This chapter discusses college completion for Latino/as who attend community colleges and the role of leadership in promoting completion. The chapter also provides a number of lessons for success drawn from the national initiative, Achieving the Dream.

An innovative position, a Student Success Coach, was created in response to a newly developed undergraduate-degree program on the recently established University of Minnesota Rochester campus. Student Success Coaches serve as the link between the academic and student affairs sides of the campus. They interact closely with students and faculty to…

This article examines why state planning and policy for higher education are increasingly focused on increasing educational attainment, quality, and the productivity of the system. It presents four "stories" which illustrate initiatives to improve attainment, quality, and productivity, but fall far short of exhausting the available material.

It is suggested that, among executives in higher education, particularly in operations management, professional development needs attention. Consideration is given to weaknesses in operations management, inadquacies of career ladders, departmental responsibilities, deanship duties, vice-presidential and presidential development, and reasons for…

A survey and case studies of southern institutions show a great diversity in approaches to instructional evaluation and considerable unevenness in both the effectiveness of the systems in achieving their purposes and in the validity of some of the practices used. (Editor/LBH)

A teaching improvement program is suggested that is based on four models now in use. Designed for individual, departmental, and institutional levels it includes diagnosis, help with problem-identification, linkage to new information, involvement of authorities, increase in organizational health, support for implementation, and more diagnosis. (JT)

One approach to institutional renewal and faculty development uses a teaching resource center run by and for faculty members, as illustrated in this article by the Center for Teaching Excellence at the University of Wisconsin-Parkside. It has improved instruction and raised faculty morale. (Author/LBH)

Teaching improvement and institutional renewal efforts often face pessimism about change, if not suspicion and resistance, but faculty teams can overcome these problems through an action-oriented but low-profile "organic" approach. The need for personal invitations by colleagues is shown. (Author/LBH)

Professional development programs for faculty have been tested and have been proven to work. They are shown to represent an important new human technology for achieving educational improvement, personal growth, and institutional renewal. (Author/LBH)

Findings from the Project on Institutional Renewal through the Improvement of Teaching (PIRIT) support those from other studies showing that faculty development programs can benefit both their participants and the overall campus climate. Data were gathered from a survey of faculty at 14 of the PIRIT institutions. (Author/LBH)

Many teaching improvement programs proceed with only minimal student participation, but students can make important contributions at each stage of program development--from assessing the changes needed to evaluating the results.