To help “Clarify the Path” pathways for students, the Guided Pathways Core Team held a fall 2019 event in which department leaders met and mapped a suggested quarterly sequence of courses for their department’s programs. Departments spent the next few months reviewing and confirming their program maps. By the end of the 2019-20 academic year, more than 90% of the programs had been mapped – 155 of the 166 degrees and certificates offered that year. We have now completed 100% of the of the 170 degrees and certificates offered in the 2020-21 academic year. The 231 completed maps have been sent to the Office of Communications. That team is working diligently to finish a student-focused website that will provide access to both Guided Pathways program and transfer maps and other vital Guided Pathways information. You can expect to be able to access these pages in fall 2021.

At De Anza, we pushed past the basic requirements of pillar 1. To further support students in achieving their goals, a team of teaching faculty and counselors mapped 61 common transfer patterns during the 2020-21 academic year. These maps will aid students planning to transfer to four-year institutions, particularly those planning to major in disciplines for which a degree or certificate is not offered at De Anza. Transfer pattern maps enable students to chart their courses to the schools of their choice. 

The second pillar of the Guided Pathways model is focused on “Getting on the Path,” and we have done much to support students in making their initial decisions.  Many of our students come into college without a declared major, so developing clear areas of academic interest provides them an opportunity to strike a balance between exploring potential majors and making timely progress towards their academic goals. To that end, six areas of academic interest, or “meta-majors,” were developed by inviting faculty, staff, administrators, and students—over 140 people—to engage in activities that helped conceptualize and build each one. Within each of the six meta-majors are programs, majors, degrees and certificates that have related courses. Departments were initially placed within the meta-majors based on the data collected during the various meta-major building activities throughout the year. Ultimately, each department decided on their permanent meta-major placement. The Academic Senate and College Council approved the meta-majors in spring 2020.

Collaborative Support Across Campus

De Anza provides many resources to support students in “Staying On the Path,” including supplemental instructional support, student service support and real-life support to help students succeed in their education. 

The college has already done some important work to expand support for students and assist them in staying on the path to success. Responding to AB 705, a state mandate, the Math and English departments redesigned their curriculum so that all students begin at transfer-level college courses in mathematics and English Composition. To ensure that students continued to receive needed support, the departments engaged in numerous discussions and curricular revisions while collaborating with support services such as the tutorial centers, counseling and special programs, and restructuring placement policies to maximize a student’s potential to succeed in a course. 

The Office of Communications redesigned the college website in 2017, adopting a more streamlined format to make it easier for students to find the resources they need. For example, new pages bring together all the academic programs in one place and all of the student service resources in another. It is possible to broaden our support by embedding both academic and non-academic resources throughout students’ programs to promote student learning, retention, and persistence. We can look for these enhanced strategies to be integrated directly into student programs via the upcoming Villages project. 

Classified professionals, another powerful resource, are essential in keeping students on the path to success. The Guided Pathways Team partnered with classified leaders to create a series of workshops that culminated in a co-facilitated conference; we formalized and institutionalized the various, critical roles classified professionals play, in conjunction with administrators and faculty, in ensuring student success.

Pillar 4 requires us to “Ensure Learning.” We have tools to help us measure which strategies are most effective. Those include using some quantitative data collected through both our robust Student Learning Outcome tracking and our established cycles of assessment via college structures like Program Review. Another way to ensure learning is through student feedback. The Guided Pathways Core Team has gathered student input by including student membership on the core team and by conducting in-person student focus groups and online student surveys for our meta-majors work. The recently established  “Student Focus Group” team plans to continue soliciting student input through various means, as we believe students’ stories are important qualitative data to collect, review, and use to help shape our work. 

But there is more to ensuring learning than assessing data. We need to discuss openly how assessment functions within our environments. Peer discussions are a vehicle for this kind of professional development, and the Guided Pathways Team will support employees by fostering this kind collaboration to make the outcomes of assessment useful and apparent. We must ask hard questions to rebuild the idea of assessment through Student Learning Outcomes into a meaningful dialogue with strong, positive outcomes for all of us. Answers to how to do this work will come as we take a closer look at the fourth pillar of Guided Pathways.