Recently, Jasmine Prasad, vice president of legislative affairs for the Student Senate for California Community Colleges, urged the many colleges still placing students in remedial courses to stop presenting this as a positive option and instead enroll students in transfer-level courses that provide the best possible path for college success.
We couldn’t agree more because we’ve seen firsthand the power corequisites have in providing students supportive transfer-level options that improve college math completion rates. Students in Carnegie Math Pathways corequisites, for example, earn college credit at over three times the rate of students in traditional remedial math sequences, and in a fraction of the time. But achieving these outcomes takes more than just a shift in course structure. It takes investing in faculty and supporting them with the resources they need to successfully teach corequisite courses.
When institutions adopt corequisite math programs, they’re undertaking a fundamentally different, more equitable approach than traditional remedial math sequences. Corequisite education, in particular, is enabling thousands of students to enroll directly into college-level courses while receiving the targeted supports they need to earn college credit in a single term. While coreq models have shown tremendous promise at leveling the playing field for many more college students, we must acknowledge that they are intensive and demand new skills of educators. It is for this reason that Carnegie Math Pathways provides educators with professional training and development opportunities to ensure their experience in the classroom is successful.
In Pathways corequisite courses, specifically, educators use evidence-based active and collaborative learning methods to have students work through real-world math problems together—a wholly different approach from the rote, lecture-based approach to math teaching. But we don’t simply hand off materials to educators and expect them to become experts overnight. Through a structured system of peer-led training, faculty mentorship, and ongoing professional development, we help educators build the skills, strategies, and comfort they need to command this new and impactful instructional approach. And perhaps most importantly, we help foster a community across institutions in which educators are able to connect with and support one another in their practice.
In more than a decade of working with educators, we’ve learned that investment in faculty training and professional development is vital for ensuring that proven reforms like corequisite math remediation can succeed at scale. The results of this community of support for faculty have been profound. With robust resources and a community rallying behind them, educators not only see higher course outcomes, but they develop stronger connections with their students, observe deeper learning and greater persistence in their classroom, and have a more positive teaching experience.
“The mentor assuaged my fears and helped me understand and refine the active learning and group management techniques that I was using. Then, after a little more professional development, I was ready to be a mentor myself. This experience enabled growth and change that made my classroom teaching a lot more rewarding.”
Such was the case with Read Vanderbilt, a Statway corequisite instructor and math faculty at Diablo Valley College in California. Vanderbilt says that while educators may have taken a professional development course on group learning, putting the approach fully into practice can be really challenging. Yet with dedicated, ongoing support, educators can build their confidence as facilitators of group learning and help their students reach new heights.
“Carnegie Math Pathways provided me with weekly communication with a mentor in my first year, which made all the difference,” he said.
“The mentor assuaged my fears and helped me understand and refine the active learning and group management techniques that I was using. Then, after a little more professional development, I was ready to be a mentor myself. This experience enabled growth and change that made my classroom teaching a lot more rewarding.”
The adoption of accelerated corequisites to expand access to transfer-level math is a change for educators, but the prospects they hold for helping thousands more students advance in their education, particularly those most harmed by the status quo, cannot be denied. California colleges owe it to their students to provide them with the best course options to help them reach their goals, but they also owe their faculty and instructors the resources and supports they need to successfully implement these courses.
