Community College Professional Development Reading: Higher Ed & Org Culture

Higher education is broken, and we haven't been able to fix it. Even in the face of great and growing dysfunction, it seems resistant to fundamental change. At this point, can anything be done to save it? The Instruction Myth argues that yes, higher education can be reformed and reinvigorated, but it will not be an easy process. In fact, it will require universities to abandon their central operating principle, the belief that education revolves around instruction, easily measurable in course syllabi, credits, and enrollments. Acclaimed education scholar John Tagg presents a powerful case that instruction alone is worthless and that universities should instead be centered upon student learning, which is far harder to quantify and standardize. Yet, as he shows, decades of research have indicated how to best promote student learning, but few universities have systematically implemented these suggestions.

While community colleges have traditionally focused on providing students with opportunities to gain credentials for employment, the increasingly important question is: Are they preparing students for the looming dynamic, disruptive, and entrepreneurial environments ahead? This book addresses the urgent need for community colleges to prioritize entrepreneurship education both to remain relevant in a changing economy and to give graduate students the flexible and interdisciplinary mindsets needed for the future of society. It argues that entrepreneurial education should be offered broadly to a wide range of students, and across all disciplines; defines the key constructs for achieving this objective; and describes how to create entrepreneurial learning environments.

In Grading the College, Scott M. Gelber offers a comprehensive history of evaluating teaching and learning in higher education. He complicates the conventional narrative that portrays evaluation as a newfangled assault on the integrity of higher education while acknowledging that there are many compelling reasons to oppose those practices. The evaluation of teaching and learning, Gelber argues, presented genuine dilemmas that have attracted the attention of faculty members and academic leaders since the 1920s. By providing a deeper understanding of how evaluation operated before the dawn of high-stakes accountability, Grading the Colleges eeks to promote productive conversations about current attempts to define and measure the purposes of American higher education.

In Rethinking Class Size, the world's leading researchers into class size effects counter the dominant view that class size has no impact on pupil outcomes. Peter Blatchford and Anthony Russell reveal the influence of class size on all relationships and interactions in the classroom. They develop a new social pedagogical model of how class size influences work, and identify policy conclusions and implications for teachers and schools. The book is an invaluable contribution to the international debate on class sizes.

Offers readers a fascinating glimpse into a near-future where careers last 100 years, and education lasts a lifetime. The book makes the case that learners of the future are going to repeatedly seek out educational opportunities throughout the course of their working lives -- which will no longer have a beginning, middle, and end. Long Life Learning focuses on the disruptive and burgeoning innovations that are laying the foundation for a new learning model that includes clear navigation, wraparound and funding supports, targeted education, and clear connections to more transparent hiring processes.