For Immediate Release
February 11, 2009

Cañada College Professor Named Bay Area Coordinator for Statewide Effort Aimed at Improving Student Basic Skills

Approximately 70 percent of all students entering California community colleges are not prepared to do college-level work in English, reading, writing or math.

Anniqua Rana of Redwood City, a professor of English as a Second Language at Cañada College, has been named the Bay Area Network Mentor for the state’s Basic Skills Initiative.

Rana will work with colleges in Northern California to build a network of professional learning and find ways to help local colleges to share strategies supporting the success of students with basic skills needs. The Bay Area Network will be one of four regional pilot networks in California for 2009. Over the next five years, these networks will collaborate to form a self-sustaining, highly coordinated, state-wide network of professional learning supporting the success of all community college students.

“Anniqua’s appointment puts the college at the forefront in the state’s efforts to help students who do not enter college proficient in English and math,” said Cañada College President Thomas Mohr.

The State Chancellor’s Office started the Basic Skills Initiative in 2008 with an eye toward finding and promoting successful teaching strategies. A strategy that has worked at Cañada is the learning community model, where students take multiple classes together and are paired with an academic counselor. In a learning community, students find friends to study with and have easy access to an academic counselor.

Rana will present Cañada’s “Crossing Borders” learning community for basic skills students at the Achieving the Dream Conference Feb. 19 in San Francisco.

“Achieving the Dream is a multiyear national initiative to help more community college students succeed,” she said. “The initiative is particularly concerned about student groups that traditionally have faced significant barriers to success, including students of color and low-income students.”

Ben Smith of Redwood City understands the power of a learning community. Smith, a student at Cañada College since 2006, has excelled in the social sciences but struggled to pass math. Last spring, he enrolled in a learning community that featured two math classes the same semester, and he passed with ease. "It was the best decision I've made in college," he said. "I learned about math anxiety and how to overcome it. I had friends in the class and we studied together and (instructor) Denise Hum would meet us in the Learning Center to help us study. There was a lot of interaction in the class."

Ben will finish at Cañada this semester and has been provisionally accepted at San Jose State University where he will study behavioral science and sociology in the fall.

As a Bay Area Network Mentor, Rana can help position Cañada as a statewide leader in basic skills education. “We can share what we’re doing and we can gain from what others are doing. We’re learning as we go along and we have the opportunity to learn from others. It’s exciting because Cañada is being viewed as a state leader in the area of basic skills education and they are looking to our models and experience to influence best practices,” Rana said. “It’s a great opportunity for our college to shine.”

For more information, contact Robert Hood, Director of Marketing and Public Relations, at hoodr@smccd.edu or 306-3340