Chaparral 2024-2025: Origins of the Supplemental Instruction (SI) Program with Jean Lecuyer

The idea of the SI program comes from an English teacher, I believe it was Jo-Ray McCuen. It came out when we were putting together an application for a large Title III federal grant of $2.5 million. We had a meeting with representatives from all the divisions to see if we could come up with ideas for new programs that the Grant would enable us to fund and get started.  That teacher told us that one of her colleagues always claimed that she would never have gotten her degree if it hadn't been for a group of students of which she was part and who met regularly outside of classes to study together and help each other with the class material. 

 We thought it was a good idea and decided to look into it further. That's when we heard about the Supplemental Instruction (SI) Program that had been developed at the University of Missouri-Kansas City. What this program was doing was precisely what our friend had been talking about: for a given class, it organized weekly student meetings outside of class times and it provided leaders for these meetings who had been in the class and gone through it successfully. 

 We also heard of a similar program that had been developed at UC Berkeley by a math professor whom we invited to the college to explain his program. It was similar to the Missouri one except that it focused more on problem solving. Students were not there to explore concepts so much as to try to solve problems from a set provided by the teacher. 

Both approaches appealed to us and so we just put them in the grant application; we would use the Missouri SI for humanities and Social Sciences and the Berkeley format for Math and the Sciences. In both cases we would provide SI leaders chosen from students who had succeeded in the class before and were recommended by their teachers. We would also give a training session at the beginning of the semester for these SI leaders.

The impact of the SI program was spectacular. First, it helped us get the grant we were applying for and all the teachers who tried it reported increased student success when we checked in at the end of the first year of the grant. In my Algebra-based Physics class, my success rate had been low because for so many of my students this was the first science class where they could not rely on memorization: they had to understand the concepts and be able to use that to solve problems. But when I started using SI, the success percentage in my class went from the low 40s to the mid-60s, a very big gain by educational standards. Several of my colleagues in the Sciences and Math also reported very good success with the program and kept using it. 

Initially we were able to use as SI program coordinator the secretary that the grant provided. That worked well since I was in charge of the grant and my secretary was Ann Reed who did an excellent job. She took over not only the Title III paperwork but also the organization of the SI program. She helped make it very successful. When the grant ended after 5 years, the college took over the financing of the SI coordinator and still does to this day, now under the leadership of Nancy Yaldizian.