Monthly Archives: November 2013

How to FAIL at Engaging Faculty and Staff in Student Success Efforts

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This post was originally published on the Completion by Design blog. Completion by Design is a national initiative, funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, that works with community colleges to significantly increase completion and graduation rates. Read more about our work with Completion by Design.

You’ve been there before: grading papers, wrapping up a student advising appointment, and trying to muster the energy to make it through another committee meeting. You glance at your screen - a new email from your president announcing a new initiative that will boost student success rates. Details are scarce, but you’re promised that specific information is forthcoming.

What exactly, you wonder, is this student-success initiative? Didn’t we try something like this already? Do we even have time for this?How will it impact me?

At Public Agenda we spend a lot of time helping college leaders to engage their colleagues in student success efforts. We’ve encountered the above scenario time and time again, and over the past decade we’ve learned a thing or two about the do’s and don’ts of fostering meaningful and collaborative change toward improved student outcomes.

But instead of simply listing what we’ve learned, we’ve had some fun creating an “anti” how-to guide. In other words, if your goal were to fail miserably, how would you carry out a student success effort at your campus? In what follows, you’ll find our top-ten tips for failure, followed by the implications of these disastrous moves for what actually helps the work succeed.

1. Plan without Practitioners

There’s no better time to seek out the expertise of your faculty and staff than right at the beginning. Bringing in as many perspectives as possible to examine student success challenges will result in a better understanding of the problems and shared ownership of the solutions.

2. Talk, Don’t Listen

Engagement is a two way street, and the benefits of engagement come from listening – to students, adjunct faculty, advisers – about how they perceive student success challenges and how to tackle them. The most effective leaders and “change agents” are those who know that listening first and listening deeply are essential to sustainable change on behalf of student success and completion.

3. Start with the Solution, but Pretend You’re Listening

If you’ve already made a decision without input from those who will be asked to implement the idea, be clear about where input actually matters. Better yet, don’t make critical decisions without meaningfully engaging those who are closest to students and those who will be asked to implement new policies and procedures. People can live with decisions they dislike, but they cannot abide the disrespect signaled by empty-gesture consultation. You can demonstrate respect and cooperation by engaging your colleagues around the problems instead of telling them the solutions. The ideas that emerge will be stronger and more effective because of the collective wisdom and experience that created them.

4. Approach Completion as a Technical Problem

If only we were so lucky. Inadequate facilities and LMS glitches are examples of technical problems, or problems that can be solved by experts and authority figures. Boosting student completion is an “adaptive” problem, or one that is messy, has no easy answers, and requires the cooperation of many. Check yourself every time you’re tempted to treat the problem like it has an ‘easy’ solution. Easy answers are almost never the right ones.

5. Hold a Traditional Town Hall-Style Meeting

It’s tempting to “do engagement” by bringing everyone together in a large room, deliver a Power Point presentation, and provide a few minutes for questions. The “town hall” meeting format, however, will not help you to generate a shared sense of purpose. In fact, this meeting format all too easily stokes hostilities and empowers the least constructive voices. Focus groups, stakeholder dialogues carefully designed to promote candid--yet respectful and deliberative— conversation, and respectful department meetings are better formats for action-oriented dialogue that will advance your efforts.

6. Don’t Use Data in Making the Case

Everyone is stretched thin in an environment of scare resources and increasing pressure from every direction, and therefore attention to thoughtful case-making is critical to creating a sense of shared ownership for problems. Quantitative and qualitative data are critical to making the case for change.

7. Treat Data as Though They Speak for Themselves

Quantitative and qualitative data are critical to making the case for change, but they can backfire when introduced in a unidirectional data dump. No matter how compelling your data are, attention needs to paid to how data are translated and used by different audiences. Ideally, practitioners at every level should be engaged as partners in making sense of data.

8. Use Data to Shame

Part of the power of data resides in its ability to shock and surprise us out of our complacency, but it is painful work to face bad news emerging from qualitative or quantitative research. Care must be taken to support institutional practioners as true co-owners of both failures and successes, and this means avoiding the use of data to shame.

9. Write off Resistance as the Result of Mere Laziness

There are many reasons why one might run into pushback, but laziness is probably not one of them. More common sources of opposition are fear of change, heavy workloads, initiative fatigue, disagreement about the nature of the problem, lack of clear and consistent information about the initiative, etc. Begin by figuring out which of these conditions apply, and then act accordingly.

10. Communicate Sporadically, Inconsistently and Make Sure You Don’t Follow Up

You will encounter many challenges when working toward increasing student success, so you don’t need to create new ones by dropping the ball on communication. Whether you use a graphic to describe all of your initiatives, an FAQ, a weekly newsletter, or a standing agenda item at department meetings, make sure to regularly provide clear and consistent information about your efforts. If you hold structured listening sessions, it is imperative that you take the time to ensure that participants are kept apprised of how their input is being used.

Completion by Design colleges have made tremendous progress over the past two and a half years by avoiding these common pitfalls and learning from their mistakes. Check out these resources for concrete tips and strategies about engaging your campus community in student completion.


the panopticon is impossible, or why citizens must collect information

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(en route to Austin, TX) Yesterday, we heard an exemplary presentation on Community-Based Participatory Research (CBPR) by Berkeley professor Meredith Minkler, who is one of the leaders of the field. She told a perfect story of a research project that was a collaboration between university-based scholars and laypeople: in this case, workers in Chinese restaurants in San Francisco. The workers provided guidance that made the research interesting, original, and important. My colleague Sarah Shugars has a summary.

I was struck by a minor point that brings up a larger issue. The Berkeley researchers knew that non-fatal accidents are very common among restaurant workers. Their worker colleagues noted that restaurants’ first aid kits tend to contain only Band-Aids. The team therefore calculated the percentage of restaurants that do not maintain satisfactory first aid kits. In order to generate that statistic, they had to know how many Chinese restaurants there are. The City of San Francisco did not know. The restaurant workers contributed a precise count.

Now, a city could count its Chinese restaurants. It could send one of its paid employees to count, or it could hire a contractor for that purpose. But many of our political theories just assume that the state knows things. We take that for granted. On the contrary, knowing something as simple as how many Chinese restaurants exist raises layers of problems:

  • The state must care about the topic in order to collect the data. (To be fair to San Francisco, its health department participated in this project. My point is a general one about the need for the state to care.)
  • The state must pay for the data, which is not free. Collecting the data may be more expensive for the state than for other parties. For instance, Chinese restaurant workers can read signs in Chinese; most city government employees cannot.
  • The state must define the concept, which almost always raises value questions. (What is a genuinely “Chinese” restaurant? Why separate Chinese restaurants into their own category?)
  • The state must employ agents who act with integrity. For instance, a state employee who counts Chinese restaurants could take bribes to leave out some restaurants so that they would avoid scrutiny. That would ruin the data.
  • The state must collect the information competently. As I noted recently, “The same US government that can apparently tap almost any telephone in the world cannot harvest information that people voluntarily provide on the government’s own website regarding their eligibility for insurance.”
  • The state must pay attention to the data it collects. After all, “the state” is actually a whole bunch of human beings who do not automatically know what their colleagues know, let alone act on that knowledge.

Clearly, states should collect information as the basis of sound policy. We shouldn’t ask restaurant workers to do all the research about restaurants. But collecting good data is itself a political achievement. We can’t just presume it will happen. Nor is the best way to obtain it always for the state to buy it. For one thing, citizens can benefit from being the researchers. In this case, the same restaurant workers who collected the basic data also won significant reforms in city law. The process of data-collection took effort (for which they were paid on the grant), but it also gave them political power.

(See also “Why Engineers Should Study Elinor Ostrom“)

The post the panopticon is impossible, or why citizens must collect information appeared first on Peter Levine.

Pledge to Help Foster Respectful Dialogue

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LRC-logoAs an organization, NCDD is not in the habit of supporting online petitions. But when Joan Blades, a supporting NCDD member and a co-founder of Living Room Conversations and MoveOn.org, reached out to us to support a petition she recently created, we immediately recognized its value for our work and knew that it was something our members could support.

That’s why we are encouraging NCDD members to join us in signing and sharing Joan’s petition, which is a commitment to make a simple pledge. It states:

I pledge to help our leaders and our communities to engage in respectful dialogue and to look for ways to solve problems cooperatively. Doing this, we can create better answers to all the challenges we face.

As people committed to the work of engaging every day people in their communities and in a broader democracy through dialogue and deliberation, many of us in NCDD have probably already made such a commitment, at least to ourselves. But by making it publicly and encouraging others to do the same, we might be able to bring even more people into our work who will make or renew that commitment to keep improving the ways we solve our problems as a society.

Joan and her colleagues have framed this effort as an effort to tackle the deep polarization present in our nation and especially among our political leaders. As dialogue and engagement practitioners, it is clear to us that the political dysfunction we have seen in recent months and years stems from this polarization and a lack of willingness or ability to engage with “the other side” in our politics. But we also know that the solution involves moving toward greater collaboration and real relationship building.

So we are proud to join Joan, Living Room Conversations, and MoveOn.org in renewing our commitment to help our leaders and our communities engage in respectful dialogue and cooperation. We hope you will join us, too.

You can find and share the pledge by visiting http://petitions.moveon.org/sign/healing-the-heart-of.

Here’s hoping this is a spark that starts something bigger.

Jacob Hess on Narrative and the Red-Blue Divide

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We’re happy to share this post, which was submitted via our Submit-to-Blog Form by one of our sustaining NCDD members, Dr. Phil Neisser, on behalf of Jacob Hess, a supporting NCDD member. Both of these gentlemen are co-authors of the book You’re Not as Crazy as I Thought (But You’re Still Wrong): Conversations between a Devoted Conservative and a Die-Hard Liberal.

Do you have field news you want to share with the rest of us? Just click here to submit your news post for the NCDD Blog!

Dear Friends,

You might be interested in a brief essay just published online by Jacob Hess, our fellow NCDD-er and my conservative co-author. In it, he does a good job of laying out some differences between how liberals and conservatives view problems. You can read the article below, or find the original by clicking here.

American Politics: Beyond Angels and Demons

“Barack Obama is destroying this nation” is how it usually starts. Then it goes on to health care, gay marriage, the economic stimulus, foreign policy or all of the above. The details of the political rant vary widely, but one conclusion is remarkably common:

“And you know what? I think he’s very aware of what he’s doing. I think he reallyknows how he is hurting the country.”

As a conservative who lives in a conservative stronghold of the USA, I regularly hear this kind of dinner table commentary. At the point where Obama’s malevolence is mentioned, I can’t resist stepping in by saying “I have to disagree with you there. I know lots of people who think like Obama – and all of them really do believe their plan is going to benefit America.”

“What you might not be appreciating,” I usually add, “is that Obama is coming from a very different story about the world than we conservatives do. And if you take that narrative as your starting point, it leads you to a very different set of decisions in terms of what is best for our country.”

And that’s where I lose them…”Hmmm…ok, thanks for sharing.” (Translation:  “I still think Obama is a demon”).

My conservative neighbors are not demons either.  Instead, they’re illustrating something that’s fairly common to most of us, namely this: when faced with intense disagreement, it’s easy to see opponents as malicious, malevolent, or otherwise ill-willed. As my liberal friend Phil Neisser once said:

“Many people think that the solutions to public problems (and the nature of the problems themselves) should be obvious to anyone who’s reasonable, informed, unbiased, and well-intentioned. From this perspective, if all parties to a conversation are reasonable then the conversations should be easy, because most problems have ‘common sense,’ obvious solutions.”

Once we adopt this view, those who disagree with us are no longer simply reflecting a different understanding of the world.  Instead, any difficulties in the conversation confirm our feeling that the other side is unreasonable, ill-informed, biased, and badly-intentioned. And why would you ever talk to someone like that?

That’s why I believe it’s crucial that we pay careful, regular attention to the narratives that surround us.  If we’re not listening to the ways that distinct and powerful stories shape our experiences, then we’re more likely to demonize, vilify and condemn our political opponents as ignorant or unworthy. That isn’t the best way to start a relationship, let alone move towards collaboration and shared work together.

Let’s take an example.  There’s lots of talk across the world these days about helping those who are poor. Despite popular stereotypes, liberal, progressive and conservative communities in the USA all hold to narratives that value helping those in need. But exactly what that means in practice, of course, varies in fundamental ways.

Conservative narratives famously pay attention to the importance of individuals doing what they can for themselves as part of the helping process.  In our view, passivity, dependence and over-helping are real issues – with the potential to become even bigger problems than those we are trying to address in the first place.

Although my liberal and progressive friends aren’t necessarily unconcerned about these issues, they seem much less central in their own story of helping. Instead, their narrative focuses on the urgency of providing help – ‘let’s get people health care and get businesses back on their feet’ – with less concern about the potential side effects of over-helping and dependence.

The point is this: different policies make sense depending on which narrative of helping is taken up. Hence, President Obama presses for mandated health care and economic stimulus while conservatives scratch their heads in confusion.

Political competition is essential in any democracy, but when deeper narratives are ignored, gut-level exasperation can quickly turns into unbending opposition: ‘Why would anyone oppose universal health care, unless they are demons too?’ Rather than trying to understand how a different narrative shapes someone else’s experiences, we write them off: ‘what kind of human being could ever believe in that?’

What would it mean if we really grasped the differences in our narratives and stories?  Could it influence our ability and willingness to work together?

I think the answer is “yes.” Take the large divide that exists around environmental issues. In liberal and progressive narratives, the impact of human beings on the earth’s environment is often taken to be the biggest threat to human life.  Discussion centers on ways to protect the environment in the face of economic growth.

For conservatives, however, caring for the environment is rarely the first focus in our narrative, even though we do care about it.  Instead, it is “social climate change” that we perceive as the biggest threat to human life – the shifts away from norms and values that we see as central to a healthy society. Without denying the potential of serious problems that arise from growing carbon emissions, avoiding future calamities depends for us on the size of our collective “moral footprint.”

These differences are real and have to be acknowledged as the basis for any meaningful conversation, but the good news is this: once they are understood there is much more room-to-maneuver for compromise and collaboration.  Most of the conservatives I know really don’t want to trash the environment.  Likewise, I’ve never met any liberal or progressive individual who advocates for more adultery in society.

Rather than grappling with an unbridgeable chasm between different human beings – the angels and the demons – we might enjoy exploring the contrasts in emphasis, priorities and moral vision that exist between equally-thoughtful and well-meaning people.

Once we grasp this position, many possibilities emerge. Over the next few weeks on Transformation we’ll be exploring a range of often-surprising ways in which diverse citizens are talking and working together in the rough-and-tumble of American politics. We’ll see how people with radically different views are trying to find some common ground through “Living Room Conversations” and other efforts to develop a different quality of political debate. We’ll examine how America’s military budget is being curtailed by unusual alliances between liberals, conservatives and progressives. We’ll hear about encounters with the Tea Party and Fox News by gay and lesbian activists, and how “slow democracy” is being modeled on the “slow food” movement which originated in Italy and France.

The bottom line running through these experiments is simple: smart people with good hearts disagree about the nature of almost everything in the world.  Once we embrace this reality, new relationships become possible. In particular, we can practice the art of deep and vociferous disagreement while respecting each others’ worldviews and backgrounds.

What could that mean for potential political compromises, collaborations and the future of social change?

Make no mistake – it could mean everything.

Original article link: www.opendemocracy.net/transformation/jacob-z-hess/american-politics-beyond-angels-and-demons

The Silent Giveaway of New York City’s Internet Domain: Will De Blasio Step Up?

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The election of Bill de Blasio as Mayor of New York City suddenly presents a rich opportunity to reclaim a commons-based resource that the Bloomberg administration was on the verge of giving away. I’m talking about the pending introduction of a new Internet “Top Level Domain” for New York City, .nyc.   

Top Level Domains, better known as TLDs, are the regions of the Internet denoted by .com, .org and .edu.  They amount to Internet “zones” dedicated to specific purposes or countries.  Over the past few years, far beyond the radar screen of ordinary mortals, the little-known Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) – which manages TLDs -- has been pushing the idea of TLDs for cities.  If Paris wants to have its own Internet domain -- .paris – it can apply for it and get it.  Rome could have its own .rome and London could have .london. 

New Yorker Thomas Lowenhaupt of Connectingnyc.org – a long-time advocate for treating the TLD as a shared resource – has written, “I’ve often thought of the .nyc TLD in its entirety as a commons -- that the .nyc TLD is a digital commons that we all need to protect as we today (seek to) protect our physical streets and sidewalks by not littering, and provide clean air, parks, schools, health care, fire and police protection, and the like, to our built environment so that it best serves 8,200,000 of us.”

Here are some examples that Lowenhaupt has come up with for how .nyc could make New York City more accessible and navigable: 

The idea is that Internet users could use the TLDs to access various aspects of city life by using them in creative ways.  Instead of having to rely on Google to search for museums in New York (which would yield thousands of not-very-well-organized listings), you could use museums.nyc and find everything laid out more intelligently.  Or if you were new to Brooklyn Heights, you could go to brooklynheights.nyc and find all sorts of civic, community and commercial website listings for that neighborhood – the library, recycling resources, parking rules, links to relevant city officials.  And yes, the businesses. The possibilities are endless -- and potentially enlivening for a city.

read more

Launch of Voice of the People and its Campaign for a Citizen Cabinet

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Here’s an important announcement from one of our supporting members, Steven Kull. Steven is Research Scholar and Director of the Program on International Policy Attitudes at the University of Maryland. I’ve been watching Steven’s work with great interest over the last few years especially, and I’m exciting about Voice of the People.

Dear NCDD Community,

I would like to announce that our new organization Voice of the People (VOP) and its Campaign for a Citizen Cabinet had its rollout last month. The website is now up at www.vop.org.

VOP seeks to give the American people a greater voice in government by:

  • Working with Congress to establish a national Citizen Cabinet, a large standing panel comprised of a representative sample of the American public, to be consulted on current issues, using new online interactive tools to give voice to the people on an unprecedented scale; and
  • Making these same online resources available to all Americans, so they can get better informed and more effectively communicate their views to their representatives.

In the short term we will be developing interim Citizen Cabinets in a number of states and Congressional districts as well as consulting the public on a national level on issues currently in front of Congress.

VOP-largepic

We have also been having many meetings on the Hill with Congressional staffers and some Members and have been getting a very positive response to the idea of establishing a new Congressionally-chartered National Academy for Public Consultation that would run a Citizen Cabinet as well as doing other forms of public consultation.

We hope you will go to the website, find out more, sign the petition and stay in touch.

At the rollout event at the National Press Club members of our advisory board spoke, including former Senator Byron Dorgan (D-ND), former House Members Bill Frenzel (R-MN) and Martin Frost (R-TX), former House Member and Governor Mike Castle (R-DE), and Wendy Willis of the Policy Consensus Initiative. You can see the video of the event on the site.

The event led to press coverage in Politico, US News and World Report, Roll Call, the Christian Science Monitor and other places, as well as some television coverage.

The plan for the Citizen Cabinet goes like this… It will be comprised of 275 citizens in every congressional district—120,000 nationwide—scientifically selected to accurately reflect the American people, and connected through an online interface. Each Citizen Cabinet member will serve for 9-12 months, and Internet access will be provided to those who do not already have it, to make sure everyone is represented.

On a regular basis, members of the Citizen Cabinet will go through an online public consultation on a pressing issue facing the federal government. For each issue, Citizen Cabinet members will:

  1. Get Briefed: Get unbiased background information reviewed by experts and congressional staff from both parties;
  2. Weigh the Arguments: Learn about the policy options that are actually on the table and evaluate the pros and cons; and.
  3. Make Choices: Choose from a menu of policy options, or go through a more in-depth process that requires making trade-offs (e.g. creating a budget).

Finally, the Citizen Cabinet’s recommendations will be broken down by state and congressional district, and reported to each Member of Congress, the President, the news media and the public.

The Citizen Cabinet will be managed, with bi-partisan oversight, by a new National Academy for Public Consultation. All of the materials presented to the Citizen Cabinet—the briefing, competing arguments, and policy options—will be vetted by a bipartisan group of experts and available online for anyone to see.

VOP-graphic

While members of the Citizen Cabinet would be scientifically selected to be a representative sample of the public, VOP seeks to give all Americans the opportunity to use these same online interactive tools–getting briefed, weighing competing arguments and coming to conclusions on key policy options. We will also make these tools available to schools, community groups and other organizations.

Citizens will be able to better engage and make more effective recommendations to their representatives, as their input will be more informed and focused on the actual policy choices and tradeoffs Congress is facing.

We would be interested in hearing from people who have been doing related work. There may be ways we can work together. Please let us know.

Again, please do visit the website www.vop.org and sign up so we can keep you posted on how things develop.

Best,
Steven Kull

new journals related to civic renewal

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Scholars working on civic engagement, civic education, and related topics have no shortage of publication venues, including free, online–but peer-reviewed–journals:

The International Journal of Research on Service-Learning and Community Engagement has published its first issue. Articles include “Rethinking Peer Review: Expanding the Boundaries for Community-Engaged Scholarship” by Sherril B. Gelmon, Cathy M. Jordan, Sarena D. Seifer, and “A Research Agenda for K-12 School-based Service-Learning: Academic Achievement and School Success” by Andrew Furco.

The Journal of Public Deliberation (JPD) is now up to volume 9, issue 2.  The new issue includes articles on stakeholders and citizens in deliberation; participation in the New York Public Schools; and the effects of non-neutral moderators. The current editorial team has done a great job, but they are handing it over to a great new team of Laura Black, Tim Shaffer, and Nancy Thomas.

The Journal of Civic Literacy has launched its website and invites research on “the causes and consequences of low levels of literacy, the role of public education, the comparative efficacy of available curricula and programs (what is working? why and how?), the connections between the current media environment and deficient civic understandings, and the role of civic literacy in defining ethical and trustworthy public service.”

The eJournal of Public Affairs is published by Missouri State University and affiliated with the American Democracy Project. “Public Affairs” means different things to different people, but this journal is actually devoted to civic engagement, civic education, and closely related topics.

Partnerships: A Journal of Service-Learning and Civic Engagement comes out of North Carolina Campus Compact but has national reach and is also a peer-reviewed, open-access journal.

The Journal of General Education (“A Curricular Commons of the Humanities and Sciences”) is edited by Jeremy Cohen, who has a deep commitment to civic education, free speech, and public media. So, although its topic is “general education” at the undergraduate level, it is an important site for discussions of civic education and engagement.

[Added later:]

The Good Society is a distinguished journal of political theory, now turning to what we call Civic Studies. It is not open-source because of the contract with the publisher, but articles are freely available for two months after publication. In any event, it is a fine journal.

And Public, from Imagining America, is a peer-reviewed, multimedia e-journal focused on humanities, arts, and design in public life.

The post new journals related to civic renewal appeared first on Peter Levine.

Launching a 3-year learning exchange with the Kettering Foundation

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NCDD is pleased to announce that we are embarking upon an exciting three-year “learning exchange” with the Kettering Foundation.

This research with Kettering focuses on documenting and making explicit what NCDD is learning in areas of mutual importance to Kettering, to NCDD, and to our field. Specifically, under this agreement, we will:

  • Explore the capacity and track record of collaboration among practitioners in public dialogue and deliberation, while exploring new opportunities as well. This joint research will give us the opportunity to think through—with many of you—the obstacles to collaboration in our field and how to overcome them.
  • Leverage our network to help quantify the level of dialogue and deliberation in the U.S. We’ll be surveying you in a number of ways to find out where, when, and how often you’re engaging people; what your organizations’ strengths and specialties are; and what your hopes and challenges are. The goal is to inventory the assets that exist in our field as a whole—and present that information in ways that public administrators, funders, potential sponsoring organizations, the media, and all of you can access.

We will certainly need your help for these efforts to be successful. Many of you are working together on a wide variety of projects already. We ask that over these next few years, you help us to learn from your work and explore with us what’s possible. We’ll also be looking for people to help us catalog, report on, and map what we’re learning. Ideas, input and involvement from our members will be critical in all our upcoming work with Kettering.

I am so excited about this opportunity to work more closely with the Kettering Foundation and to create a better climate for dialogue and deliberation, at a time when our world so desperately needs it. Please join me in celebrating our new venture.

About the Kettering Foundation…

The Kettering Foundation is a nonprofit operating foundation rooted in the American tradition of cooperative research. Kettering’s primary research question is “What does it take to make democracy work as it should?” Kettering’s research is distinctive because it is conducted from the perspective of citizens and focuses on what people can do collectively to address problems affecting their lives, their communities, and their nation.

The foundation seeks to identify and address the challenges to making democracy work as it should through interrelated program areas that focus on citizens, communities, and institutions. Guiding Kettering’s research are three hypotheses. Kettering’s research suggests that democracy requires:

  • Responsible citizens who can make sound choices about their future;
  • Communities of citizens acting together to address common problems; and
  • Institutions with public legitimacy that contribute to strengthening society.

The foundation’s small staff and extensive network of associates collaborate with community organizations, government agencies, researchers, scholars, and citizens around the world. A monthly meeting series brings together Kettering staff, associates, researchers, and others with whom the foundation works to explore a tightly focused research question or area. Those working on related problems share what they are learning at the foundation’s many meetings, which provide space for an ongoing exchange of ideas and stories in an effort to develop research interests.

As the foundation’s learning progresses, Kettering shares its research findings through books, research reports, occasional papers, videos, and its website. The foundation also disseminates its research in three periodicals: Connections, the Higher Education Exchange, and the Kettering Review.

In addition, Kettering produces materials, including issue books and starter videos, for the National Issues Forums (NIF), a network of civic and educational organizations whose common interest is promoting public deliberation. The foundation collaborates with NIF as part of its research efforts.

Established in 1927 by inventor Charles F. Kettering, the foundation is a 501(c)(3) organization that does not make grants but engages in joint research with others. It is an operating foundation headquartered in Dayton, Ohio, with offices in Washington, D.C., and New York City.

Amanda Kathryn Roman’s Interview from NCDD Seattle

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At the 2012 NCDD national conference in Seattle, NCDD member and filmmaker Jeffrey Abelson sat down with over a dozen leaders in our community to ask them about their work and their hopes and concerns for our field and for democratic governance in our country.

Today we’re featuring an interview with Amanda Kathryn Roman, co-creator of Living Room Conversations.  Amanda embraced public engagement at the age of 12 when she began doing community organizing and has been involved in many forms of bridge-building or transpartisan work ever since.

Watch the blog over the next month or so for more videos from NCDD Seattle, which brought together 400 leaders and innovators in our field. You can also check out Jeffrey Abelson’s Song of a Citizen YouTube channel and in our NCDD 2012 Seattle playlist on YouTube.

For adult students, confidence should be a good thing, but is it limiting their chances at success?

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For adults without a college degree, making the choice to go back to school can be intimidating. These adults have been out of practice as students for a year or often much longer. They need to believe that they will succeed in order to make it to the starting gate, never mind the finish line. Otherwise, they'd never go back. Ironically and unfortunately, this confidence can also prevent them from taking steps that could increase their chances for success.

We spent part of the last year speaking with many of these adult prospective students. None had degrees, though all were planning on taking the leap back to school within the next two years. In doing so, these adults face some grim statistics.

Just half of all undergraduate students earn a degree or certificate within 6 years. Among older students – those who start college in their twenties or later – the risk of dropping out is much higher. More than half (54 percent) of those students who start school at age 25 or older end up leaving within 6 years.

If adult students want to beat the odds, they need to start by choosing a school or program that's right for them. Most of the adults we spoke to were confident that they could do so:

  • 76 percent agreed that there is enough information "out there" for people to be able to choose the college and program that best fits their needs – they just have to make the effort to find it.
  • 73 percent say they know someone who can give them good advice and guidance in choosing a program and college.
  • 67 percent say they know someone who can give them good advice on how to pay for college and manage their finances.

On the one hand, this confidence and optimism could be advantageous in their pursuit of higher education. On the other hand, it may hinder these prospective students from asking important questions and properly evaluating all of the information they need to make good decisions.

In fact, our results suggest that many of these students may be unaware of or misinformed about key issues that could impact their ability to succeed in college. For example, many of these adults see themselves as finishers, not quitters. Just 30 percent said they were worried about dropping out. As a woman in Los Angeles told us, "if I'm going to start something, I'm going to try to stick to it as much as I can and not go that way to drop out."

Perhaps for this reason, these adults don't see why a college's graduation or drop-out rate should factor into their decision making. Just 47 percent say they think knowing the graduation rate of a school is essential information for their college searches. Most higher education experts, on the other hand, say these metrics can accurately indicate a student's prospect for success.

As another example, 67 percent of these prospective students told us they worry about taking on too much debt when they return to school. However, barely half (51 percent) think it's important to know the average debt a typical student at a particular school graduates with. And just 30 percent have spoken to a financial aid adviser during their college search.

What's more, while it's true that, as these adults sensed, there are numerous sources of information and other support "out there," few adult prospective students seem to be accessing these resources. For example, just 18 percent have used resources like comprehensive websites that compare schools during their college search. Just 21 percent have spoken to a college counselor in the past year.

Going back to school is tough, and we applaud the adults we spoke to for making the choice to do so. They need to retain their confidence to have the best shot at making it through. At the same time, they will be much more likely to complete their degree if they select a school that meets their needs socially, academically and financially.

There are steps that leaders in higher education, policy and philanthropy can take to empower these adults and help validate their confidence. Our report includes a number of recommendations to help leaders better reach these adults hoping to go back to school. Check them out here. Do you have other ideas? Share them with us on Twitter, using hashtag #WorthIt.