Western Michigan achieves faculty and student success through Gateways to Completion

Currently in their third cohort of the Gateways to Completion process, Western Michigan University has continuously built on their prior work. In the start of the process, new collaborations were formed with the goal of improving DFWI rates and addressing equity gaps. For Western, this meant getting faculty involved.

Gateways to Completion helped bridge the gap between staff in academic support programs, like Katie Easley, Director of Student Success Services, and faculty in the classroom. She says that “The strength of our initiative is that we do have a partnership between our student success staff and our faculty. And while those two groups could do good things on their own, they’re stronger when they are working together collaboratively.” Especially during the first year of the process when participants review KPIs and complete their self study, having people engage in robust discussion proved to be powerful and essential to their work.

Access to data has also been an important part of this work. Being able to share data with faculty and show them what’s going on with their students has been empowering. For faculty who participated in Gateways to Completion, the changes have been transformative for their students and their teaching. They have redesigned their courses and see students learning more, being more engaged in their learning, and then ultimately seeing better grades at the end of the semester. Faculty have also begun seeing equity gaps closing. Easley says that she sees that faculty who were a part of cohort 1 are still continuously improving their courses. After completing the 3 year process, their mindset has shifted to being more thoughtful about what and how they are teaching, how they are assessing, and working with their students.

In their second cohort, Western Michigan University was announced as the 2019 Barefoot & Gardner Award winner. They continued to see improvements in the DFWI rates and improvements in the grades in the next courses in a sequence, even through the pandemic.

After two cohorts in their College of Arts and Sciences, Western Michigan University expanded their scope to the entire university and are now working on courses such as Anthropology and Spanish. Although not typically considered as gateway courses, the Western team saw from their data that STEM were not the only courses that could impact student success.

One of the keys to their success has been learning from national experts. The support from the Gardner Institute team was one of the most influential parts of the process. The institute team was able to provide neutral insight into the institutional data. Easley says that the mentorship provided felt personal and was career-changing for her and other members of the institution.