number, 200 take an assessment test (it is
not mandatory for the college but is
encouraged for TLC programs), and 120
actually sign up.
In addition to the learning communities,
another aspect of the center’s basic
skills work is Math Jam, a two-week, noncredit
summer program that tries to introduce
students to college math by making it
fun. A third element, summer bridge, is a
required program for all students enrolled
in most .XL programs that not only
immerses them in math, reading and writing but also helps them learn about
the campus and the learning communities.
Victor Aquino, who
attended the summer program
before his fall classes this year, said
that without the program, “I would
have started here without any
friends.” Having the same people
in his classes makes it easier to “get
into groups to talk about math or
brainstorm about doing your
essays.”
Extensive tutoring is available
weekdays from 30 tutors (13 paid,
and 17 volunteer) at the TLC lab,
which doubles as the program’s
offices. There are frequent field
trips, such as the one taken by an
oceanography class to the Arroyo
Seco, not far from campus. The
trip enabled students to see firsthand
the forces—man-made as
well as seismic—affecting the flow
of water from the narrow trickle in
a creek bed near the Jet
Propulsion Laboratory to the
Pacific Ocean.
Ongoing analysis has regularly
led to refocusing the program. For
example, a second-level summer
bridge session was added to try to reduce
the number of dropouts after the first year
of classes. TLC also added .XL experiences
aimed at students planning to enter
nursing or other health sciences, business,
art or teaching. “Where we were in 2000,
we aren’t now,” said Klein.
Statistics show that these approaches
produce results. For example, TLC
reports that 25 percent of the group of students
who began the .XL program in summer
2005 finished remedial math classes
and registered for transfer-level math
classes at the end of nine semesters, compared
to 11.1 percent of other basic skills
students.
Statistics are one measuring stick, personal
testimonies another. Take Carlos
“Tito” Altamirano, who is now
the TLC lab coordinator. After
he was expelled from one high
school for carrying a hunting
knife he forgetfully left in his
backpack after a hiking trip,
Altamirano says he woke up and
decided to do better in school.
But he raced through PCC’s
math and English placement
tests because his sister had a softball
game. He scored low and
had to take basic math and
English courses.
Altamirano, 26, accidentally
signed up for one of the TLC
English courses and fell in love
with the program. In his first
semester he received help from
tutors, so he began volunteering
for Conexión, a tutor/mentor
program. “You have to do it two
hours a week minimum, but I
was doing it about two hours a
day,” he said. “You learn a lot by
teaching other people. I hadn’t
really paid a lot of attention to
nouns and verbs and adverbs, but
you have to do that when you are
tutoring.”
Altamirano graduated from PCC in
2004 and earned a bachelor’s degree in history
from the University of Southern California
in 2006. He is now working toward
a USC master’s degree in education in
postsecondary administration and student
affairs and wants to be a counselor.
Meantime, he has also been in the active
Marine reserves and served in Iraq as a
field radio operator from January to June
2003.
He is what the TLC program considers
“a pacer,” that is, “somebody who pushes
the community beyond the standard that
has been set,” as Klein described it. “Tito
was an early member of the peer tutoring
group. Soon he was helping on a camping
trip,” Klein said, adding that Tito and his
father built the obstacle course that students
completed as a team exercise for an
Outward Bound-style part of the summer
program.
Faculty find themselves changed by
the program, too. Ann Davis, who joined
the math faculty in 2001, got involved with
the center when Klein had a pizza party. “I
learned there is no such thing as a free
lunch,” she said. “I didn’t see the potential
until Brock had that party. He said if you
want to do something, talk to me.”
Davis started a math faculty inquiry
group, a collaborative effort in which professors
examine how students learn and
how they can improve their teaching. “It
completely changed my life. I found leadership
skills I didn’t know I had. There was
no financial incentive, but people would
stay until 10:00 on a Friday night rewriting
the curriculum. They were so excited.
Brock spun that into completely rewriting
the lowest math course.”
Jay Cho, another pre-algebra teacher,
shared the lead with Davis in this effort.
The group discussed the concepts they
wanted their classes to grasp and how to
get them there. One tool that Cho developed
was “think aloud,” a videotape of his
students saying out loud what they were
thinking as they tried to solve a math
problem.
“As teachers, we assume a lot of stuff
about how students learn,” Cho said. “But
this way we could see that students do this,
and this and this. We could analyze how
the students do the work,” he said, and
then teach them using those steps.
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Brock Klein is co-director of Pasadena City
College’s “holistic” approach to teaching basic
skills.
(Photo by Axel Koester, for CrossTalk)
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Faculty members also teach their students
study skills. Cho tells his math students
to label their equations so he will
know what they are doing. Silvia
Villanueva, who teaches English, wants
her students to underline key passages in
their reading so that the material will sink
in. She urges them to stop and look up
words they don’t know. David Douglass,
division dean for natural sciences and professor
of geology, tells the students on the
Arroyo Seco field trip to keep notebooks,
put their names in them in case the notes
get lost, and include in them the diagrams
of faults and sections of the river that he
draws on a large portable tablet. It’s his
way of making them pay attention and
assuring that they’ll have the material to
study later.
TLC faculty like Villanueva and
Monika Hogan, another English teacher,
spend large amounts of class time going
over reading material with students.
About one-third of the students in
Hogan’s English class—the first-level class
for college transfer credit—were with her
previously in basic classes. The students
are preparing for health services careers,
and she has them reading Susan Sontag’s
“Illness as Metaphor.” Hogan talks with
the students about any problems they had
with the essay and the arguments Sontag
used. This is not easy reading, she knows,
but the discussion is lively.
What happens to these students when
they transfer to four-year colleges or universities
where professors might not
involve them as much in the class work?
Hogan said that the training at PCC
“teaches them how to get the help they
need. They have a remarkable amount of
strategies” toward that end.
Today’s college students are much different
to teach than were those of their
parents’ generation, said PCC President
Paulette J. Perfumo. ”They have on iPods,
they are texting, they are working on computers,
and at the same time they are
answering a question from mom or dad,”
she said. “Brain research is showing that
all this technology is remapping the brain.
You think they are not paying attention,
but they are.”
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High school recruiter Melva Alvarez works with Teaching and Learning Center students
Lisette Robles, Ian Galeana and Lauren O’Neill.
(Photo by Axel Koester, for CrossTalk)
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TLC students face a variety of out-ofclass
challenges separating them from
more affluent college students. Many have
little money, and even though tuition is
low—$20 per credit hour—they have
nothing left for expensive textbooks, so
TLC has a textbook loan program.
Other students might miss class
because they are the only members of
their family who speak English, and
grandma needs to go to the doctor. Or
their parents don’t see education’s longterm
value and insist that they get jobs
instead of studying. Or families are evicted
from their homes. “One student was supporting
herself when her car broke down,
and she didn’t have the money to fix it,” so
she dropped out of school, Davis recalled.
“What these students work with, I
would call daily life struggles that impinge
on their ability to focus” on schoolwork,
Robert Miller said. “They have responsibilities
that extend beyond themselves. We
have to have the flexibility and level of
caring that allows us to say the rules can
be bent and sometimes must be bent.”
The Teaching and Learning Center
grew out of a five-year, $2 million Title V
Hispanic-Serving Institutions grant from
the U.S. Department of Education. That
grant allowed the center to develop a variety
of learning community models and to
transform a former arts studio into the
center’s home. Students go there to do
their homework and to socialize.
Since 2005, a three-year grant from the
Hewlett Foundation, managed by the
Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement
of Teaching, has been helping
Pasadena and ten other California community
colleges explore ways to teach and
assess their students under a program to
strengthen basic skills education. Each
school has received $100,000 a year.
“There’s now a network of faculty and
leaders like Brock (Klein)” who are sharing
ideas and making their programs into
laboratories for change, said Rose Asera, a
senior scholar at the Carnegie Foundation.
Asera believes that one key gain from
this effort “is the redefinition of professional
development—linking it directly to
a student program.” Schools can make this
work meaningful to faculty, as opposed to
the episodic, uncoordinated stabs at it that
have often occurred in the past, according
to a Carnegie report. “It’s not impossible,”
Asera said. “We have examples of it.”
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David Douglass, a professor of geology, leads Pasadena City College students on an
oceanography class field trip, part of the Teaching and Learning Center program.
(Photo by Alex Koester, for CrossTalk)
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TLC’s funding also includes a threeyear
grant from the Irvine Foundation,
which the center has used to develop its
short summer non-credit programs in
math, reading and art. Even a little exposure
to math helps students do better in
the fall, the center has found. In addition,
a five-year grant from the National
Science Foundation aims at increasing the
number of students receiving degrees in
science, technology, education and math.
What would happen to the center if
foundation funding dried up? Perfumo,
who began her presidency in fall 2008,
plans to “work to institutionalize it,” that
is, to integrate the program into the regular
college budget and academic structure.
“We are fortunate that three years ago
the state Basic Skills Initiative was established,”
Perfumo said. “So there is money
available.” If the grants dried up, she
added, “I think we would back-fill it with
other money.” The center has been successful
not only in helping first-generation
college students but “also as a teaching
center for faculty. It has become an incubator
for innovation and dissemination of
that innovation across the campus.”
TLC’s budget is $518,000 a year—for
salaries, faculty development stipends,
tutors, external evaluation, supplies and
the textbook loan program. When asked if
it could be a line item in next year’s budget,
Perfumo said yes.
California had just passed its 2008-09
budget when Perfumo was interviewed. In
the ensuing meltdown of financial markets,
even that overdue, stringent budget
faced new challenges. No one knows yet
what those tests might be.
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Jay Cho (second from left) meets with some of his Teaching and Learning Center
students (left to right): Jonathan Olmos, Martin Rosas, Jennifer Zavala and Carla
Gonzalez.
(Photo by Alex Koester, for CrossTalk)
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Perfumo and the TLC want to increase
the program’s impact across the campus.
Currently, at most, 1,400 students participate
in some part of the center’s work.
Klein and co-director Lynn Wright wonder
about the program’s scalability. “If an
intense, sustained intervention provides
the best results, can you scale up?” Klein
asked. “Where is the tipping point that it’s
too big, the teachers not involved enough,
the attention not personal enough?”
Perfumo said that she believes the
learning community concept can be of value
throughout the college. “Again,
research shows that [students] are retained.
They do better. They help each
other. That’s critical. It’s absolutely magic.”
The California Legislature and the
community colleges consider basic skills
education “one of the top priorities” upon
which postsecondary studies build, according
to a June 2008 report from the state’s
Legislative Analyst. California’s community
colleges provided basic skills instruction
to more than 600,000 students in 2006-07,
the report said, yet only about 60 percent
completed English courses with C grades
or better, only 50 percent for basic skills
math courses.
The report adds that while research on
these efforts has grown considerably, some
of the district’s policies and individual
schools’ practices diverge from what the
research shows to be effective. For example,
the report said that many incoming
students “do not undergo mandatory
assessment,” some are not required to
take remedial work within a certain time
frame, and substantial numbers are not
provided with required orientation and
counseling services.
The creation of this Basic Skills Initiative,
the spread of learning communities
and faculty inquiry groups, the increased
attention to community colleges in general
on both the state and national level are
providing synergy for change, according to
Klein. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen a more
likely moment,” he said. “There’s a convergence
of energy, interest, opportunity,
from government, non-profits, foundations.
Lots of people are thinking about
community colleges.”
