Insightful Intervention

Insightful Intervention: A new blog series by Mitchell Welch, Senior Educational Specialist for Edmentum’s Higher Education Division.

In today’s postsecondary market, remediation is often applied to actions taken to reverse established patterns of achievement by learners who are already struggling or failing and need intensive and long-term assistance. We know we need to change.  We need to step back and realize we are spending a large amount of time and energy trying get through content and information.  We are exhausting our resources.  Instructors are dragging learners through the learning process and repeating instruction and reteaching skills.  We are faced with adult learners who require individualized instruction and need to achieve large instructional gains in a short amount of time.

The focus of the Edmentum Higher Education group is on intervention, with the goal of helping adult learning institutions identify particular strengths or problems early and provide instruction that addresses their learners’ needs. It is imperative that we create a proactive approach where institutions will not wait until students are falling behind before intervening; rather, they engage in a continual process of assessing learners’ strengths and weaknesses, providing or modifying instruction that preemptively targets the learners’ needs.  

• Systematic Improvement
  • Increase learner involvement in their own instructional transition into college and careers
  • Utilize data effectively
  • Increase instructional options leading to high school equivalency diplomas
• Instructor professional development
  • Increase instructional knowledge of adult educators
  • Provide instructional resources in order to recruit and retain highly qualified instructors
• Facilitative best practices
  • Provide blended, researched based curriculum which integrate and contextualize skills that lead to college and career readiness
  • Learners apply retained skills independently and transition to credit bearing courses and employment

These components will facilitate the delivery of specific, individualized learner experiences and outcomes. We will create strong intervention initiatives that have a compilation of strategies that are intentional, strategic, meaningful, interrelated, and designed to work together. We will cultivate a culture of high expectations, 21st century skill acquisition and college and career readiness. Offering personalized, formative and summative supports and learning experiences for each learner based on their needs (including online experiences). Our initiatives will build strong, deep interactions among learners, staff, community-based organizations, business and higher education institutions.

Through insightful interventions we will connect and integrate academic content to authentic real world examples, problems and issues and provide learners opportunities to work independently, unassisted by their instructors. Learners will be provided the resources they need in order to develop real understanding, solutions, and products. They will be provided a facilitated learning environment using proven research-based practices that promote how people learn most effectively.

To learn more about Edmentum's approach to higher education, we encourage you to register for an upcoming webinar Five Steps to Successful Adult Intervention on March 27, 2013 at 3:00 p.m. CT and learn how our Adult Intervention and Rapid Response (AR³) program differs from traditional adult remediation programs.