The SuccessNow Learning Communities’ initiative will create from the beginning a consistent, organized, and comprehensive faculty and staff development program, the SuccessNow Faculty/Staff Academy.

SuccessNow Learning Communities for developmental reading and writing students are being designed to increase student success and persistence toward their goals and credentials. Taking a leaf from the success of Valencia Community College, every thing the academy does, every policy, every process, every description of our work will be subjected to two powerful questions:

"How will this support improved learning?" and “How do we know it will?”

There is a great deal of evidence that learner engaging pedagogies improve student success. “Research findings over the past 30 years unequivocally support the fact that student learning and retention are strongly correlated with student engagement. The more actively engaged students are with the subject matter being conveyed, with faculty and staff, and with other students, the more likely they are to persist and achieve at higher levels.” (Goode, Riehl)

For the SuccessNow Learning Communities to be effective, there must be organized, consistent, and ongoing faculty/staff development. From Faculty Development in a National Sample of Community Colleges, a survey of 130 community colleges, come these faculty/staff development recommendations – “a major component of an effective faculty development program is the existence of a formalized, structured development program and activities. Another recommendation is the following - “a major component of an effective faculty development program is faculty ownership; there can be no ownership of an unstructured, leaderless program. Random faculty development has little impact.”

Planning for the SuccessNow Learning Communities will involve developing formats for a consistent, formalized and comprehensive SuccessNow Faculty/Staff (development) Academy.

“There’s an irony: It’s a teaching institution, but there’s almost nothing for the teachers … there’s no big investment in teaching your teachers how to teach, or teaching them how to research, teaching them how assess the results of what they are doing, or keeping them in communities so they talk to each other.” “Honored But Invisible: An Inside Look at Teaching in Community Colleges” – Routledge

The intent of the SuccessNow Faculty/Staff Academy is to stand that irony on its head. First, by defining ourselves as a learning institution instead of as a teaching institution. Teaching does not ensure learning. “The Learning Paradigm embraces the goal of promoting what Gardner calls "education for understanding"-"a sufficient grasp of concepts, principles, or skills so that one can bring them to bear on new problems and situations, deciding in which ways one's present competencies can suffice and in which ways one may require new skills or knowledge." This involves the mastery of functional, knowledge-based intellectual frameworks rather than the short-term retention of fractionated, contextual cues.” (Barr and Tagg) We will consistently ask, "How will this support improved learning?" and “How do we know it will?” (Shugart)

Second, by shifting from random professional development to “consistent, formalized and comprehensive faculty/staff development.” (Faculty Development in a National Sample of Community Colleges)