At most community colleges, math and English faculty teach many of the same students enrolled in corequisite courses, yet they rarely have opportunities to collaborate with each other. That changed at the Community College of Baltimore County (CCBC) when an English faculty member asked a simple question of a math colleague: “What do you need from me?” The discussion that followed about how language and statistics are intertwined sparked a collaboration unlike any that either department had tried before. What emerged were cross-disciplinary microlessons: brief, targeted classroom visits where faculty from one discipline step into a colleague’s course to make a connection between the two subjects that students rarely get to see. The result is faculty who have started thinking beyond success rates in their own courses toward the bigger goal of student completion.
CCBC has been at the forefront of developmental education reform for nearly two decades, after launching one of the first corequisite models in the country in 2007—the Accelerated Learning Program (ALP) in English—and building out accelerated math pathways through its AMP program. But corequisites and other structural reforms, while effective, don’t close every gap. Students in reformed courses still struggle—sometimes with content, sometimes with confidence. Many others delay enrolling in one or both gateway courses, losing critical momentum toward completion.
In 2024, CCBC joined CCRC’s Developmental Education Reform Innovation Incubator as one of four colleges working to develop classroom-level innovations that address outcome gaps that persist even after structural reforms are in place. The college assembled a six-person team—three math faculty and three English faculty—chosen by departmental leaders for the innovative work they were already doing inside their classrooms.
Established in 2024, the Developmental Education Reform Innovation Incubator is a CCRC-led project aimed at elevating innovative practices happening in colleges that have reformed their developmental education courses. In its second year, the project is facilitating a community of practice that supports four colleges in developing innovative classroom-level practices to improve student learning and success. Read a report on the project and stay tuned for additional posts in this blog series—the first was on Hartnell College—sharing innovative practices being implemented at each Incubator college.
The microlessons are deceptively simple. In a statistics corequisite section, an English faculty member began visiting regularly to address something the statistics instructor had noticed for years: By the end of the semester, students still didn’t know statistics vocabulary. Greek symbols like “mu” and “sigma” were confusing students on every exam. The English faculty member reframed the problem as a language issue, not a math issue. She introduced flashcards, the same technique used in foreign language classrooms, and brought stickers with messages like “I am a mathematician” that students stuck on their laptops and water bottles.
Together, the two faculty members also revised word problems on exams that were creating barriers for students, including replacing abstract scenarios with references to Baltimore neighborhoods and local businesses that students could actually picture. One math faculty member said the English professor had opened her eyes.
“When the context is familiar, students can focus on the math instead of decoding the question,” she said.
The exchange went the other direction too, with a math faculty member visiting a corequisite English section to show students how the skills they were building transferred directly to statistics, and also to make the case for enrolling in math sooner rather than later. For students who had never seen themselves as “math people,” the visit opened a door.
None of this started with a fully formed plan. When the CCBC team arrived at the Incubator’s summer institute in 2025, each discipline had their own initiatives underway. One faculty member said there had been here a wall between them.
“And then we got in the same room and had these realizations that we’re working with the same students, and we’re seeing the same things, but we don’t know what the other side is doing,” the faculty member said.
Rather than splitting into separate breakout groups at the summer institute, the team stayed together, and when an English faculty member asked a math colleague, “What do you need from me?” the microlesson idea began to take shape.
The team’s vision for growing this work is intentionally incremental. In January 2026, they hosted a college-wide Think Tank, bringing math and English faculty from across CCBC’s three campuses together for the first time. The response confirmed that there was an appetite for this across the college.
“English and math should be the launch pad,” said one faculty member. “There’s a lot we can do with professional development across disciplines.”
Math and English faculty at large institutions often serve the same students and struggle with the same challenges, but never get structured time to figure out solutions together. Neither CCRC researchers involved in the Incubator project nor the CCBC team have seen other colleges doing this kind of sustained cross-disciplinary collaboration between math and English departments, which makes what they’ve built all the more worth watching.
