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MCC Daily Tribune Archive

President's Wednesday Message


An unexpectedly quiet Friday afternoon can offer a special gift: the chance to catch up on reading. With this gift in hand last week, I had the opportunity to dig through a stack of languishing copies of Community College Week, Educause, Trustee Quarterly, and Community College Journal. One particular piece I read caught my attention and held it. The essay was by Jen Lara, professor of teacher education at Anne Arundel Community College (a fellow League for Innovation institution). Professor Lara’s point of view column, “Faculty of the 21st Century: Embrace, Entangle, Amplify,” outlines what she calls the three elements necessary for faculty to achieve greater success for 21st Century students. These three elements seem to apply not only to faculty but to the entire college community, so I wanted to share them:

Embrace: Professor Lara calls on us to embrace “a growth mindset … to ignite bold conversations, create real change, and escalate student success and completion rates.” She characterizes this mindset as open-minded, curious, tenacious, and resilient.

Entangle: In perhaps one of my favorite sentences of the season, Professor Lara advises that “it is time to entangle students in a web of engagement.” She identifies connection, care, and compassion as central to student success and encourages us to think about the power to entangle that rests in every person, event, service, and office on campus.

Amplify: This element addresses the issue of scale. Professor Lara challenges faculty to “amplify boutique programs to ‘big box programs’ and scale them to meet the population and demographics of our bustling community colleges.” To amplify, though, we must also make difficult decisions about what we leave behind: programs and practices that may not be effective but are familiar and more comfortable.

Jen Lara’s observations about what conditions create student success are not new, but the way in which she describes concepts that have been at the heart of what we do is different—and makes them new again. She evokes new metaphors, new narratives of innovation and engagement, making us see the work we do as more personal, less distant. Perhaps it was not accidental that I found her essay on Friday, the first day of Spring—the season of renewal.
Do you believe in this model of thinking about innovation and engagement? Do you see “embrace, entangle, amplify” in practice at MCC? Do you see places where it could promote even greater student success at the College?

Share your thoughts on the blog.

Anne M. Kress
Office of the President
03/25/2015