Spring 2026: Improving Process Skill Development in Coreq College Algebra - What to do instead of things students hate.

This term I am teaching a corequisite support version of College Algebra at my home institution, and as an educator I am constantly tweaking and changing my courses. There are two changes I'd like to make this term; the first on process skill development which I'll describe here, and the second on better alignment of course activities and student-facing directions of the weekly learning objectives, which I'll talk more about in another post this week.

Process skills, success skills, or foundational skills, are the skills students need to develop and use in order to learn. There are a wide variety of them out there (I also like the CAST UDL Guidelines, and there is overlap with the NACE Career Readiness Competencies) and I use the Process Oriented Guided Inquiry Learning (POGIL) Process Skills; Teamwork, Oral and Written Communication, Management, Information Processing, Critical Thinking, Problem Solving, and Assessment. Here are the three areas Process Skills will come about in my class this term. 

1. Class Session Agenda - Each class session I make a student-facing agenda that includes group assignments, role assignments, process skill for the day, faculty goal for the day, learning outcomes, exit ticket feedback, and how many pre-class assignments were submitted. The inclusion of the process skill is meant to help students identify the specific skills they are developing, and to nudge them towards behaviors that will help them learn in groups. I then also use it when asking students to reflect about their progress as a group in answering questions together. 
   
   
2. Craft Your Learning - Corequisite support courses have three goals; help students develop prerequisite knowledge to support their understanding of course-level material, have more time for course-level content, and to develop the necessary skills to be successful in a college-level math course. I used to have specific assignments about organizing a binder, reflecting on procrastination, and other skills, but students rarely completed them, and when they did complained about them.
   
   To help with this I started having conversations with the class about what they struggled with. Over time these conversations came around to the same skills I was trying to help them develop, but it wasn't until they recognized the need for the skills themselves did they actually start engaging in these assignments. I have now a developed protocol on how to structure these conversations, focused on having students discuss what they are struggling with in small groups referencing the POGIL Process Skills, and collecting this information anonymously to share out with the class. We then talk about what kind of assignment or activity would have students address this struggle, and then talk about what they did the following week. If you are interested in hearing more and seeing examples, I will share out more during the upcoming POGIL Practitioner Collaborative in June. 
   
   
3. Weekly Process Skill - One thing I would like to try is to have a specific process skill for the week, that I integrate into the goals for the week, exit tickets, and course announcements. I thought I might have this list before the start of the term, but I'm realizing it may be better to think through it as I do my weekly preparations.
   

How have you used process skills in your courses? Yours may not be the ones I use, and students seem to benefit from having the 'hidden curriculum' be made visible and direct.