Caelin Bragg
Lantern Staff
Butler is hosting the Great Plains Conference on Acceleration at the Hubbard Welcome Center in El Dorado from Thursday, March 8 to Friday, March 9.
The conference aims to allow developmental education (dev-ed) faculty to discuss and spread information about dev-ed and accelerated learning program techniques to a variety of colleges across Kansas and beyond.
“Acceleration is about students getting through their developmental education in a more efficient and effective way,” Katheryn McCoskey, professor of English and lead of developmental English, said. “It’s not about just making everything faster, so it gets done faster, because that doesn’t really work. It’s cutting out the stuff we don’t need and putting it in a smarter model, so that we’re working off of students’ strengths.”
Representatives from Kansas, Nebraska, Iowa, Illinois, Missouri and Oklahoma are coming to the conference. Three speakers, Susan Gabriel and Jesse Kiefner, directors of the Accelerated Learning and Accelerated Mathematics Programs at the Community College of Baltimore County, Maryland and Patrick Saxon, director of the Developmental Education Doctoral Program at Sam Houston State University, Texas, are giving presentations at the conference.
“I’m excited [to have Saxon at the conference],” Bethany Chandler, a professor of math, said. “He’s involved with development math [and] development education, and he’s [going to] talk to us about what’s happening with development math across the country and developmental education in general, so I’m just excited about the people we’re bringing in.”
This is the second annual Great Plains Conference held, the first taking place on Feb. 16 and 17, 2017 also at the Hubbard Welcome Center, and featured Gabriel as a speaker. This is the first year developmental math is being featured at the conference.
McCoskey and Chandler hope to spread the success they have had with the accelerated learning and math module programs that have been implemented at Butler.
“We’ve hit the wrong target as a nation on dev-ed where we’ve probably been doing a lot of skill and drill of stuff that supposedly students didn’t get right in middle school and high school, where really what we should have been doing is having them work at a college level and have a lot of extra support doing it if they need that,” McCoskey said. “And so, with the math redesign and the English redesign at Butler, I think we’re seeing different ways to set up curriculum to work off students’ strengths and just teach in a different way.”
Individual sessions will be held over the two day conference, which will be hosted by different attendees, including Butler faculty, covering all aspects of teaching dev-ed English, math and more.
During the conference on Thursday, March 8, Butler’s Culinary Arts department will prepare meals in seven groups to attendees, and they will hold a vote on which group’s dishes were the best.
