Supporting Faculty's Student Success Work with Lisa Ratchford

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 Learn how to support faculty to ensure student success and equity.

In this episode, I interview Professor Lisa Ratchford who co-leads the Diablo Valley College faculty onboarding and professional development program known as Nexus.

(Scroll down to access the transcript.)

We cover the following topics:

8:39:21: Ingredients of the Nexus faculty onboarding and professional development program.
Nexus Program Website (To be updated)
- Equity is the foundation
- Reflecting on one's practice
- Solution-oriented training
- Connection between instruction and student services
- Nimbleness

15:15:01: How the ingredients are put together.
- Set number of hours faculty commit to per year
- Create a sense of belonging and community for faculty (like we should for students)
- Faculty are partnered with a mentor
- Connect faculty to the community they serve

23:20:24: How a series of racist graffiti incidences primarily against Black students resulted in student demands, including to improve faculty professional development.

30:09:14: Nexus program sample topics.
First two days:
- Model for faculty what they would do for students in the classroom
- Teaching word cloud
- The kind of climate we want to build for students
- Equitizing the syllabus
Then after the 2-day session, a series of workshops throughout the year that vary depending on the needs at the time. For example:
The Students We Serve (understanding equity gaps)
Take Stock of High Impact Teaching Strategies (how to address equity gaps)

41:41:10: Pedagogy Inquiry & Action Teams per meta-major (area of interest).

Co-led by faculty extraordinaire, Ian Thomas-Bignami and Kris Koblik.

46:21:10: Opportunities for equity work throughout the faculty experience.

51:27:05: Advice to launch a successful faculty onboarding program or to strengthen an existing one.

57:50:15: New online course: Effective Teaching & Classroom Practices.

Visit HERE for downloadable Nexus Program Materials

Select episode quotes:

"What we establish from the very beginning is something that we also try to help our new faculty establish in their classrooms, which is a sense of belonging. How do we ensure that our faculty are coming into the college and feeling immediately connected?"

"Historically, our bus tour for faculty was to visit sister campuses, but it has been transformed into a tour that connects faculty to the community they serve."

"It's important for us as faculty to be very familiar with all of the campus resources that are available to students and to embed them into our instruction."

"The Nexus program creates a space where we just really lay it all out on the table about what our concerns are about teaching, what our hopes are for what that classroom experience can feel like, and then develop some practical equity strategies and to support one another in how we do that. "

"We emphasize the importance of creating that sense of belonging, mattering, and inclusion in the classroom."

"Thank goodness for the student voice. It helped inform and improve our program. We are much more intentional about equity." 

"The initial 'Students We Serve' session is designed to help faculty know something about who the student body is. We cover student demographics, but it's also our opportunity to really front load the equity aspect of our training. We also share student success data and other key indicators, persistence, and data that are disaggregated by race so that our faculty are able to see college-wide some of these disparities in face-to-face and online learning. We also analyze data within different divisions or interest areas. It sets the tone for what our program is about. Why we put equity at the center."

About Professor Lisa Ratchford
Lisa is a Professor of Sociology and Women’s Studies, and the Chair of the Sociology and Social Science Department at Diablo Valley College. She completed her undergraduate education in Sociology at UCLA and her graduate studies at UC Berkeley. With 20 years of teaching experience at the community college and CSU, Lisa embraces a student centered, equity-minded approach to teaching, that encourages critical thinking and experiential learning in order to help students envision new possibilities. Lisa is also committed to creating an inclusive and racially just educational environment for students and faculty within her institution. Currently, she serves as the Co-Coordinator of the Umoja Program, a learning community that serves African American and other historically underrepresented students. Her involvement in transformative work across her college includes being an Academic Senate lead, an original organizer of the DVC Racial Justice Task Force, and a co-lead of the Ethnic Studies Workgroup and district-wide Advisory Council working on the development of the Ethnic Studies program. Lisa also coordinates the Nexus professional development program which is a year-long onboarding program for new faculty. Lisa’s role as the Nexus coordinator is to bring an equity focus to the training program and to design workshops that help faculty increase their knowledge of equity minded educational practices, and that engage faculty in important conversations about pedagogy, instructional techniques, student services, and their relationship to student success.

About Dr. Al Solano
Al is Founder & Coach at the Continuous Learning Institute. A big believer in kindness, he helps institutions of higher education to plan and implement homegrown practices that get results for students by coaching them through a process based on what he calls the "Three Cs": Clarity, Coherence, Consensus. In addition, his bite-sized, practitioner-based articles on student success strategies, institutional planning & implementation, and educational leadership are implemented at institutions across the country. He has worked directly with over 50 colleges and universities and has trained well over 5,000 educators. He has coached colleges for over a decade, worked at two community colleges, and began his education career in K12. He earned a doctorate in education from UCLA, and is a proud community college student who transferred to Cornell University.

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