Message from Dr. Belinda S. Miles – February 5, 2016
Our Achieving the Dream coaches completed another two-day visit by meeting with many of you and offering insight and perspective on our student success initiatives. Many of you have devoted significant time and resources to Achieving the Dream and others are still seeking understanding about how the college benefits from this association and what it means for you personally. Achieving the Dream helps us in two ways. First, it focuses our attention on student success. It asks all of us to think intentionally about how our work and our decisions support measurable student progression through the college.
Second, Achieving the Dream helps us coordinate our efforts, pull together the programs and interventions that work, and spread those practices across campus. We work on this through various committees, including the Achieving the Dream core team, Faculty Senate, PRESS, Strategic Enrollment Management, Policy and Procedures, and others. These are important groups that will focus on student service and success.
Achieving the Dream is a not program we implement, it’s a way of thinking and acting that we adopt to work in a coordinated and disciplined matter to improve outcomes for more students. It’s not new work, it’s a way to improve and expand the many great efforts already underway.
The variety of committees and initiatives throughout the college ensures that there is sufficient room for everyone to be engaged in our student success work. We must continue to evolve to:
- incorporate our various activities into a coherent college-wide student success narrative
- commit to strategic performance indicators create meaningful outcomes for our students and institution
- minimize duplicated efforts by integrating teams that have overlapping purposes.
Whether you are faculty, staff, or administration, and whether you work in academic affairs, student affairs, or any of the other functional areas, everything you do can and should promote student success. I look forward to engaging with all members of the college community to do this mission’s critical work.
Thanks for making it a great week.
Cheers,
Belinda S. Miles
President