Making Learning Matter: Building Guided Learning Pathways at LaGuardia Community College

Abstract

LaGuardia Community College is pursuing a sustained, multi-layered strategy to place learning, teaching, and cohesive curriculum at the center of a guided learning pathway. Implemented in both general education and disciplinary majors collegewide, our Learning Matters core competencies offer faculty powerful tools they use to design, enact, assess, and refine cohesive curriculum pathways. Curricular coherence is central to our innovation, but it does not operate in isolation. Its effectiveness emerges from careful alignment with an array of complementary reform strategies. High impact professional development supports faculty and staff as they connect curricular coherence with engaging pedagogy and faculty-driven assessment processes. Our ePortfolio practice shapes dynamic digital learning processes that help students to understand and engage those pathways and make them their own. This integrative strategy positions learning--student learning, faculty learning, and organizational or institutional learning--as the essential central element in a broad and effective educational improvement effort.