Partnering with CTE to Address High DFW Rates or Other Student Success Bottlenecks: Course Insights for Academic Success

CTE will partner with departments seeking to reduce DFW rates and enhance student success. Our process follows our “ideas-to-action" approach of gathering evidence to help academic departments uncover the root causes of high DFW rates and develop and implement targeted action plans for improvement.

Ideas to Action

By working at the department level—rather than addressing high DFW courses in isolation—we make it more likely that new approaches are sustained through leadership and faculty transitions and that they are coordinated with the rest of the curriculum. This collaborative approach builds shared responsibility for student success within a department, aligns improvement efforts with broader departmental goals, and cultivates a culture of responsive innovation that can benefit all courses and students. 

Working with a team of faculty/staff from your department, CTE will employ a collaborative, data-informed process that involves:

  1. Inquiry: Collecting evidence from multiple sources (institutional data, student insights, learning outcomes, classroom observations, course reviews) to explore the complex factors behind DFW patterns. 
  2. Collaborative Sensemaking: Bringing department representatives together to interpret findings and develop shared understanding. 
  3. Action Planning: Creating specific curricular, pedagogical and other improvements tailored to your department's unique challenges and opportunities.  
  4. Implementation: Putting changes into practice with ongoing support and assessment for continued refinement and adaptation. 

CTE will partner with departments in this work on a rolling basis. During the academic year, we also host gatherings of department teams with shared goals to create a community for peer support and idea exchange. 

Contact Judy Eddy at to schedule an initial discovery meeting.