Alamo Colleges' Selected for New Statewide Peer Coaching Initiative
By: Kay Hendricks
Friday, February 22, 2013
The Alamo Colleges is one of seven Texas community colleges chosen to participate in the new Achieving the Dream Texas Peer Coaching Initiative (TPCI), funded by a $185,000 grant from the TG Public Benefit grant program. This initiative is designed to accelerate the transfer of effective practices from college to college, with the long-term goal of positively impacting sustainable student outcome gains in Texas. The Alamo Colleges will receive a grant of $10,000 from Achieving the Dream, Inc. to assist with activities associated with the initiative.
Through the TPCI, the Alamo Colleges will provide support to five Texas community colleges on evidence-based effective student success strategies. The participating community colleges are Cy-Fair, Montgomery, North Harris, and Tomball from the Lone Star College System, and Victoria College.
Faculty, staff, and college administrators from the participating colleges made a recent visit on February 14-15 to learn about effective practices taking place at the Alamo Colleges. Faculty and staff from the five Alamo Colleges presented on topics related to developmental mathematics and student services.
"As a long term partner with Achieving the Dream, the Alamo Colleges is ideally positioned to take the next step forward with this initiative to further our student success goals," said Alamo Colleges' Chancellor Dr. Bruce Leslie.
“These seven Achieving the Dream Leader Colleges have already demonstrated commitment to and progress on the principles of Achieving the Dream and have shown an increase in student achievement, and are therefore poised to assist other institutions in the student success movement,” said Rachel Singer, vice president of Achieving the Dream, Inc.
With nearly half of all higher education students enrolled at community colleges, the U.S. cannot close its skills gap without a concerted effort to increase community college persistence, retention, and completion through effective student success strategies. Many community colleges are on this path and have developed and implemented promising student success initiatives and realized increased student success outcomes. Though these colleges are making great progress, it is difficult to spread these effective practices to other community colleges so that more students can benefit from these interventions and so the nation can reach our education and workforce goals.