Four Connections and You

In 2010, in an effort to improve course dropout rates, Odessa College sought out the common thread between their courses which had the greatest student retention.

What they uncovered are four simple, yet effective practices that can increase your connection to your students and promote student success in your face-to-face or online classroom. They called their findings The Four Connections.

This on-demand workshop will share Odessa’s fascinating story and give you the tools to bring the power of The Four Connections to your classroom in more intentional ways. The call to action will be for you to reflect on your own effective strategies for bringing students into a strong class community, describe a new intervention you can implement under one or more of the Four Connections themes, and indicate a section or sections where you will employ these strategies so that we can track student retention and success in courses intentionally utilizing Four Connections and gather additional approaches that can be shared as a collection of strategies to increase retention.