Pictured left to right, panelists Jessica Crossfield-McIntosh, Assistant Professor, Public Services Librarian; Regina Kengla, Senior Instructor, Writing Services & SI Coordinator; Jen Bechtold, Director of the Center for Student Involvement; Shelley Payne, Associate Professor, Health and Sports Sciences.
How many college assignments require a lot of writing?
How many basic courses do you have to take before you get into your major?
What can I do now so I will be ready for college?
These are just some of the questions that were asked by Westerville Central students to a panel of educators from Otterbein University, who visited the high school on January 11 to discuss college preparedness.
The event was the result of several years of conversation between Central Teacher-Librarian Amy Farris and multiple university academic librarians. Her mission was to find out how to better prepare students to be successful in a collegiate environment and how to align high school instruction accordingly. By understanding university level expectations, she believes high school students can be more prepared.
In the winter of 2017, Farris met with Jessica Crossfield-McIntosh, an Otterbein librarian who was engaged with the prospect of talking more with high school students about college readiness. Crossfield-McIntosh regularly works with pupils experiencing stress over college-level expectations, or those who find themselves taking remedial-level courses because they were not well prepared.
Crossfield-McIntosh was invited by Farris to visit Westerville Central, where she met with teachers Susannah Lee, Bridget Cargin and Jim Grannis, and they formulated a plan to connect Otterbein educators with Central students. The panel was well received and pupils left with a better understanding of what to expect, academically, at the collegiate level.