This article features a "Triad" partnership of a group of Snohomish County organizations representing education, government and industry. Recognizing the need for a training and workforce development effort to address the aerospace manufacturing employers' needs, Triad views themselves as the pivotal cornerstone for deployment of complex…

Five trends are emerging that will not only change the role of human capital in the United States but will also challenge the legacy system of workforce development, skills and competency-focused institutions, and assuredly, community colleges. Workforce investment boards, for example, are currently geographically constrained in environments that…

The federal No Child Left Behind Act requires schools, districts, and states to recruit and retain "highly qualified teachers" and to show annual progress toward the goal of 100 percent student proficiency in reading and mathematics by 2014. This heightened attention to teacher quality and pressure to improve achievement leaves educators facing a…

This guide combines both theory and practice and focuses on the role of faculty in engaging students, celebrating learning, and developing students' skills. Learning is a collective enterprise--ongoing, always unfinished, exciting, transformational--as much for instructors and staff as for students. The guide attempts to capture that spirit of…

Many high school and two-year college vocational programs are exploring new ways to help students develop and document skills valued in the labor market. Over the past decade, some efforts to improve vocational programs have focused on reorganizing curricula around skill standards and assessments formulated by employers. One recent example of this…

Multi Media Madness (3Ms) was a faculty development program where participants were guided by mentors through the development of a multimedia project. Nine faculty participants attended a week long workshop session in June 2003 taught by three mentors. At the end of the workshop series, the participants submitted a project plan that was reviewed,…

This article describes the experiences of the program coordinator of a new two-year preservation trades program at Harford Community College in Bel Air, Maryland. The two-year associate in applied sciences degree offered at Harford Community College (HCC) is a Technical Professional Studies program in Building Preservation and Restoration (BPR).…

This chapter identifies a number of resources that department chairs can use in their professional development.

This chapter provides an overview of the League for Innovation in the Community College's project on learning outcomes. The 21st Century Learning Outcomes Project was a three-year project involving sixteen diverse community colleges that supported the development of practices for assessing and using student learning outcomes to improve student…

Workforce development grants and contracts are important methods for sustaining financial support for community colleges. This chapter details decision factors, college issues, possible pitfalls, and methods for procuring and handling government contracts and grants for workforce training.

The authors present the results of a 2-year longitudinal study of 90 British children beginning at school entry when they were 4 years 9 months old (range = 4 years 2 months to 5 years 2 months). The relationships among early phonological skills, letter knowledge, grammatical skills, and vocabulary knowledge were investigated as predictors of word…

The United Nations has declared a Decade of Education for Sustainable Development from 2005 to 2015. The American Association of Community Colleges' (AACC) Board of Directors recently passed a resolution to support education for sustainable development in its member institutions and affiliated councils. However, there are significant questions in…

In this essay, the author offers basic suggestions for faculty to become active teacher-scholars within the two-year college professional community. Among his suggestions are: (1) become familiar with the major professional journals in the field; (2) joining a professional organization and attending professional meetings; (3) publication in…

At AACRAO's Annual Meeting in April 2003, Tom Stewart was presented with the APEX Award for Achieving Professional Excellence in his field. He was recognized for his tireless work and commitment to SPEEDE, the electronic transmission of records. Over the almost 40-year span of his career, he has earned the SACRAO and AACRAO Distinguished Service…

The experiences of a first-time community college library director during the initial three months on the job are detailed. The process of automation software migration is used as a vehicle for demonstrating activities performed to improve knowledge. Marketing, customer service, and identification of core library supporters are addressed. Concern…