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CBT Case Studies
Compton Community Educational Center/
El Camino Community College
 Faculty One-to-One Program
Instructional Services Assessment, Analysis & Recommendation
SITUATION
Compton College’s accreditation was terminated by the ACCJC and was closed on August 22, 2006. A 2006 agreement between El Camino College and Compton Community College allowed Compton to continue operations as an educational center of El Camino.
In December of 2007 College Brain Trust was contracted to assess, train and coach 80 full-time faculty members of Compton College. Rocky Young and Randall Lawson led the effort and recruited 24 local faculty consultants from area colleges to work one-to-one with the Compton College faculty.
The goal of the precedent-setting program was to proactively create a baseline instructional professional development program to serve as a resource to Compton faculty.
Peter Landsberger, Special Trustee for Compton and champion for the effort, says, "I went to Rocky Young because he was the best person for the job, and he recruited Randall Lawson to help design and implement the program, and the local faculty consultants. Both Rocky and Randy are senior administrators who are extremely faculty-friendly and non-threatening and we knew we could count on them to be highly effective. All I had to do was introduce them to the Compton participants and they took it from there."
CHALLENGES & OPPORTUNITIES
One of the inherent challenges of this project was that Compton had just gone through having their accreditation revoked—one of the most difficult things for any college—and simultaneously El Camino had to assimilate Compton as an educational center. The CBT team walked a fine line somewhere in the middle, with Compton as their client, but El Camino as the official college.
Special Trustee Landsberger remembers there being a "fair amount of anxiety from the outset—the Compton faculty was a little nervous and dubious of how it would turn out. However, once it actually got underway and they met with their colleagues and established relationships, it went very smoothly."
The goal was to serve as a resource to the Compton faculty and to provide the opportunity for Compton to be in the vanguard and do something that had never been done before.
STRATEGIC APPROACH
From the very beginning, the beauty of the faculty-to-faculty connection between the Compton faculty and the CBT consulting faculty created a unique opportunity for a strategic approach.
There was no rigid methodology for the assessment—consultant faculty were empowered to drive the project, assess, coach and serve as a resource to Compton and report back their findings for analysis.
Rocky comments, "Because of the faculty-to-faculty connection and the Compton faculty’s willingness to collaborate, we obtained really meaningful dialogue in our assessment which contributed to a more effective analysis."
Meanwhile, lasting bonds were created between faculty that surpassed anyone’s expectations and endured long after the project ended.
OUTCOME & REFLECTIONS
Rocky reflects, "An immensely satisfying outcome of this project is the genuine, ongoing, win-win relationships that were formed between the consultant faculty and the Compton faculty. The credit really belongs with them. Many have sustained friendships and continued to share ideas and resources, even after the project was officially ended."
Landsberger believes that the effort can serve as an example for other colleges.
He says, "CBT helped us establish a true institutional professional development program for faculty that reestablished and reinvigorated what was going in the larger context of what Compton was doing. This project was precedent setting, very well received and a potential model for other colleges." |
