Next week we will be welcoming our fourth cohort into Pathway. We have 14 new students joining our returning 2nd and 3rd year students for a total of 31 students.
Certainly one of the constants here has been change. Every year we incorporate what we have learned – refining our admissions process, tweaking the curriculum, adding new staff.
Over the course of this year we will be making one of our biggest changes to our curriculum. Specifically, we will be increasing the opportunities for integration into classes with typical students. This is not a big change for us philosophically – we are already there in believing that our students are capable of much more, but it is a big change for us logistically.
Up to this point our students have been taking the same classes based on whether they were first of second year students. With some exceptions all the classes that students were taking were for Pathway students only. We have always had some students taking individual courses, but in general at any given moment we knew that our students were in one of a handful of locations. In going to this much more individualized system we will have 32 students in 32 different locations at any given time. Therein lies a series of challenges - finding the right classes, finding the right instructors, supporting students to get to and from class, and supporting students in and outside of class.
Since there are a limited number of us on staff we are building an infrastructure of student volunteers and interns to provide additional support to our students. Starting in the fall we will be working with individual students to take classes through UCLA, UCLA Extension, and UCLA Recreation with our goal being that by the end of the year all students will have participated in at least 2 fully integrated courses.
