The Bush Administration ' s announcement last year of $250 million in job training grants to community colleges is the latest indication of the institution's growing prominence. The community college is increasingly recognized for its flexibility and cost-effectiveness-providing affordable access to higher education and tailoring occupational training programs to local workforce needs. Yet even this welcome recognition woefully underestimates the community college's potential.
More than any other organization, community colleges are positioned to take advantage of broad changes in the nature of work and learning that have occurred over the past two decades. They have a striking opportunity not only to become far more effective at their core business of teaching and learning but also to play major roles in both K-12 education and workplace reform.
In what follows I outline a new course of action for the community college that fully exploits these opportunities by building a new core competence for the institution and dramatically increasing its educational impact.
ADDRESSING THE FUNDAMENTAL CHALLENGES OF COMMUNITY COLLEGE EDUCATION
Community colleges have long faced three fundamental challenges. First, many have low retention and transfer rates, problems for which K-12 education is only partly responsible. second, due to their multiple missions, community colleges rarely function as integrated communities in which opportunities for collaboration and cross-pollination are systematically pursued. Rather, many resemble holding companies in which a central administration enforces performance standards and allocates funds across independent and sometimes antagonistic divisions. Third, despite its newfound prominence, the community college has not yet built the political and community support it needs to secure adequate financing.
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Changes taking place in schools, colleges, businesses, and community organizations present an opportunity for community colleges to address these fundamental problems much more effectively than they have done in the past. Over the last 20 years, a steady, well-documented shift has taken place across all sectors of society towards more decentralized, networked organizational arrangements. Organizations in all fields are devolving day-to-day decisionmaking to decentralized teams, creating partnerships with other organizations, and participating in a variety of learning networks.
In both K-12 and higher education this shift is found in two trends: 1) burgeoning movements to reorganize teaching and learning around learning communities, and 2) the proliferation of partnerships and networks connecting schools, colleges, businesses, and community organizations. As I am using the term here, learning communities are clusters of courses, often linked by overarching themes, that are taught by interdisciplinary teams of teachers to cohorts of students. Learning communities and organizational partnerships are among the most promising reforms currently underway in contemporary American education-especially for community colleges-and they are spreading rapidly across all types of educational institutions.
Yet restructuring into decentralized teams and creating effective partnerships are formidable challenges for organizations in any sector. As more and more organizations attempt to implement these new practices, they increasingly need systems of organizational support that include better coordinating structures and cost-effective professional development and technical assistance.
Community colleges are ideally suited to play lead roles in creating these systems of support for both educational institutions and businesses. In doing so they can carry out powerful reform movements on their own campuses while making significant contributions to the schools, colleges, and workplaces in their communities.
Specifically, community colleges have an opportunity to spearhead an altogether new kind of learning network, or rather two overlapping networks-one that supports learning communities in educational institutions and another that supports team-based employers. I call these new arrangements team learning networks. These networks bring teams together for structured peer learning and improved linkages across the organizations. Both networks take advantage of the community college's experience with adult education and its location at the nexus of K-12 education, higher education, and workforce development.
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And by anchoring both networks, community colleges can build a new core competence in supporting teams, designing peer-learning opportunities, and improving programs that link schools, colleges, businesses, and community organizations. Through their role at the center of these overlapping learning networks, community colleges can drive the development of more coherent and effective education and workforce development systems in their communities.
SUPPORTING LEARNING COMMUNITIES ACROSS HIGH SCHOOLS, COMMUNITY COLLEGES, AND FOUR-YEAR INSTITUTIONS
Building this new core competence requires that community colleges first make a major institutional commitment to implementing learning communities and then spearhead a learning community network that includes nearby schools and perhaps a four-year institution as well.
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Two Overlapping Team Learning Networks
Learning communities are a powerful and growing reform movement in K-12 education, just as they are in higher education. School districts are breaking thousands of big schools into smaller schools and schools-within-schools in which students take most of their courses from teams of teachers.
Middle schools have long been designed around interdisciplinary teams, and most new school designs for elementary schools include gradelevel or multi-grade teams as well. Yet it is in high schools-the largest, most bureaucratic, and, in many respects, most troubled schools-that learning communities are being created in the greatest numbers. Both the federal government and the Gates Foundation, among other funders, are supporting the creation of smaller high schools and learning communities with large multi-million dollar grants. And high school reform in general has become a hot-button issue of late, as evidenced by the recent National Education Summit in which the nation's governors made high school reform a top priority and announced several new initiatives and commitments.
Learning communities are spreading rapidly across colleges and universities as well-62 percent now offer some form of learning community-because when well executed, they lead to higher academic achievement. Courses are linked by overarching themes; teachers explicitly make connections across the courses, and thus students have more coherent intellectual experiences as they grapple with different disciplinary approaches to issues. Often teachers design authentic interdisciplinary projects that students work on in teams.
Learning communities also make it possible to integrate academic and occupational courses and skill and content courses in ways that make each course component more successful. To complement classroom instruction, for instance, entrepreneurial learning community instructors often make connections to community organizations for service-learning projects and to employers for career development.
Further, learning communities support the professional development of their teachers and the improvement of classroom practice in powerful ways. Instructors in learning communities work in teams to make connections among their courses, design group projects that cut across courses, compare teaching strategies, and assess the progress of the students who are in their collective charge. Teachers in learning communities learn new ideas and approaches that they then carry back to their singleton courses as well. Norton Grubb, an economist at Berkeley, conducted an observational study of teaching practices in 257 classrooms in 32 community colleges in 11 states, and he consistently found many of the most engaging and effective instances of good teaching in learning communities.
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High School-College Learning Community Network
While learning communities in higher education are most common at large research universities that are attempting to create smaller learning environments for their students, there is a particularly good fit between the challenges of community college education and the strengths of learning communities. Grubb makes the point that community colleges have historically prided themselves on their commitment to teaching, and learning communities are perhaps the most effective mechanism to translate this commitment into innovative, effective teaching and learning.
Many colleges have also found retention rates to be significantly higher among learning community students. Learning communities are especially effective at integrating freshmen, who experience by far the highest dropout rates in American education, into the academic and social life of their institutions. Students take a cluster of classes as a cohort, get to know each other better, and thus are more likely to form peer-learning groups.
Community colleges have extra incentives to create such connections for their students, who do not have the community-building benefit of residence halls and who frequently take classes part-time. Learning communities can also be tailored to the needs of challenging sub-groups of students-such as developmental clusters or special offerings for returning students.
But while learning communities are common, and partnerships between higher education and K-12 education are common, K-16 partnerships explicitly focused on supporting learning communities as a central instructional strategy through extensive peer learning and improved linking programs-ideally with the support of full-time staff-are only just beginning to emerge.
Like most innovations, learning communities require a structure of support. Despite their many benefits, it is difficult to realize their full potential without providing help to instructors for the new responsibilities they assume. Teaching teams need assistance in using their common planning time effectively to discuss curriculum, instruction, and individual student progress, as well as in making connections to outside organizations. Typically, however, each teaching team has to address the common challenges of learning communities on its own, reinventing the wheel team by team. Sharing across teams is usually limited to informal connections and relatively expensive and thus infrequent national conferences, segregated by type of institution.
Learning community networks allow learning communities in the same city or region to combine resources, build a cost-effective support system, attain a larger scale within a close geographic area, and create more meaningful linkages across K-16 education. In a few cases, colleges and schools have begun to create such networks.
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Moorpark Community College in Southern California has for several years invited nearby high school teachers to participate in its learning community professional development activities. And in a project that I am involved with, Holyoke Community College (MA) and the Community College of Rhode Island, working with the University of Rhode Island, have each convened secondary and postsecondary learning communities in their areas with the idea of forming learning community networks. Through these networks member institutions can improve curricular alignment, share the costs of funding full-time learning community coaches/coordinators, and organize ongoing professional-development activities in which entire teams from different institutions come together to learn from the experiences of their peers.
What would these networks look like if they were fully developed? First, a small staff of coach/coordinators-funded by a mix of contributions from the school and college partners and grants from federal, state, and foundation sources-would meet with each learning community teaching team on a regular basis during its common planning time and organize a variety of peer-to-peer workshops focusing on the common challenges of learning communities.
There are, of course, some important ways in which high school and college learning communities differ. In addition to the obvious differences in student maturity and level of content, high school learning community teams tend to be larger than college teams, and the teachers meet more frequently.
Yet high school and college learning communities face the same central challenges, particularly in using their common planning time effectively to discuss critical topics. It is in addressing these core challenges that high school and college faculty have much to learn from each other. These topics form the natural focus of the coaching and peer-to-peer professional development activities of learning community networks. They include:
* Improving instruction in light of learning goals and learning outcomes;
* Creating meaningful, engaging connections across courses, and in some cases integrating academic, occupational, and service-learning components;
* Discussing individual student progress constructively, respectively, and efficiently; and
* Improving team effectiveness.
In addition to the economies of scale created by having multiple institutions participate, the differences in context-high school, community college, and four-year institution-create a rich, diverse mix of teaching strategies, which in turn spurs innovation. Further, as high school and college teachers work together to address these issues, they come to understand each other's respective curricula better and become valuable resources in support of curricular alignment.
A second benefit of learning community networks is that, again with the help of the network's coach/coordinators, they can take advantage of the small size and thematic orientation of learning communities to improve college outreach, service learning, and school-to-career and mentoring/tutoring programs. High school learning communities can visit college learning communities for outreach activities. The coach/coordinators can support faculty in establishing deeper connections with specific employers and community organizations, building relationships between faculty and supervisors over time that lead to learning experiences for students that are more closely tied to classroom activities. External organizations can work with clusters of learning communities within broad thematic areas, such as health, business, environment, law and justice, and so on.
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Finally, learning community networks that serve these professional development and linking functions make for effective political and fundraising coalitions, the kind of partnerships that funders regard as costeffective investments.
Learning community networks provide a way for community colleges to address their weaknesses and exploit their strengths and their position. They create a powerful, cost-effective support structure for a college's own learning communities as well as for the rapidly growing number of school and university learning communities, and they improve the effectiveness of other programs that link schools, colleges, employers, and community organizations. Further, developing the capacity to support learning community networks will help community colleges build a core competence that can be successfully applied in their workforce development activities as well.
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High-Performance Learning Network
SUPPORTING HIGH-PERFORMANCE WORKPLACES
Learning communities are an important instance in education of a much broader, decades-old trend taking place in businesses, government agencies, and nonprofits. In traditional organizations, departments are the central locus of work. Departments tend to perform narrow functions within hierarchical chains of command. For example, just as a high school or college English teacher traditionally only has responsibility for the English a student learns during a semester or a year, a design department in a company is only responsible for designing a product-not manufacturing, marketing, or selling it.
Increasingly, however, organizations are flattening hierarchies and either supplementing or replacing departments with teams that perform broader, more holistic tasks and have more decisionmaking authority, and they support their teams with ample information, training, and rewards. Thus, just as learning community teachers are given responsibility for most or all of the educational experience of a group of students for a semester or a year, teams in other workplaces are given responsibility for an entire product, project, or process. Decentralized teams are central to every managerial innovation of the past 20 years, including the High-Performance Workplace, Total Quality Management (TQM), Re-engineering, the Network Organization, and the Learning Organization.
Paul Osterman of MIT, who has documented the growth of these "highperformance" practices over the past 20 years, has found that more than 40 percent of American corporations have organized over half their employees in teams, including many successful, progressive employers like Whole Foods. He and others have found that employees generally prefer high-performance workplaces to traditional bureaucratic ones. Further, the preponderance of research on the impact of high-performance practices on company performance has found very positive results. Yet research also suggests that managers and employees sometimes have difficulty making the transition from long-established bureaucratic routines to the more flexible, dynamic, and less authoritarian behaviors characteristic of the high-performance model.
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That high-performance practices are both beneficial and difficult to implement creates an opportunity for community colleges to form high-performance learning networks similar in structure to the learning community networks I have described. Building such networks entails selecting from among the many companies a college deals with those that are interested in high-performance work organization and thus that are committed to employee training. Many companies have created networks around TQM and other workplace practices. Research suggests that for most companies, these kinds of networks are critical to successful implementation, yet existing networks typically do not provide much support to employee teams or take advantage of resources community colleges can provide.
High-performance learning networks could sponsor "benchmarking" workshops and company visits in which employees compare their implementation trials, errors, and solutions. Community colleges can support these efforts by designing classes that integrate technical, academic, and team skills for employee teams, including financial literacy and quality techniques. These new integrated courses, in conjunction with related benchmarking activities, would significantly aid companies in implementing teambased work organization. Tn addition to company contributions, federal and state workforce development funds are obvious sources of support.
Companies will benefit from employee education and the exchange of organizational and technical knowhow. Colleges will develop special relationships with employers who are implementing progressive workplace practices associated with higher job satisfaction, employers who are likely to be long-term contract training partners. Further, companies that have good experiences working in highperformance learning networks led by community colleges will be inclined to support the work of their local learning community network. These employers will be predisposed to provide schoolto-career, financial, and political support to colleges and schools that are working in analogous networks implementing analogous reforms and whose students are well-prepared-in terms of academic proficiency, real-world experience, and team skills-to work in high-performance contexts.
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Coherent System of Education and Workforce Development
Team Learning Network Theory of Change
THE NEW CORE COMPETENCE OF THE COMMUNITY COLLEGE
By anchoring learning networks of team-based work organizations that perform both professional development and linking roles, community colleges can become adept at implementing these innovations as a coherent package, thereby building a new core competence for the institution.
The notion of core competence is a useful way to contrast expertise specific to departments or other units with the more abstract, general knowhow and capabilities that organizations develop-or should develop-across departments and divisions. In order to develop these competencies, organizations must first identify them and then create mechanisms-through senior management teams, linking groups, and strategic staffing-explicitly designed to share learning across divisions.
In their 1990 article on core competence in corporations, C.K. Prahalad and Gary Hamel use several business examples to illustrate the concept. For instance, they point out that Honda's success derives from building good cars, but Honda is good at building cars in part because it has developed the general capacity across the corporation to build very good engines and power trains of all types. Honda also has good relationships with its parts suppliers, assembles parts well, and has a good system for training and supporting its dealers. Unlike other car manufacturers, Honda then deploys these general capabilities profitably and often innovatively in different markets: automobiles, motorcycles, lawn mowers, and power generators.
Different community colleges have different core competencies, but among them is the ability to deliver relatively low-cost postsecondary education to diverse learners, especially to students who did not excel in high school and adults returning to school for specific skills. I am proposing that in addition, community colleges make team-based work organization, education partnerships, and structured peer learning central to the way they do business, first by anchoring overlapping team learning networks expressly designed to support the implementation of these practices across a variety of organizations. They can then build a core competence around these practices by creating mechanisms that transfer learning and build linkages across both networks and (ambitiously) across the education and workforce development sides of the community college house.
INTEGRATING MULTIPLE MISSIONS
The increasing importance of higher education and the need for responsive training programs bode well for community colleges, but the institution nonetheless faces formidable organizational challenges. Within higher education, community colleges are given the difficult assignment of providing general and occupational education to the least prepared, most diverse, and lowest-income students while also serving the workforce development needs of employers. The strategies I am recommending have obvious costs, but by adopting these practices in a much more coherent and comprehensive fashion than they have thus far, community colleges can create a powerful institutional architecture for carrying out their ambitious multiple missions more successfully.
As is the case with any good strategy, there are trade-offs associated with building a new core competence around teams, partnerships, and peer learning. Learning communities increase student choice by creating a more integrated, collaborative option, but they also limit student choice in that they reduce the number of sections that are not part of a cluster. In some cases learning community class sizes are smaller and thus more expensive, and faculty need to be compensated for at least some of their common planning time.
Learning community networks require senior administrators to coordinate relationships across different institutions. Member organizations need to identify and/or raise funds to provide a small staff to operate the network and to pay for teacher time in professional development activities (perhaps a few hours every four to six weeks on top of their common planning time). Highperformance learning networks entail more intensive relationships with teambased employers on the part of the workforce development division. Given scarce administrative resources, this may mean that other activities receive less attention.
In return for these investments, however, community colleges build the capacity to consistently offer effective learning communities, which in turn create a sense of community for students, increase academic achievement and college persistence, and provide a powerful support structure for good teaching. Teaching and learning improve as a result of ongoing local workshops in which school and college faculty discuss academic standards and innovative teaching practices, and students benefit from improved college outreach, service learning, school-to-career, and mentoring/tutoring programs. These activities can serve four-year institutions as well through support for their learning communities and better-prepared high school graduates and transfer students. Over time learning community networks can be expanded to include elementary and middle schools as well.
Implementing both team learning networks creates a common language of reform across communities and a cadre of lead instructors, administrators, and managers conversant in new approaches to work and learning. High-performance networks develop close working relationships between community colleges and employers while helping them implement a workplace model that, from a public policy perspective, is both progressive in terms of employee training and job satisfaction and productive in terms of organizational performance. The cross-institutional ties that result lead in turn to well-designed programs that link teams across schools, colleges, and employers and that reach more students more effectively.
Community colleges have an opportunity to support organizational change and integrate progressive approaches to work and learning in ways that no other institution can. Learning community teaching teams that integrate developmental, academic, occupational, and/or service learning can serve as the signature for institutions that integrate their multiple missions organizationally through overlapping learning networks. These in turn will create more coherent systems of work, learning, and service in their communities. Community colleges that master these competencies and play these roles will become the influential hubs of organizational change in their communities while dramatically improving teaching and learning on their campuses.