Transforming the Gateway Course Experience
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“Transforming the Gateway Course Experience” should be required reading for Postsecondary educators of all types, full stop. Dr. Koch’s contribution brings a combination of quantitative analysis and relatable institutional examples to clarify the issues and link them to two important underlying dynamics: the role of gateway courses in influencing student sense of belonging, and the ever-present “weed-out culture mentality”. Most critically, he presents a clear, three-phase plan to dramatically improve the student (and faculty) experience, resulting in greater, and more equitable outcomes.”
Patrick Methvin
Director, Gates Foundation Postsecondary Success
This book explores the critical role of gateway courses in higher education and how they reflect broader societal, cultural, and economic issues. It emphasizes the need to address inequities within these courses to improve student success. Drawing from his extensive experience in education and his role at the Gardner Institute, Koch provides historical and philosophical contextualization for these issues. The book serves as a call to action for educators, urging them to recognize and address the inequitable outcomes in gateway courses. It argues that these outcomes result from specific practices and policies, rather than occurring naturally. Using data and examples from Gardner Institute work with hundreds of colleges and universities, Koch highlights systemic issues that perpetuate inequality in higher education.
The content includes an examination of high failure rates in gateway courses and suggestions for policy changes to improve outcomes. It discusses how race and class divisions are reinforced through current practices in gateway courses, supported by data from numerous institutions. The book also explores how these courses impact students’ sense of belonging and perpetuate stereotypes and critiques the toxic culture of weeding out students while challenging myths such as grade inflation and curve grading. To provide practical solutions, Koch presents an evidence-based model for improving teaching, learning, and success in gateway courses. Written in an accessible style, the book aims to offer educators insights and strategies to transform gateway courses into true opportunities for student success, ultimately advancing higher education’s broader equity and social justice goals.
The book is available print and digitally on Amazon and Routledge. Use code: AFLY03 for 20% Discount with Routlege.
“Could there be a connection between college gateway courses and our nation’s racial history? For Andrew Koch the answer is yes. Koch provides educators with eye-opening evidence that there is indeed a color line notably witnessed in DFWI grades in college gateway courses where the hopes and dreams of far too many racially minoritized students literally come to an end. Everything is in this book for educators to move away from adhering to myths about who can and can’t succeed, as well as from what Koch calls tyrannical practices that do nothing more than perpetuate inequitable learning outcomes. This is the most promising book I have read that can truly change the futures of millions of students, especially those who remain underrepresented and underserved.”
Laura I. Rendón
author of Sentipensante Pedagogy: Educating for Wholeness, Social Justice and Liberation, Second Edition, Stylus
“As I was sitting down to read Drew Koch’s manuscript on “Transforming the Gateway Experience”, I was thinking that it would be a “cookbook” or a “workbook” on addressing what is a huge student success barrier in the universities and colleges around our nation. I have been in the student-success business almost 40 years and was extremely happy to see a scholar/ practitioner put a pen to paper giving us some direction. What I got was that and much more. As I read this book, I became engrossed in the conceptual framework of his compelling argument which challenges us to "put up or shut up". Dr. Koch couched this call to action with historical knowledge and contemporary argument for why there is no time to waste if we believe that education is the great equalizer.”
Dr. Aaron Thompson
President, Kentucky Council on Postsecondary Education
“Higher education admissions is important. But as Drew Koch points out, what do we learn if we devote as much attention to who graduates? I always ask new questions when I listen to Drew Koch. And I always learn from him.”
James R. Grossman
Executive Director, American Historical Association
“Proponents of increasing student success in higher education should feel compelled to focus on courses, the building blocks of the curriculum, as the site for needed transformation. Transforming the Gateway Course Experience: A Call to Action describes compelling rationale and identifies tested tactics and proven maneuvers to equip leaders and disciplinary associations to act and plan for the constant nature of course redesign work at the gateway to the major -- a site where too few students are welcomed into and supported to join the field and thrive.”
Dr. Jillian Kinzie
Associate Director, National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE), Indiana University School of Education, Center for Postsecondary Research
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