In addition to a three hour pre-conference workshop on the key ideas and innovations emerging from the Faculty Inquiry Network, you can participate in a problem solving community and investigate case studies on building cultures of inquiry or changing instructional practices and structures.  The conference also features 55 interactive breakouts and briefing presentations highlighting issues ranging from instructional practices to equity to accreditation & institutional effectiveness, such as:

• Assessing with Academic Freedom: Enhancing the Collaboration of Faculty, Service Providers, and Students throughout the Teaching and Learning Cycle
• Got Counseling? Inquiry into Integrative Approaches that Support Career Pathways and Academy Students
• Developing Students’ Critical Thinking: A Conversation Across Disciplines
• Engaging High School Students with Community College Instruction: Rigor that Works
• Establishing the New Faculty Institute: Lessons Learned from a Professional Development Coordinator
• Strengthening the Learning Center/Classroom Connection through Directed Learning Activities

The conference will be held October 6-8 at the Hilton Orange County/Costa Mesa.  Registration is just $375.  There is a free shuttle from the John Wayne Airport and steep discounts have been negotiated on parking and room rates. A complete list of sessions, their descriptions, registration information, and tips on securing funding for registration fees are all available at http://www.rpgroup.org/events/SSS10.

Space is still available – but be sure to sign up before the event sells out!

Exponential Attrition and the Promise of Acceleration

[vimeo 3350235 630 472]

Thomas Lothian:

• Technology Support
• tlothian@chabotcollege.edu

As part of the Cerritos College Faculty Inquiry project (SPECC), participating faculty began a process of thinking deeply about their teaching practices within a selected developmental class. Throughout the semester, participating faculty researchers were mentored in a sequence of guided reflections by faculty outside their disciplines and experienced with SoTL. The mentors assisted the faculty researchers in both thinking through the process and articulating their thoughts in writing. The mentors worked in pairs, each pair being assigned either the math faculty researchers or the English faculty researchers. The guided reflections addressed faculty interpretation and understanding about the:

• Description of Course, including a description of prerequisite knowledge, course content, students, and their satisfaction and frustration with the selected developmental course;
• Teaching Methods, including a description of their class organization, assessments, assignments, and intended outcomes;
• Analysis of Student Learning, including examples and their analysis of three levels of student performance; and
• Planned Changes, including a description of what the faculty member plans to do differently as a result of their analysis of student performance.

Responses to each faculty researcher’s reflections were posted to an electronic portfolio. Faculty reflections and responses are available here.

In this presentation, Annie Agard presents a whole range of evidence gathered from her ESL classes. In this PowerPoint presentation, Agard shares many different findings from her classroom research on her ESL. class. The evidence is not only useful for ESL teachers but as a model of going public with classroom research.

The evidence covers many different kinds of methods for gathering student performance data, such as through pre/post data.

Some of her evidence is based on student attitudes and perspectives.

One of the consequences of her classroom research is the ways that she discovers “complicating evidence” from her students. One example of this is her analysis of perforamance and atittudes related to group work, where she discovered in part that some students who performed better through group work actually prefered working alone.

from The Power of the Pursuit, Suzanne Crawford, Lydia Alvarez, and Lynn Serwin (Cerritos College)

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adapted from “Sample Rubrics for Writing Assignments,” by Lynn Serwin

The rubrics below can be modified for any assignment. I used them for the types of assignments listed, but they can be used for anything. The rubrics for adding details and for the writing process are generic and can be used with any assignment.

Each heading on the page links to a pdf for that rubric. Rubrics in clude:

• Summary paragraph rubric
• Example paragraph rubric
• Example essay rubric
• Problem solving essay rubric
• Persuasive essay rubric
• Rubrics for Including Engaging Details
• Rubric for the Writing Process

from The Power of the Pursuit, Suzanne Crawford, Lydia Alvarez, and Lynn Serwin (Cerritos College)

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Two Versions of a Student Self-Assessment Survey, Suzanne Crawford

Surveys mapping student progress in using more effective and detailed language in writing:

2006 survey:

Hello English 20 Students!

As you all know, we have been working this semester to, among other things, improve your word choice when it comes to using more concrete and specific language (the “green” words). Please give me some of your thoughts about your progress with this skill by answering the following questions. Thank you very much.

S. Crawford

1. Do you feel that, as a result of our various efforts, you are more likely to use such better words?

For example, do you see the value in writing like the first of these (A) and not the second (B)?

A. The boy sat down on a chair.

B. Tall, slim Joe plopped himself down on the old wooden rocking chair.

Do you think the various handouts we used were helpful?

Do you think using the markers helped you understand this concept better?

2007 survey:

ENGLISH 52: Self-assessment of your writing progress

Describe what progress you have made this semester in your ability to craft effective essays. Please use specific evidence from your papers to describe your writing improvement. Consider comparing the skill levels of your earlier papers with those of your later papers. In particular, please note any improvement in language use. Do you now, for example, use more vivid or concrete words? Be sure to support your points with direct references from your papers. For example, if you claim that you now use more specific words, give before and after examples.

A Carnegie Perspectives repost

By Pat Hutchings

The author of this month’s Carnegie Perspectives is Pat Hutchings. Pat is Carnegie’s vice president, and among her many responsibilities is her deep involvement in Strengthening Pre-collegiate Education in Community Colleges (SPECC), a joint initiative of Carnegie and The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation to address basic skills education in 11 California community colleges. This work involves campuses in sustained, reflective, evidence-based ways to improve the teaching and learning of underprepared students. A number of the SPECC reports, essays, tools, and products from this three-year project are available at: http://www.carnegiefoundation.org/programs/specc/

From Special Occasion to Regular Work

For the past several years the Carnegie Foundation has been working with a group of California community colleges to improve student success in pre-collegiate math and English. One of the themes that has emerged as central in this effort—which we call Strengthening Pre-collegiate Education in Community Colleges, or SPECC—is the need for different ways to think about and conduct professional development.

Part of what needs to be different is language. Though most educators aspire to be life-long learners and to improve in the various facets of their professional work, being “developed” is not an altogether appealing prospect. For starters, it sounds like something that happens to you; even worse, there’s a sense that something’s broken and needs to be fixed. In contrast, many of the SPECC sites have adopted the language of “faculty inquiry,” pointing toward a process that begins with the questions that good, thoughtful teachers have, and need to understand more fully, about their own students’ learning. In this spirit, SPECC campuses have created Faculty Inquiry Groups (FIGs) that illustrate powerful professional growth and learning characterized by three key principles.

First, opportunities for teachers to grow and develop must be sustained over time. Professional development often takes the form of one-time workshops and presentations by outside speakers that may or may not be related to the campus’s goals for student learning. SPECC participants have been energetic in pointing out the limitations of this model. “We believe that the one-hour, lunch-time faculty development workshop has little impact on the transformation of faculty attitudes and behavior,” one campus team reported. In contrast, they noted that their work in the Carnegie project “has taught us that if we are serious about making radical changes to the way we deliver instruction, we must work intensively with a select group of faculty over an extended period of time.” Some FIGs established in SPECC have continued for more than a year now.

A second principle is the importance of collaboration. One of the most persistent impediments to educational improvement is that teachers have—because institutions provide—so few purposeful, constructive occasions for sharing what they know and do. Thus, one of the most important moves a campus can make is to create occasions for educators to talk, to find colleagues, to be part of a community of practice. As an administrator at Merced College remarked during a SPECC site visit, “Good things happen when teachers talk.”

Of course talk is not enough, and not all talk is created equal. With this in mind, some campuses have worked their way toward carefully structured routines and protocols for collaboration. At Los Medanos College, for instance, a group of English instructors organized themselves as a kind of graduate seminar, with clear tasks in preparation for each meeting and an emphasis on developing new tools and materials—course assignments, for instance, and assessment instruments. At City College of San Francisco, several faculty groups employ a carefully structured process of classroom observation, which is then grist for discussion during their meetings.

The third defining feature is a focus on evidence about student learning. SPECC campuses have served as laboratories for exploring how to bring different kinds and levels of evidence more effectively to bear on the improvement of teaching and learning.

Most important, certainly, is information at the classroom level, generated through the regular routines of teaching and learning: student performance on exams, projects, papers, problem sets, office consultations, and grades. This kind of information is at the heart of powerful feedback loops. But an important lesson of SPECC’s work is the power of viewing classroom data through the lens of larger institutional trends and patterns. Most campuses have a good deal of such information: data about student demographics, enrollment, retention, and the like. What’s needed are occasions to raise questions that fall into what might be described as the “missing middle”—the gap between information from individual classrooms and institutional data in the form of big-picture, aggregate trends and patterns. The power of focusing between and connecting these two is nicely illustrated by a story from Los Medanos College where the Developmental Education Committee realized that their efforts to reshape curriculum and pedagogy needed to be informed by evidence faculty members did not have, including—and especially—patterns of student course taking and success beyond the level of individual courses. The Committee approached the Office of Institutional Research, and the two groups worked together to develop a data-gathering plan that would address the questions faculty wanted to understand more fully. The result was a report tracking students from pre-collegiate courses in English and math into the first level of transfer English and math courses. This was not the kind of information Institutional Research staff members were in the habit of preparing; nor was it a perspective that faculty were accustomed to seeing. But it turned out to provide a powerful rationale for redoubling efforts that keep students moving through the developmental sequence without stopping out.

Fortunately, the three principles proposed here are becoming increasingly commonplace; some readers will recognize them from Carnegie’s work on the scholarship of teaching and learning. But it’s worth remembering that this different way of thinking about professional development really is different—maybe even radical—predicated as it is on an understanding of teaching not as a matter of individual expertise employed in the privacy of one’s own classroom but as a set of practices that have and need a social and organizational context. Seen through this lens, “professional development” should not be a separate or special occasion but an integral feature of the way educators do their work everyday. What matters in such work is who talks with whom, how often, with what information in the picture, and around what shared questions, processes, and goals. These turn out to be hard things to change, which is why having new models—like the ones developed on the SPECC campuses—is so important.