Collaboration and Partnerships for Student Success at HBCUs
This is the second issue in a newsletter series that will serve as a report and thematic summary of content shared in the National Resource Center’s multipronged engagement of HBCUs in their work with the Advising Success Network (ASN).
HBCU Symposium Newsletter | August 20221
AUGUST 2022 ISSUE NO. 2
An initiative of the Advising Success Network and the National Resource Center for The First-Year Experience® and Students in Transition
The Center has identified HBCUs as spaces where some of the most innovative and effective work is being done to improve student success outcomes and advance equity. Yet, too often, the work at these institutions is not part of the larger dialogue about advising redesign and student success and, thus, the positive impact of their efforts has not been fully shared, celebrated, and modeled. As part of a commitment to engaging HBCUs in ASN activities, the Center created several dedicated channels for their involvement. One of these channels was a one-day Symposium, delivered live in October 2021 via a virtual conference platform. The Symposium represented a mix of plenary content delivered by invited speakers and interactive content proposed and presented by participants. Throughout the Symposium, presenters and other participants relayed collaborations and partnerships that are working to promote student success at their Asinstitutions.suchcollaborations can occur in many forms, this newsletter will highlight examples from organizations and institutions that contributed to the Symposium program and dialogue.
• finding out what staff members are already doing to collaborate with other entities – and what they have the ability to do; and sharing expectations among institutional partners (i.e., outcomes, challenges, victories).
Dr. Alayna Blash is associate director for student success at Spelman College; Dr. DeKimberlen Neely is an associate dean at Spelman. For their roundtable presentation, “Huddle Up: Collaborative Advising Efforts for Academically At-Risk Students,” Blash and Neely used the backdrop of athletics as a frame of reference for student success and collaboration across the institution.1.
3. Game Stats: Institutions need methods of assess ing how they are doing. Relative to sports, then, win ning can be defined by measuring variables such as:
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2. Friday Night Lights: With this second step, insti tutions put planning into action. Every institutional staff member has the opportunity to impact students directly. Institutions can make the most effective impact through their collaborative efforts by:
For students, solving the challenges of economic mobility can be a roadblock to success.To give potential graduates a competitive edge, Spelman partners with Braven, a national nonprofit that helps students reach a path to economic mobility. Using Braven’s resources, sophomore Spelmanites can receive mentoring, leadership coaching, learning labs, and 16 weeks of interviewing experience.
Elsewhere on campus, Spelman analyzes various data points to help it plan collaborative interventions with students. These collaborations include:
• oval walks with a dean, in which students have 20- to 30-minute walking conversations with a staff member from the Dean’s Office;
“We have to think about, what is the win?” Blash said during the Symposium. “On campus, it’s not that Student Success is winning, or that the Dean’s Office is winning, or the professor is winning. It’s really about the student winning and institutional winning. … We all can win.”
4. Monday Morning Quarterbacks: By analyzing their past efforts and building on them, institutions can work to improve students’ future college experiences.
• first-year study groups, which meet three times weekly to go over academic work and other topics dealing with the college transition and allow upperclassmen to serve as leads;
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Delivering on the Spelman Promise
Team Meeting: The first step toward possible part nerships requires planning. By narrowing down the campus stakeholders involved, institutions can better identify key players for this purpose. With these stake holders identified, an institution can then: organize its efforts; • recruit appropriate staff; set the tone for success as a universal goal; and • develop a plan for success that is flexible and rooted in the institution’s strategic plan.
• building trust and increasing effectiveness through frequent and transparent communi cation;
• retention, • GPA, • graduation, • employment outcomes, • utilization of services, and • faculty adoption of best practices.
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For Spelman, a winning game plan relies on three objectives:1.ensuring every student graduates with a compet itive edge; 2. inspiring an efficient, collaborative, and resultsoriented culture among faculty and staff; and 3. streamlining student processes.
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• What if you had unlimited resources on your campus? Dr. James Cabaniss, executive director of student success and retention at Elizabeth City State University, vouched for students’ impact on the advising process. With busy schedules for student services staff, including advisers, many cannot regularly assist students “on the hall” in residential spaces, Cabaniss said. At ECSU, students in on-campus living–learning communities can provide academic and peer support as academic housing advisers. Among other tasks, these advisers encourage fellow students to go to tutoring sessions, work with university staff to ensure students are in good standing close to midterm, and identify students who aren’t logging on to Blackboard to complete their coursework online. “Having someone who’s dedicated as a student that can assist has worked out very well for us,” Cabaniss said of the program.
Removing Barriers to Success
• a partnership between Spelman’s Office of Undergraduate Studies and the college’s Student Success Center.
By identifying what could be possible in a best-case scenario, student success staff and their institutions can bring their ultimate goals in closer focus. For a separate roundtable discussion, Blash and Neely solicited feedback on how collaborative advising efforts are leveraging on-campus partnerships to support academically at-risk students. To spark discussion, the presenters asked Symposium attendees a series of “What if?” questions, each of which presupposed a best-case scenario.
• What if all faculty participated in your efforts? Dr. Judetta Cowden, director of student retention at Talladega College, said higher participation by faculty at her institution has made for a more efficient advising process. When Cowden started work at Talladega’s Student Success Center, she didn’t see many students, she said.While faculty were still referring students for advising, faculty were accustomed to not hearing back from the center, creating a feedback “loop” that Cowden and her team worked to close. “There’s no wrong door,” she said. “If (students) come in, then we will assist them.” During advising, Cowden’s team will perform a “soft handoff” with the college’s admissions office, notifying them that a student needs academic support.
• Spelman’s College Completion Action Team, composed of representatives from all areas on campus who identify annual goals and strategies for the institution; and
• What if all barriers to student success were removed? While not an HBCU campaign, Appalachian State University’s Black Male
• What if every student responded to your email? In his role as a retention specialist and academic advisor at Dillard University, Corey Simms works with first-year and transfer students through Dillard’s University College program. The program puts personal interaction with students at a premium; besides advising firstyear students, support team members double as first-year seminar instructors and are housed in the same area as students. Along with increased interaction between students and staff because of the familiarity University College provides, Simms said Dillard recently has seen its women-dominated student population retain a larger percentage of men.
3 HBCU Symposium Newsletter | August 2022 • advising, which involves collaboration between Spelman’s faculty advisers and the college’s Student Success office, as Spelman does not use professional advisers; • quarterly meetings with the Student Success Program and the Dean’s Office; • “ask a” sessions with the Dean’s Office and the Student Success Program; • the use of EAB Navigate to communicate intervention efforts and outcomes (e.g., alerts, progress reports);
Course sharing provides a host of benefits for students, including:
Ultimately, Benedict eliminated some majors (e.g., math, history, religion) that were not proving productive for the college and introduced others (cybersecurity and justice administration) because of demand and enhanced course availability through course sharing.
• enhancing student success;
Finding Reasons to Share at Benedict
• boosting degree completion;
“When you are building out a program and it’s a new major, you may not have all of the faculty yet to teach those courses, but the students are here,” Lyn said during the Symposium. “The industry that they’re inter ested in says that you need this, this, this, this. How can we, in the time being, figure out a way to not hold the students up?”
• the ability to apply financial aid to current courses; and
• a stronger connection to students’ home institution (HI).
• an expanded course catalog to support progress and completion;
• insight into course quality and delivery;
• addressing inefficiencies;
• an open line of communication with teaching institutions; and
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Lyn addressed the effective use of technologysupported advising and student success initiatives as a high-impact strategy, with an emphasis on course sharing. As it highlighted collaboration between Bene dict and its external partners, this presentation took a different approach from the various alliances between on-campus partners at Spelman College and other Alonginstitutions.with her role at Benedict, Lyn is a senior fellow with Acadeum, a platform that powers online course sharing for colleges and universities. Acadeum helps institutions establish course-sharing partnerships for the purpose of:
• institutional credit – unlike in transfer courses, grades are awarded in courses at students’ current school;
Through course sharing, institutions are able to fill gaps in their current capabilities by accessing or sharing high-quality courses from like-minded institutions, making for valuable collaborations. For the National Resource Center’s Symposium, Dr. Jamila Lyn, a student success coach at Benedict College, facilitated a plenary session, “Integrating Online Course Sharing at HBCUs to Increase Student Success.”
The college was also able to eliminate scheduling challenges and roadblocks that normally could delay or prevent degree completion for some students.
Lyn explained how the course-sharing process led Ben edict to take a fresh look at its curricula and programs.
Along with the revenue generated from students, course sharing provides other benefits to HIs, including:
• supporting academic strategies; and
• greater control over the courses students take off campus.
Excellence Initiative is a residential living–learning community that aims to give first-year students a sense of belonging on campus while also helping develop connections with faculty, staff, and other students. As part of the initiative, Dr. Will Sheppard, assistant director of university housing and residence life at App State, teaches a required student success course while gathering expertise from across campus to help students learn skills such as financial literacy.
• credits that can count toward part- or full-time status;
• less management of transfer credits;
By helping institutions address imbalances in course supply and demand,Acadeum aims to support student progress while also boosting institutional efficiency.
• increasing institutions’ revenue.
The National Resource Center recognizes the importance of institutions forging new connections and reigniting older ones where possible. In the years to come, we look forward to sharing these with the community of HBCU educators and advocates as we are made aware of them. Such partnerships are hallmarks of student success and of best practices in advising.
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Stephanie McFerrin Designer Reed Managing editor Jennifer Keup Executive Director
Benedict developed a repository of courses that students can take to stay on track for degree completion; previously, after failing part of a course, students might have had to wait two semesters to retake it. Course sharing also provided students a level of grade recovery, as grades from course sharing are calculated into a student’s GPA at their home institution. Lyn remarked that this feature helped “energize” summer enrollment at Benedict, which launched a new MBA program as a result.
Publications Staff
The Advising Success Network (ASN) is a dynamic network of five organizations partnering to engage institutions in holistic advising redesign to advance success for Black, Latinx, Indigenous, Asian, and Pacific Islander students and students from low-income backgrounds. The network develops services and resources to guide institutions in implementing evidencebased advising practices to advance a more equitable student experience to achieve our vision of a higher education landscape that has eliminated race and income as predictors of student success. The ASN is coordinated by NASPA - Student Affairs Administrators in Higher Education, and includes Achieving the Dream, the American Association of State Colleges and Universities, EDUCAUSE, NACADA: The Global Community for Academic Advising, and the National Resource Center for the First-Year Experience and Students in Transition
Building upon its history of excellence as the founder and leader of the first-year experience movement, the National Resource Center for The First-Year Experience and Students in Transi tion serves education professionals by support ing and advancing efforts to improve student learning and transitions into and through higher Weeducation.achieve this mission by providing oppor tunities for the exchange of practical and scholarly information as well as the discussion of trends and issues in our field through the convening of conferences and other profes sional development events such as institutes, workshops, and online learning opportunities; publication of scholarly practice books, research reports, a peer-reviewed journal, electronic news letters, and guides; generating, supporting, and disseminating research and scholarship; hosting visiting scholars; and maintaining several online channels for resource sharing and communica tion, including a dynamic website, listservs, and social media outlets.
Cultivating Future Success
While the organizations and institutions listed here might vary in their collaborative approach, the impact of their engagement on student success at HBCUs is undeniable.
Todd Money Contributor Writer
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Kiisha Hilliard
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Because HBCUs must often look around campus and off campus to find support for students, a willingness to collaborate is vital – something the Symposium’s presenters and other participants made clear. The examples given also illustrate these institutions’ willingness to innovate – by making communication more transparent, using technology to expand course options, and overhauling traditional housing assignments for students and instructors, to name a few initiatives.
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Academic Advising as a Tool for Student Success and Educational Equity
The National Resource Center for The First-Year Experience and Students in Transition, a core partner in the Advising Success Network (ASN), is excited to share the first two of a three-part series of case studies concerned with demon strating innovation, institutional transformation, and advising initiatives focused on advancing equity. The first features institutional practices and examples dedicated to academic advising and the second highlights campus initiatives for career advising.
ADVISING SUCCESS NETWORK CASE STUDIES
The National Resource Center for The First-Year Experience and Students in Transition, a core partner in the Advising Success Network (ASN), is excited to share this three-part resource collection that foregrounds best advising practices rooted in a culturally relevant framework that affirms HBCU students and their unique perspectives, lived experiences and need for community connections. Read more about the HBCU Resource Collection here.
Career Advising as a Tool for Student Success and Educational Equity
Advising at HBCUs: A Resource Collection Advancing Educational Equity and Student Success
A full collection of work centered on holistic advising, trends in the field, relevant resources, and promising practices is available as openaccess resources through the Advising Success Network.
Read more about the academic advising case study collection here Read more about the career advising case study collection here.
HBCUCOLLECTIONRESOURCE
