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Meet Gloria, a 19-year-old community college student with a problem. She has just finished her first semester of college, having completed only six units. She's discouraged. Her teachers approached English and math like they did in high school. It didn't work for her then, and it doesn't now.
She thinks she's a good writer, but she was placed in a lower-level course before she could register for transfer-level English. She had more difficulty there than she had expected—she was supposed to do most of her writing in class or in the writing lab, but she felt she did her best work at home. Then she missed several classes to take her mother to a series of medical appointments. She withdrew from the class midway through the semester as it became clear that she probably wouldn't pass.
Diego Navarro (www.my-ace.org) is a full-time faculty member at Cabrillo College and founder of the Academy for College Excellence. He has served in advisory capacities for several organizations, including Achieving the Dream's Scaling-Up Advisory Panel, the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching's Statway “Do College” convening, the California Community Colleges' 3CSN Advisory Board, and the National Science Foundation's ATE review panels.
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