An Emporium Story

Once upon a time, a community college noticed that their developmental math classes were not very effective … too few students were completing the course, and the cost of delivering the courses was higher than the results warranted.  An obvious solution was a methodology now called the emporium model; however, this was 1970 so that phrase was not available.  Students spent their time working problems, focusing on what they needed to learn — no lectures, just work.

The college was my institution (Lansing CC), and the emporium model was called the LCC Math Lab.  I began working in this Lab in 1973, when we had strong faculty leadership to make it more than isolated skills taught in modules.  The work was not easy, but we were able to provide improved instruction and results (though we did not worry as much about saving a lot of money). 

Fast forward to 2010 … the College closed the Math Lab at LCC because the results showed the method was not very effective and the cost of delivering it was too high. 

After working in this ’emporium’ methodology for 37 years, I can tell you that it does not take any outstanding wisdom to predict that the emporium model will work on a limited basis for a limited period of time.  The student results depend greatly on the institution’s support and planning, and the cost savings is grounded in administrative procedures — not the method itself.  Our program went from using 80% of the standard cost to using 190% of the standard cost, due to administrative changes.

Unless we want to return to a painful change process in a few years, we should look further than these “ISO” type redesign methodologies … the improvements are not universal, the curriculum is not up-to-date, and the cost savings are administrative (and perhaps temporary).  Using emporium-buffet-etc redesign is like installing a GPS unit on a 1973 Pinto — yes, we get better data and we feel ‘with it’, but it’s still a 1973 Pinto.  We will not save the planet by driving a Pinto, nor will we save our profession by emporium models; we need a top-to-bottom new vision of our work, whether this is the New Life vision or some other model.

ps — ‘ISO’ is ‘International Organization for Standardization’, as in “ISO 9001” a set of management criteria (see http://www.iso.org/iso/home.html)… focusing efficiency from a management point of view; I see emporium and related models as being ‘ISO applied to developmental mathematics’.

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Equity, Opportunity and Developmental Mathematics

Our friends at the Developmental Education Initiative (DEI) kindly offered an opportunity to write a guest post for their blog Accelerating Achievement … my post on Equity is up at their blog http://deionline.blogspot.com/2011/05/guest-post-equity-opportunity-and.html

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Webinar on “Carnegie Pathways”

A webinar was held today, and was attended by a very large crowd.

You can see the presentation slides, and watch the recording of the webinar, at the Carnegie Foundation web site … http://www.carnegiefoundation.org/spotlight/webinar-introducing-carnegies-work-in-developmental-mathematics

I hope that you take a look.  Change is coming, and we can control the changes more if we are fully engaged.  Please take a look at the Pathways information, as well as the New Life project http://dm-live.wikispaces.com/; these are parallel efforts to change developmental mathematics based on professional standards.

Getting there … and letting go of ‘what works’

We’ve all seen them … lovely compilations of ideas ‘that work’, often published by an esteemed leader or organization with the goal of moving our profession forward.

A recent post by Justin Baeder (see http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/on_performance/2011/03/doing_what_works_doesnt_really_work.html) got me thinking about my response to these ‘what works’ lists.  Most of the entries on the lists are discrete items, and their inclusion might have some evidence-based rationale.  However, they are seldom presented with a conceptual framework to understand what is productive about them.  Justin Baeder also points out that the ‘what works’ mentality often misses the importance of system thinking … life (and teaching) is much more complex than using the right set of tools.

It’s not that I do not want to see change happen.  Obviously (or maybe not so) I have invested considerable time and energy to bring about change.  My concern: Change without understanding context or concepts is just like our students doing 100 problems practicing ‘solving equations’.  The result may (on occasion) look pretty, and it appears that we are doing the right things.

Our work represents our understanding and wisdom; our work represents professional effort.  Replicating ‘what works’ in the field normally avoids the understanding and wisdom … after all, “X” was listed as a ‘best practice’ by an expert, so it must be a good thing to do. 

Learning is a complex process, involving elements of a multitude of sciences (psychology, biology, sociology, and anthropology to name a few).  Each ‘practice’ exists in a complex web of practices and their meanings.  Transferring a best practice to a new context assumes a fundamental equivalence of the contexts.

Getting there will involve developing our understanding and wisdom.  We will find that there are concepts and theories with a track record of predicting positive outcomes.  At a sufficiently high level, we can all use the same concepts and theories to produce good results.  Seek the understanding and wisdom.  As Albert Einstein was reported to have said:

The significant problems we have cannot be solved at the same level of thinking with which we created them.