Cohort or Co-mingle?

As the result of California’s AB705, all community college students are to be placed directly in college-level math and English. Our school (College of the Sequoias) is in our first full semester of implementation. One of the first things you have to decide is whether to use a cohort model or a co-mingle model.

In a cohort model, students enroll in a gateway course and corequisite support course that are linked together. So, there are no students in the gateway course that are not taking the support course.

In a co-mingle model, students can enroll in any section of the gateway course and any section of the support course. So, the gateway classes will have some students who need the support course and others who do not.

At our college we decided to go with the cohort model. Here are some of the things we considered when we made our choice.

• Flexibility
  On our campus we do not all teach the same exact topics, in the same exact order, at the same exact pace. We felt this would make it difficult for the instructor to know what exactly to cover in the support course, as we have decided to use a “just in time” approach for support topics.
• Continuity
  We felt it would be beneficial for the students to see the same instructor in both courses. That instructor would know the strengths and weaknesses of the students, and could address things as needed in either course.
  (We were fortunate that all of our instructors are qualified to teach both the gateway course and the correquisite support course.)
• Communication
  Since one instructor is teaching both courses, there is no need for communication between the gateway course’s instructor and the support course’s instructor.
• Morale
  We felt that it might be demoralizing for some students to see students who did not need the support course leave while they had to stay for extra help. We understood that having students at various skill levels could be beneficial to all students, but decided to go with our homogeneous approach.

There are many arguments that can be made for using a co-mingle approach. Did your college choose a co-mingle model? We’d love to have you share your approach and your reasoning to help others make an informed decision. Please leave a comment, or perhaps we could get you to write a guest blog for us?

George