THE PROJECT
Colorado Higher Education Systems
Bringing instructors together from across Colorado’s two-year and four-year institutions to support student success in Gateway Math and English courses through learning mindsets
THE CONTEXT & CHALLENGE
The Colorado Community College System (CCCS) and the Colorado Department of Higher Education (CDHE) serve a variety of two-year and four-year institutions across the state. They have been implementing developmental education reform in their Gateway Math and English courses to adopt a corequisite model since the early 2010s, with the central goal of enhancing student outcomes in these courses and reducing equity gaps in persistence and graduation rates, particularly for Black and Brown students, first generation students, and low-income students. Strong Start to Finish is a national initiative focusing squarely on this same outcome, partnering with state entities like the Department of Education and Community College system in Colorado to financially support their efforts to pursue this central goal.
THE PARTNERSHIP & APPROACH
With support from Strong Start to Finish, Colorado sought Motivate Lab’s assistance to help them achieve their goal of improving student success rates in Gateway Math and English courses. We designed a set of activities (i.e., the Colorado Mindset Academy) for instructors who teach Gateway Math and English courses, including three core activities. Participants in the Colorado Mindset Academy were asked to:
- Distribute a student survey of learning mindsets to their students
- Complete Motivate Lab’s Introduction to Learning Mindsets course, which is a brief (45-60 minute) introduction to our more in-depth Motivating Learners Course. The course introduces instructors to Growth Mindset, Purpose & Relevance, and Sense of Belonging (i.e., Mindset GPS), three key learning mindsets that play a significant role in student success in higher education.
- Attend an in-person convening to deepen their knowledge of learning mindsets and plan how they will put this knowledge into practice
Over 30 Math and English instructors from across the state signed up to be a part of the Colorado Mindset Academy. These instructors collected learning mindset data from 276 students in their courses.
THE LEARNINGS
- Of the instructors who completed our Introduction to Learning Mindsets course, 96% agreed that the course was valuable for them. When we asked instructors if they would recommend the course to their peers on a scale of 1 (not at all likely) to 10 (extremely likely), the average was an 8.5.Â
- Our in-person convening culminated our partnership with a palpable spark of engagement among attendees, supporting them to fortify their understanding of learning mindsets, build fluency with identifying learning mindset supportive messages, and create plans for how they will take what they learned back into their classrooms and programs.
- The analysis of the learning mindset survey data from students is on-going.
NEXT STEPS
The most common question asked after the in-person convening was, “What’s next?” We are currently working with our system partners in Colorado to answer this very question. Our vision is to use the spark from the first iteration of the Colorado Mindset Academy to build momentum for this work to gain greater interest across the system. We also plan to work closely with a select group of Colorado Mindset Academy participants to build their skills with learning mindsets, enhancing their capacity to engage in this work with their colleagues at a grassroots level.
