Diablo Valley College’s Focus on Athletic Success

Background: DVC's focus on athletic success

Two years ago, the Athletic Department at Diablo Valley College embarked on an ambitious effort to improve student athlete success. Knowing that the Counseling Department was a key ally in this effort, the athletic director, Christine Worsley, and assistant football coach, Ryan Byrne (now athletic director at Santa Barbara City College) presented the concept of a student athlete success course to the counseling leadership (Dean and Department Chairs). As a part of working through concerns that some of the curriculum overlapped with the Counseling department's "Student Success" course, the thought emerged to develop a summer learning community (totaling 12 hours over four days) which would constitute a comprehensive orientation for student athletes. Six hours of this learning community would be an experimental physical education (PE) course designed to focus on rules, regulations, and expectations of student athletes. This PE course would be paired with the existing COUNS 096 - Orientation for Student Athletes. The ambitious goal of this six hour session, would be that all 30 students enrolled would complete a comprehensive educational plan that led to an associate's degree.

Background on the Athletic Educational Plan Templates

Like many colleges, at DVC when counselors return from summer break, the athletic department has already incorporated numerous student athletes into the practices for their fall sports. The student athletes may have attended a general orientation, but in no way can this provide the educational planning that student athletes both need and are required to have before competing. At DVC, they must have a comprehensive athletic educational plan on file before they participate in their first games.

What typically happened in years passt was that during the first two weeks of the fall semester, our Athletic Counselor (one counselor for 400 athletes) was "slammed" with hundreds of athletes who needed educational plans before they could compete. It became increasingly impossible to complete comprehensive educational plans for student athletes, and therefore we had to rely on student athletes to reschedule another appointment to finish their educational plans. Unfortunately, the preponderance of athletes never returned to finish their plans, and thus did not have the complete road map they needed to help them toward achieving their academic and hence athletic goals upon transfer. When DVC began requiring comprehensive educational plans leading to degrees, it became imperative that we would need to work very differently. 

In previous semesters, the athletic counselor, Jamie Bailey, and I had experimented with rudimentary Excel based templates with 15 football players for six hours in a computer lab, and realized that while cumbersome there was some promise to this practice. There were some technical challenges with this effort and the idea was shelved for a couple of years until the new requirement was implemented and the notion of the learning community surfaced.

Once the decision was made that Counseling and Athletics would pilot this effort in the summer of 2010, the athletic counselor, Jamie, the Counseling office supervisor, Cathy Walton-Woodson, and the author began to discuss the need for a revolutionary approach to educational planning in order to accomplish the goal of 30 educational plans within the new six hour course. We conceptualized two major formats which Cathy developed in PDF format. The pros and cons were discussed and debated. Would the template be a semester-based plan mimicking the typical paper educational plan that has survived decades of use (see Appendix 1), or would it be a "requirements" based template shadowing the various general education (DVCGE, CSUGE and IGETC) requirements (see Appendix 2)? The major advantages of the semester based plan that we discussed was that it "looked like" the educational plan with which we were all familiar, where we place the term at the top of the semester box, and then write all the courses below the semester in which students will take them. 

One disadvantage of the traditional format was that we could not readily insert, into the template, required or suggested courses within specific semesters in a manner that would logically assure needed flexibility and individualization in course sequencing (i.e., basic skills English and math, and prerequisites). As a result, this format would need to start as a blank form, requiring students to not only identify which specific courses they wanted to take to meet specific requirements, but also to select the specific semesters during which they would take these courses. This seemed fraught with the potential for mass confusion and chaos, and seemed to betray the possibility of accomplishing 30 comprehensive educational plans in six hours of the class. Also, even if there were time to complete such a plan which would inevitably need to be modified in subsequent semesters (e.g., a student was not able to get into a course in a given semester, or a different class was chosen altogether) there was no context within that format for the student athlete to know which courses were meeting which requirements, which inevitably could lead the athlete back to the counselor, or much worse, astray and off track.

With the requirements based format (Appendix 2), the major drawback is a psychological one. "It just doesn't look like an educational plan!" This is a fact! However, the advantages of the requirements based plan, which we ultimately chose, far exceeded its lack of "face" validity. This template is broken into three major segments: general education, major and P.E. courses. Within the general education portion of this template, we easily plugged in potential pre-requisite courses which students might need to take, particularly with English and math, which would not be included in their degree applicable unit count. Also, the templates were populated with suggested and/or randomized courses which met each specific general education requirement. In addition, using this format, we were able to pre-populate courses which double-counted in more than one general education requirements, as well as courses which met both general education AND major requirements, thus reliably creating a very efficient educational plan.

A legitimate concern arose during development of these templates about the possible perception that only the suggested course would meet the requirement, when in reality multiple courses could do so. This led to adding an asterisk (*) at the end of each suggested course where students had other choices available to them on our general education sheets. It also led to the realization that we also wanted to clearly identify the courses which double counted for their chosen majors. The symbol selected for this was the caret (^). These symbols are referenced toward the bottom of the general education portion of the template.

The "major" section of the plan then simply incorporates the remaining major requirements, not otherwise met with courses double-counting for general education requirements. The final section includes their intercollegiate and other required physical education courses over the course of their education at DVC.

We all have many majors. How did you determine which majors to incorporate into templates?

Conversation with athletic counselors yielded common majors requested by student athletes. At the same time, we identified other majors within our institutions that were viable for student athletes given their compressed educational timeline. Factors such as basic skills needs, historic student interests, times which courses were offered in particular majors, how many major requirements double-counted as meeting general education requirements, and how many units were required for the major all helped to determine which templates were created. The existing templates are periodically updated to reflect any changes and as new majors are approved and deemed as viable for student athletes, templates are created and added to the list of options. Please see the current list of templates at http://www.dvc.edu/org/departments/counseling/096.htm.

How did you choose the general education pattern(s) to use?

We decided to use two of the general education plans for our templates: the core general education required by DVC, or the DVCGE, and the IGETC (CSU pattern). The core DVC general education pattern works well for high unit major requirements (such as Administration of Justice and Kinesiology-Coaching), and the IGETC(CSU) works well with more of the liberal arts majors where students can double count some of their major requirements with general education requirements. We also created templates for the CSUGE, but did not customize it with specific majors. These have proved most helpful in individual appointments, when students specifically plan to attend a CSU.

OK, but how do you implement this process into a class of 30 student athletes?

The format of COUNS 096 is taught for four consecutive days for 1.5 hours each day, with a maximum of 30 student athletes and two counselors. It follows the 1.5 hour, four day, Introduction to DVC Athletics course taught by the athletic department. Both classes are taught in a computer lab.

The most frequently asked question of student athletes in the first group sessions was “But what if I am not planning to major in any of these?” As a result of these questions, we created assumptions that the athletes needed to understand before we proceeded with the educational planning process (and subsequently created a Student Learning Outcome (SLO) to measure our success in conveying this information).  Below is a copy of the PowerPoint slide used to display the assumptions which set the stage for the group sessions. You will note that in these sessions we don’t worry about whether students are qualifiers or non-qualifiers.

Assumptions for your Ed plan
• You want to compete at the Division 1 level in your sport after you transfer
• You need an associate's degree from DVC and must have an educational plan completed this week to play.
• You need to select a degree that is attainable given your athletic time-frame.
• You understand that the degree you select at DVC can be different than your degree at the university.
• You will schedule an appointment with the athletic counselor to discuss your individual circumstances, each semester.

Once the assumptions are understood we proceed to establish the first day’s objective with the next slide which displays:

Day 1 Objective
• Choose major
• Select the corresponding Educational Planning Template
• Enter Math and English sequences onto template using assessment results
• Save and email the plan to yourself

Given that our “student use” computers do not allow students to save documents, we established a method by which students can save their work to the desktop and then email the plan to themselves. After each day, students are able to retrieve their education plan from their email and continue working on them. This process continues until they are finished with their plan. Upon each student's plan completion, one of the counselors (i.e., instructors) reviews it and either suggest changes or approves it. Once approved by the counselor, the students are asked to email it to one of the counselors and to themselves, so that they each have an electronic copy of their plan. The counselor double checks receipt of the students' educational plan before they are released from the class. It is, in reality, the final exam of the class. The counselor then, upon return to his or her office saves each student's educational plan into the designated network drive by academic year and sport, where the admissions eligibility clerk can confirm its presence.

Specific objectives are also established for Days 2, 3 and 4; but most often all students have completed their plans by day 2 or 3, and the rest of the time is spent trying to enroll in classes consistent with their plans, with the availability of two counselors, while in the class.

How do you implement this process in your office with students?

Working with individual students in the office, it is most efficient to have the athletic counselor command the computer and working side by side with each student, pull up records, review the templates and proceed through plan completion. Courses previously taken at DVC, or equivalents established at other colleges can easily be added into the templates. Once familiar with the templates, counselors can very effectively complete a comprehensive educational plan for a student within 15-30 minutes.

Student Services Commitment

Student services staffs have traditionally been among the most flexible and dynamic thinkers within community colleges, probably because of the ever-present perception that the services we provide are not core to our colleges’ missions. Few can question the commitment of student services personnel who are continually trying to improve services and quickly, deftly, and creatively respond to changing national, state and local regulations. Effective use of technology with a personal touch, in the provision of our services is critical to students and our institutions, as well as to our own survival. If we do the educational planning for athletes, correctly, technology can enhance the counseling relationship rather than replace it, and can enhance counselor and college credibility with students. At the same time such efforts help fulfill the colleges’ responsibilities to comply with both national and state athletic regulations.