Coaching for Growth: The Manasse Framework for Leadership Development

Posted on February 21, 2025 by Mark Manasse, One of Thousands of Leadership Coaches on Noomii.

One of the California community colleges’ mandates is to help students—a majority of whom have been deemed so-called “basic skills” students—succeed in light of the potential structural barriers in their way (Manasse, 2017). In response to these structural barriers, over the past decade, the California Community College Success Network (3CSN) led statewide professional development within California Community Colleges with the aim of helping institutions investigate, disseminate, and scale up best practices to (a) help prepare students for college-level work and (b) better prepare instructors to help students achieve college-level work (Illowsky, 2008). To put it simply, 3CSN’s mission is “to develop leaders in California community colleges who have the capacity to facilitate networks of faculty, staff, and students for curricular and institutional redesigns in support of increased student access, success, equity, and completion” (“3CSN,” n.d.), and the way they hope to accomplish this is via professional development (Manasse, 2017).

According to Manasse (2017), the focus on professional development at the state level is indeed a crucial step. However, Russell (2012) explains that teaching experience and teacher training are not requirements for teaching in California community college classrooms; rather, a master’s degree or a higher degree in a field is the minimum requirement. Consequently, without professional development, some instructors may be ill-prepared to handle the rigors of appropriately assisting a majority of community college students because the instructors’ graduate programs do not often focus on pedagogy, and community colleges leave little room “in curriculum [to] consider the difficulties young people might have as they learn to think like a political scientist or physicist or the reading and writing difficulties that can emerge when encountering a discipline for the first time” (Rose, 2012, p. 157). Therefore, community college instructors are often discipline—not andragogical—experts and are unwittingly intertwined in the lack of preparation students demonstrate for the rigors of college-level coursework, even after basic skills completion (Rose, 2005; Manasse, 2017). In fact, due to the inconsistent preparation of some faculty to assist community college students, it becomes paramount to not only support the professional development of faculty but also the professional development of learning assistance professionals as well. Well trained learning assistance professionals might help to fill in potential gaps in faculty teaching acumen and fulfill the mission of California community colleges.

PROFESSIONALIZATION OF HIGHER ED LEARNING ASSISTANCE

According to Danny Pittaway (Personal Communication, 2018), one of the LAP co-founders, tutoring concerns itself with the inscrutable nature of learning. Learning cannot be perfectly observed. It can be approached or addressed, but often what is perceived or observed is the shadow of learning, or its effect. The thing itself is hidden, but its manifestations serve as the only evidence tutors have that it is happening, like when a student has an ah ha moment. Tutors can shine a light on these inner workings of the mind through attending to metacognition, or awareness of one’s thinking (Schoenbach, Greenleaf, & Murphy, 2012).

What emerges, then, is a clear picture and position of the tutor as situated between the domains of student and professor, who is often the embodiment of disciplinary expertise. That is, by virtue of experience and role, tutors occupy a space otherwise unoccupied that spans the gap between student and instructor or disciplinary expertise (Pittaway, Personal Communication, 2018).

Because faculty—especially newer faculty—sometimes lack the andragogical expertise to support the development of students in the ways of how to learn, not just what to learn, (Manasse, 2017), it is no surprise that higher education has also seen significant effort to foster a professional community around learning assistance in recent years. Organizations such as the College Reading and Learning Association (CRLA), and the Association of Colleges for Tutoring and Learning Assistance (ACTLA), and many other state-level and national organizations—such as the Learning Assistance Project—have championed the pivotal role of tutoring as a driver for student success. There has been a movement toward coherence and mutual support in the field, evidenced by organizations such as the Council of Learning Assistance and Developmental Education (CLADEA) which fosters an alliance among various organizations committed to improving postsecondary tutoring. In their policy statement on learning assistance, CLADEA strongly argues for institutions of higher learning to prioritize and fund learning assistance initiatives. Pointing to the efficacy of tutoring and its pivotal role in student success, the policy statement succinctly captures the state of the field in the late 2010s: Tutoring programs seeking legitimacy and permanency on their campuses.

More recently in California, the Learning Assistance Project has also aimed to further legitimatize the field of learning assistance in higher education via creating a community of practice that brings together tutoring and learning assistance educators from the California Community Colleges to raise the professional profile of tutoring through exploring effective practices in tutoring, creating community, and leveraging resources (LAP, n.d.).

Since 2014, this community of practice has worked across California to have yearly Tutor Expos, a conference for and by tutors that showcases promising practices that also allows participants to network with colleagues while also being exposed to academic conferences as this is often the first conference attendees have ever attended and/or presented at. Additionally, this organization has created a leadership institute for tutoring program coordinators who often have little to no training in running tutoring programs and who often feel isolated on their own campuses with little to no community to interact with (LAP, n.d.).

Consequently, it is crucial to consider that not only faculty, but also tutors, need professional development. Community college faculty (and tutors) may feel isolated and unsupported, and excellent instructors (and tutors) tend to have individualized success in spite of institutional policy or campus culture (Bailey, et al., 2015; Manasse, 2017). Therefore, within community colleges, communities of practice may create leadership opportunities as members are not only exposed to varying ideas on how to support students, but such exposure can lead to self-reflection and create new and shared identities for members of the community (Wenger, 1998). These communities of practice, therefore, provide a way to incrementally implement the professional development that is called for by the California Community College Chancellor’s Office to support student success (Manasse, 2017).

MANASSE FRAMEWORK

Based off of his work with LAP and a growing statewide community of practice around learning assistance, LAP’s co-founder and Coordinator of San Diego Mesa College’s Centralized Tutoring Program created a framework to support the continual develop of tutors. This framework provides tutors the opportunity to choose how and in which ways they would like to develop, supporting the concept of autonomy, mastery, and purpose mentioned by Pink (2009) in his seminal work, Drive, in which he describes how to motive adults. Hence, the tenets of the framework define the role of professional development, with explicit understanding that while these areas of focus connect to one another (developing in one area may influence the development in another area), that one never completes development in any area, so continual and ongoing professional development is driven by the framework of the community of practice itself. Consequently, tutors strive to increase knowledge in one or more of the following four domains of the Manasse Framework:
• Tutoring: Continue to develop their tutoring skills and style via experience, professional development, and work with others in their CoP
• Leadership: See themselves as a leader and define what leadership means to them
• Andragogy: Continue to learn about how adults learn, including themselves
• Equity: Meet each student where they are and learn about their individual needs
The California Community College system has recognized that learning assistance does contribute to student success, and both qualitative and quantitative data at the state and local levels continues to demonstrate this correlation. If we continue to develop our near peer learners via the Educational Professional framework, they may continue to self-improve on a consistent and ongoing basis and offer better learning assistance support to our community college students.

CONCLUSION

Faculty may come into the community college system unready to assist the students who are in their classes. The instructor may have little to no pedagogical training and may not be familiar with the cultural and language needs of the students in their classrooms, especially if they do not have the same backgrounds of their students. Therefore, focusing on the professional development of tutors may be especially helpful in bridging the preparation gap between students and faculty. Hence, a tutoring community of practice utilizing the Manasse Framework may help develop future educational leaders while also helping students reach their educational goals. While this presentation described the accomplishments of a tutoring community of practice and subsequent framework, future research will correlate qualitative and quantitative data demonstrating why and how professional learning for tutors may be connected to improved student success.