Student Success Implementation Toolkit

Community college strategic plans include a number of top goals and priorities that senior leaders wish to achieve. However, these goals often lack clear definitions, implementation steps, and success metrics. EAB recommends that community college leaders consider the S.M.A.R.T. goal framework when outlining campus-wide goals. S.M.A.R.T. goals are defined as specific, measurable, attainable, realistic, and timely. Use this framework to ensure that goals can be acted upon in a strategic manner.

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Goals outlined in community college strategic plans are rarely connected to individual stakeholder’s roles and responsibilities. Consequently, stakeholders often question who is responsible for achieving each goal. The University of West Georgia utilizes scorecards to cascade the metrics tied to specific goals to administrators at each level of the institution. The sample scorecards below illustrate how this practice ensures that all stakeholders participate in achieving strategic goals.

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To ensure college-wide participation in strategic goals, senior leaders should delegate responsibilities related to each goal to various individuals and define metrics that assess their progress toward goal attainment. Utilize the following worksheet to outline S.M.A.R.T. goals and assign them to critical stakeholders on your campus. This worksheet should be used in tandem with Tool 1.

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Most academic administrators at community colleges only sporadically review course success data without a systematic approach to interpret it. As a result, they risk missing consistent signs of underperformance in certain courses, faculty, or departments. Spokane Falls Community College’s president utilizes the following questions to guide academic administrators through a comprehensive review of all course success data. Academic administrators should consider using the following worksheet to evaluate their own departmental or divisional course success outcomes.

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This tool is a sample of a recent job posting for the Rogue Central Specialist at Rogue Community College. The job description provides great detail on the expected duties of the registration case managers, as well as essential hiring criteria to ensure that staff who are adequately suited for the job are selected.

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Most community colleges invest in early alert systems to increase student success, but administrators are often disappointed by the lack of faculty participation. Faculty report that early alert systems are particularly difficult to use, which prevents their frequent submission of student risk flags. Our research identified numerous ways in which colleges can redesign elements of their early alert submission platform and process to ease faculty use. Refer to the following checklist to evaluate the usability of your institutions’ current early alert model.

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Most community college administrators expect faculty to submit early alert flags about their students, but they provide faculty with little guidance and direction. Consequently, faculty often submit early alerts far into the semester, when intervention is too late. In the practice profiled on pages 38‒39 of Getting to the Next Phase in Student Success, Santa Fe College prompts faculty teaching high-risk courses (e.g., developmental courses and gateway courses) to submit early alerts sooner than the rest of campus. When implementing this practice, consider using the following reporting calendar from Santa Fe College as a guideline.

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Community college faculty often underutilize early alert systems because they must balance many other responsibilities. Santa Fe College reminds faculty to submit early alerts through email messages that explain the necessary steps. Use their sample email below as a guideline when crafting your own messaging campaigns to faculty. Refer to the callout boxes for essential elements of a successful email.

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Committees and task forces often repeatedly call on the same individuals for participation. To ensure diversity among task forces and committees, EAB recommends sending emails that advertise such opportunities campus wide. These emails should highlight specific roles and skills that the committee needs, and they should adhere to the following criteria. Use this sample call-to-action email, used with permission from Southwestern Community College, as a reference when creating your own.

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Community college committees, initiatives, and task forces are often created as ad hoc responses to issues deemed urgent. The scattershot nature of task force creation results in suboptimal allocation of resources, time, and energy. Intentional design and careful planning are necessary to optimize task force productivity. When administrators at Grand Rapids Community College propose and determine whether to implement new initiatives, they use a comprehensive worksheet to outline its key elements. Consider using the following worksheet as a guide.

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Community college committees and projects are often phased out in an unsystematic way, resulting in inefficiencies and lack of communication about the motivation for sunsetting. Grand Rapids Community College created a worksheet that the leader of each initiative must complete when attempting to sunset the project. Senior leaders complete and review this worksheet to ensure that a record is made of the accomplishments of the project. This process also allows time for reflection on whether the project has achieved its goals. Consider using this template as a guide when creating sunsetting worksheets for your institution.

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