At Clovis Community College, professional learning and student belonging go hand in hand

Despite its location in the sparsely populated plains of Eastern New Mexico, Clovis Community College (CCC) sits at a diverse intersection of communities and industries. A designated Hispanic-Serving Institution, CCC neighbors the Cannon Air Force Base to the west, the Texas border to the east, and close educational partner Eastern New Mexico University the next town over.

The college is committed to creating opportunities for students and fueling economic vitality in the communities it serves. Whether it is responding to a need for more commercial drivers in the region or partnering with local police and fire departments to help train public servants, CCC is an essential hub for students and community partners.

“Sometimes people just need a place to start,” said Dr. Brandon Finney, dean of student services at CCC. “We really are that place.”

In 2021, CCC deepened its commitment to increasing opportunity and mobility for its students when it joined the ATD Network. CCC’s Dr. Robin Kuykendall, now executive vice president, spearheaded this effort and the college’s involvement in the Building Resiliency in Rural Communities for the Future of Work initiative.

Since then, the college has developed programs and practices to help ensure CCC is not just a “place to start” but a welcoming source of opportunity where learners can persist and succeed — and where college leaders and faculty embrace a mindset of lifelong learning.

New tools for inclusion and belonging

As CCC’s Retention Council was examining potential strategies to support students, they focused on the important role that faculty play in students’ everyday lives. “It would make sense if our efforts to help students stay in school started in the classroom,” Dr. Finney said.

From this starting point, they worked with Cindy Martin, instructor in education/program coordinator at CCC, to develop a faculty toolkit aimed at increasing students’ sense of belonging and inclusion in the classroom. “The idea is to make students feel like they belong in the class. That will make them feel like they belong at the school,” Dr. Finney said.

The faculty toolkit consists of 12 discrete practices that educators can adopt to help foster inclusion and belonging in their classes. These tools range from simple name tents propped on desks that help ensure instructors can always call students by their names to “two by two” check-ins, where a faculty member takes two minutes of informal catch-up time with two students each class.

So far, the toolkit has been rigorously piloted by math faculty at CCC. Participating instructors picked one tool to test for four weeks at a time. At the end of every four-week period, faculty sent a brief survey to students asking to what extent they felt like they belonged or were included in the classroom. Dr. Finney said that, aside from being a valuable source of information for faculty testing the toolkit, these surveys helped demonstrate the institution’s commitment and care to the students. He believes this has had a significant effect on the level of classroom engagement faculty are now seeing throughout the department.

“The quality that they saw after that changed drastically,” Dr. Finney said. “They found students participating more and wanting to learn the material at a deeper level.”

Testing and implementing the faculty toolkit also helped college leadership realize there was significant opportunity to improve professional learning on campus. Faculty with deep experience in what they teach can still benefit from continuous learning and innovation in how they teach.

According to Dr. Finney, when the Retention Council presented the toolkit to the math department for the first time, a common response from faculty members was that they’d never previously considered many of the principles outlined in the toolkit. This prompted leaders to implement a new faculty training program where every Friday morning new full-time instructors are required to attend trainings on topics ranging from classroom management to instructional scaffolding. Practices from the toolkit are also embedded in these sessions.

Dr. Finney believes that the different perspectives that come together during these trainings have helped to identify and close some inter-departmental gaps that existed in faculty training and professional development.

Data in every aspect of the work

The team is continuously refining the toolkit based on the evidence they collect from faculty and students about its impact in the classroom. This speaks to a culture of data-informed decision-making that is rigorously practiced throughout the institution, one that has been strengthened throughout CCC’s participation in the Rural Resiliency initiative.

“The data team was a part of every aspect of the work we’ve done with ATD,” Dr. Finney reflected.

This includes the college’s recently finalized 2025–2030 strategic plan, a project for which Dr. Finney was co-chair, along with Emily Glikas, executive director of sponsored programs. Working closely with ATD coaches, CCC leadership developed a plan that incorporated institutional data in every component — not only as a guide for benchmarks and goals but also as a tool for sensemaking.

“The data coaching we got really helped us drive that plan,” Dr. Finney said of the process. “A big thing our coaches helped us see is: What does this data mean?”

Throughout the Rural Resiliency initiative, collaboration has increased between the college’s data team and other leaders or faculty — so much so that CCC’s institutional research analyst, Noy Poland, recently shared that her requests from across campus had significantly increased since CCC undertook the initiative in 2021.

“She sees that as a good thing,” Dr. Finney said. “People are requesting more data now. It’s a lot of work, but it’s a good thing because it means more people care about the data.”

Dr. Finney is hopeful that the college’s strengthened data foundation will empower him and other employees to dive into more specific, targeted information that helps them better support students. But data isn’t just a tool for identifying areas of growth: It has also empowered faculty and leadership to communicate the college’s strengths.

During board meetings, presenters have been able to include more data showing the impact and outcomes of their programs, allowing the board to better understand the strength and scope of their work. In that sense, Dr. Finney believes CCC’s culture of evidence has strengthened his peers’ ability to validate their work and highlight their success in supporting students.

But that understanding of positive impact by no means reduces the faculty’s drive to continue improving. From the math department’s continued engagement in professional learning informed by the inclusion toolkit to leadership’s increasingly hands-on relationship with institutional data, CCC’s staff and faculty are committed to learning and growing in ways that help their students persist, succeed, and thrive.

This blog post is part of a series that celebrates the work of seven rural colleges that participated in ATD’s Building Resiliency in Rural Communities for the Future of Work initiative, first launched in 2020. Through coaching, tools, and peer learning opportunities, the initiative aimed to strengthen institutional capacity, foster a culture of evidence, advance equitable student success, align programs with workforce needs, and prepare students for careers in the digital economy.