3CSN Overview

15 Years of Professional Learning by Design: (How) The Network Works

For over 15 years, 3CSN has worked to change the conversation about where the focus of our support for students should be—first and foremost with their persistence, success, and equity in mind.

3CSN’s current, thriving online communities and networks are based on a long history of building powerful face-to-face and online learning experiences for California community college educators.

We offer opportunities for educators to participate in ongoing professional learning opportunities that go beyond the nuts and bolts of implementing new procedures to include rigorous and sustained inquiry into the issues that most deeply undergird our attempted transformation. Watch the video below to learn more about our inquiry areas.

3CSN’s holistic approach rests on several premises: learning begins with tending to the identity and lived experience of each individual learner; knowledge is socially-constructed; and learning is a dynamic, iterative process -therefore, one never “arrives” as a learner, and the work of 3CSN is designed around ongoing inquiry, application, and reflection within a Community of Practice (CoP).

3CSN's Design Principles for Powerful Professional Learning

Building Knowledge

3CSN's learner-centered approach is based on theory and research about how learning works.

1. Community agreements for collegial engagement are transparently co-created.

2. Participants' voices are privileged through active engagement and protocols designed to encourage equitable participation.

3. All participants are welcome at whatever level of engagement feels most useful to them.

4. Dialogues across campuses and roles are an integral part of the community.

Building Relationships

3CSN has always recognized that relationships are critical to learning and collaboration builds capacity.

1. Community agreements for collegial engagement are transparently co-created.

2. Participants' voices are privileged through active engagement and protocols designed to encourage equitable participation.

3. All participants are welcome at whatever level of engagement feels most useful to them.

4. Dialogues across campuses and roles are an integral part of the community.

Opportunities for Praxis

Praxis- engaging in a process of reflection, learning, and action in order to transform our classrooms, colleges, and communities--is essential to 3CSN's approach to professional learning.

1. Provide space for participants to reflect upon and apply their learning in community with other practitioners.

2. Invite participants to plan next steps for change on their campuses.

3. Offer opportunities to continue this work with fellow practitioners on their campuses, in their regions, and across the state.

4. Participants become facilitators of change, building capacity on their

campuses and enriching 3CSN's

network.

Measuring Success

3CSN's key inquiry areas and professional learning design principles create a supportive network that continuously offers opportunities for learning, practice, and reflection. With over 58,500 educators served since 2008, participants continue to demonstrate the value of this type of professional learning.

3CSN believes in meeting learners where they are and recognizes that learning can have several levels of value for them. We use the Value Creation Framework developed by Wenger, Trayner, & de Laat (2011) to evaluate the usefulness and success of our offerings.

Getting to Reframed Value

This is something all practitioners and educational leaders seek- institutional and policy change. These system-wide changes do not occur overnight; rather, they are built upon the professional learning seeds sown by campus, regional, and statewide community efforts. Sometimes, these opportunities do come to us first-- in Guided Pathways and AB705, for example. These systemwide changes should be seen as an opportunity to create those equitable, reframed campuses we have always dreamed about.

Powerful Partnerships

Using action research methodology, 3CSN partners with community colleges spanning from a year to several years in order to support the colleges' efforts in sustaining and evaluating their student success initiatives. Many community colleges participate in BSILI multiple times with different team members so that their change effort is understood and owned by the entire campus. 3CSN coordinators also apply their knowledge from the 3CSN network to support their own campuses' student success efforts.

See current partnerships

3CSN provides critical professional development in a time when transformative change in education is desperately needed.