This article presents the heart of a conversation that has been evolving across campuses: how academic communities can truly thrive when they are designed with faculty engagement and student success at the center. The authors' work together on a panel for the 2025 International Conference on Assessing Quality in Higher Education sparked a deeper…

Social, emotional, and academic development (SEAD) is a holistic approach to supporting students' development and learning that is integral to ensuring positive outcomes in school and beyond. Schools must ensure students experience healthy development and rigorous learning. Unfortunately, students of color, students from low-income backgrounds,…

In developing college short term travel programs whether domestic or abroad it is essential for faculty to recognize the obstacles and challenges to ensure an enriching experience for students. Experiential learning was the guiding principle to teaching the curriculum; however, civility and respect became a lens in which to examine the qualitative…

Imagine walking into an 8th-grade science classroom and hearing a discussion among students about a challenging assignment they recently completed. A pilot program in 18 Tennessee schools develops agency through competency-based education. Students in Beth Hines' 8th grade physical science class at West Collierville Middle School in Tennessee are…

The Literacy Design Collaborative (LDC) incorporates challenging literacy standards into middle grades and high school content areas within a variety of academic disciplines, not just English/language arts courses. The Mathematics Design Collaborative (MDC) provides schools with instructional tools needed to help teachers understand and implement…

Even as educators understand how their millennial students learn in such different ways than previous generations (watching how-to videos downloaded from YouTube or engaging in experiential learning adventures), colleges still rely heavily on in-the-classroom learning. The author can't offer an alternative to this classroom format, but she…

An innovative way to add opportunities for the development of personal and professional competencies without adding any additional courses to a curriculum is to add individual assignments to already existing courses--a curriculum model presented in this paper as a "parallel curriculum" to the existing curriculum. The advantages of the…

A career training program funded by the Job Training Partnership Act was developed in Loudon County, Tennessee, to alleviate the stresses that are described in the hypothesis that occupational aspirations and expectations are lower for rural, female, economically disadvantaged, and handicapped youth than they are for other youth. To participate,…