Community colleges offer an array of programs designed to help students meet different goals. Noncredit education provides training for students seeking targeted, often shorter, courses for personal and professional enrichment (Cohen, Brawer, & Kisker, 2014). Many community colleges are now increasingly emphasizing noncredit workforce…

As two Piedmont Virginia Community College (PVCC) faculty set out to create an innovative learning community, they found that they also fostered a complex and rewarding professional development opportunity. This is an account of what it took to create such a community, and some of the lessons they learned along the way.

In this article, the author discusses the need for collaboration in developmental education and proposes two major ideas for consideration: (1) that educators need to re-conceptualize how they go about delivering developmental education; and (2) that they need to collaborate more fully with others in practicing it. The author notes that of almost…