To address the professional development needs of learning community instructors at Kingsborough Community College, faculty coordinators and program directors developed a workbook for instructional teams. This workbook walks instructors through the collaborative process of creating and sustaining successful links and focuses on what we believe is…

In 2012, the "Educational Policy Improvement Center" (EPIC) analyzed more than 2,000 entry-level course documents collected from a stratified sample of two- and four-year public and private institutions of higher education (IHEs) to establish an empirical understanding of entry-level college course expectations. Based on the findings of…

While it is common for learning community programs to provide professional development to support their faculty, such support may not be sustained. This article reports on a professional development framework instituted at Kingsborough Community College, CUNY, that includes activities for faculty teams before, during, and after the semester. This…

In my work on the college's Committee on Multiculturalism and Ethnic Studies, I found that much of the written work done in our community college was based on lower level cognition, requiring none of the assessment or exploration that is emblematic of critical thought in a democracy. Most of the assignments asked students simply to recite…

Members of a site of the California Writing Project conducted the study in this article in partnership with a large, urban, low-SES school district where 93% of the students speak English as a second language and 69% are designated Limited English Proficient. Over an eight-year period, a relatively stable group of 55 secondary teachers engaged in…