Registration for the conference is open, please register asap http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/CQ2NQTQ. Conference registration cost is $50.00 for non-FIN/Chabot-Las Positas attendees. Please register by February 6, 2011. It is an event you do not want to miss!

Faculty Inquiry Groups from inside the Faculty Inquiry Network (FIN), from Chabot College, and from around the state will come together March 4-5, 2011 to share insights, initiatives and innovations generated by their inquiry work including: Basic Skills, General Education, Career & Technical Education, Learning Communities, Student Services, and more. We will discuss: students’ affective domain, contextualized learning, moving from inquiry to innovation, changing classroom practice and dynamics, and more!

The conference also will delve into the theory and the process of inquiry itself. Attendees will benefit from practical advice and guidance, including: how to establish and sustain Faculty Inquiry Groups; how and why to integrate student co‐inquirers; and the role technology—including video—can play.

The Faculty Inquiry Network would like to offer the opportunity for other Faculty Inquiry Groups (FIGs) and investigative faculty, staff and administrators to come celebrate and share their work at this conference. If you would like to present at this conference, please complete a Call for Proposal http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/SYZLV6B.

Proposals are due January 30, 2011.

If you need hotel accommodations, the Faculty Inquiry Network has partnered with La Quinta Inn and Suites for this conference. When booking, mention the Faculty Inquiry Network and you will be given a discounted rate.

Hope to see you there!

FIN Leadership’s Pre Conference Session, Exploring Inquiry: Ideas and Innovations from the Faculty Inquiry Network

Click here to view:

Using Faculty Inquiry to Sustain Student Success in CTE Programs

Click here to view:

Acceleration in Developmental English and Math: Restructuring Curricula and Reducing the Length of Developmental Sequences

Click here to view:

Assessor, Assess Thyself: Inquiring into the Assessment and Placement Process

One thing great teachers have in common, no matter what they teach, is skill. They make accommodating 30 or more different learning styles and multi-level instruction within one classroom look like a walk in the park. But upon closer examination, you’ll learn that these great teachers are well-prepared, well-organized, and skilled at facilitating discussion, independent and group learning around meaningful subject manner. Terrific teachers know how to create a lively teaching environment, one that welcomes students to bring their prior knowledge with them to new and stimulating learning experiences.

Industry2Classroom Train-the-Trainer does not aim to bring you from zero to hero in just 2 days, but will equip every participant with helpful information, strategy, theory and real-world instructional practices that can be brought back and shared with others at your school.

Offered November 1-2, 2010, please click here for more information.

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!

For more information on the conference and how to register please click here.

Click here to download the Flier

We will be seeing each other soon. Please RSVP for the FIN Team Meet-ups.

Thank you,

Monique

Katie Hern and Myra Snell recently collaborated to create an article for the RP Group’s statewide newsletter Perspectives. The article argues that high rates of student attrition are structurally guaranteed in long developmental sequences and presents evidence from Chabot and Los Medanos colleges that one-semester, open-access courses are a promising way to increase student completion rates in college-level English and Math. The full article is linked above.

On April 15, 2010, the De Anza College Office of Instruction, Office of Diversity and ICCE, and Office of Staff and Organizational Development presented their annual conference devoted to student success. The event, “What’s Love Got To Do With It,” brought together both students and faculty and was a huge success.  To facilitate an extension of the ideas generated that day, Tom deWit was invited to present  on June 10, 2010, at a followup event he called “The Space In Between.”  Tom arrived with his team of collaborators from the Faculty Inquiry Network  who staged the space by placing numerous soccer flags all around the front of the room–a visual metaphor for the “labyrinth of attitudes.”

Labyrinth of Attitudes Activity

The opening activity invited student and faculty attendees to read and consider the following quote from James Baldwin:

“The person who distrusts himself has no touchstone for reality—for this touchstone can be only oneself.  Such a person interposes between himself and reality nothing less than a labyrinth of attitudes. And these attitudes, furthermore, though the person is usually unaware of it (is unaware of so much!), are historical and public attitudes. They do not relate to the present any more than they relate to the person.” (The Fire Next Time p. 44).

After analyzing and discussing  the quote in its own right, attendees were then asked to apply the quote to the arena of Education. To enrich that discussion, a short text-film meditation was also shown. On colored handout stickies, attendees then wrote down their responses to the question: What attitudes can fill up the space in between teacher and student or student and institution? The responses broke into two general categories: negative and positive attitudes. (The responses can be found here.)

The dialogue then deepened around a series of questions:

♥ What do you do as a learner or as a teacher to inspire a labyrinth of attitudes?

♥ How do we defy the inertia we work inside of?

♥ How do we engage and  honor the labyrinth so that learning is a creative, effective and positive experience?

First Kiss with Your Discipline/ Learning:

These questions lead into a discussion of the role of Love in Education. Attendees wrote responses to a prompt that asked them about their “First Kiss”–that is, the first time they recall really loving learning. (The insightful and moving responses can be linked to here.) The ensuing discussion served as an effective springboard into the second half of the day.

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Bringing Love into The Classroom/ Learning Assignment

For the second half of the day, attendees first were shown an excerpt from Door Number One, a film made by students from Chabot College. The excerpt delves into the emotional and affective dimension that students bring with them when they first arrive at college and enter the “labyrinth.”

Tom then lead the attendees through a Live-Learning exercise that explored the following questions. Attendees worked in groups, sharing ideas and experiences; they then collaborated to create written responses. The responses are linked here.

Prompts for Live Learning Assignment

♥ What do you need to do to bring your discipline, learning into the classroom so that it can be fallen in love with?
♥ How will you constructively leverage the labyrinth, with some lovin’?
♥ What are the conditions for love to flourish?
♥ This is about claiming your own learning; everything we will discuss is already in you and we are going to honor you by creating a space to bring it out…

Prompt Supplements

“To be sensual, I think, is to respect and rejoice in the force of life, of life itself, and to be present in all that one does, from the effort of loving to the breaking of bread. It will be a great day for America, incidentally, when we begin to eat bread again, instead of the blasphemous foam rubber that we have substituted for it. (43).♥

“All of us know, whether or not we are able to admit it, that mirrors can only lie, that death by drowning is all that awaits one there. It is for this reason that love is so desperately sought and so cunningly avoided. Love takes off the masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within. I use the word ‘love’ here not merely in the personal sense but as a state of being, or a state of grace—not in the infantile American sense of being made happy but in the tough and universal sense of quest and daring and growth” (95).♥

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Umoja VI-Save the Date

Umoja VI Registration

At East Los Angeles College, our Reading Apprenticeship FIG is a re-conception of our original project. This year, rather than examine a lower-level reading course, we are now looking at how Reading Apprenticeship methods can inform us and allow us to help students as they tackle reading in a wide array of disciplines. The areas of our FIG members include Literature, Basic Skills composition, Basic Skills Reading, Child Development, Politics, Art and Chemistry.  We kicked off with a taping of think-alouds of two students from an ART103 course. Kevin teaches this course at a sister community college, although his full-time job is with East as our Web 2.0 facilitator. Two key advantages to Kevin being the first of our group to tape a think-aloud: 1) his ease and enthusiasm for technology and 2) no other FIG members hold expertise in his content area. Two key disadvantages: 1) Kevin, unlike other FIG members, is not trained yet in Reading Apprenticeship, and 2) Kevin’s students, prior to the evening of the videotaping, had not practiced metacognitive reading techniques.

As you watch the tape, you will see that Student A does little previewing. She pretty much sticks to silent, rapid, reading, and then reacting to specific pieces of text. Katie Hern, upon viewing this tape, noticed neither student verbalized misunderstandings. In the case of Student A, however, Kevin was pleased to see that she specifically paused at the parts of the text he had stressed in that night’s lecture.

At this point, she may have decided to concentrate on the areas of understanding, and delay looking at areas of misunderstanding until a future re-reading. Student B, whose video is not posted, appears to do little more than read and then paraphrase. However, Kevin reports that Student B displayed a more reflective process during the practice session that night, and that his nervousness about the camera apparently flawed his true abilities. Katie is likely correct that the student’s nervousness reflects his need “not to appear stupid.”

Our group never settled on how much prior preparation to provide the students for Think Aloud and how we might assure that students use an array of techniques as they use Think Alouds. Most of our Think Aloud videos did not involve much prior preparation except for some modelling by the instructor.

We posted the Art text pages, this video, and many resources related to our FIG Reading Apprenticeship exploration on our group facebook page. Eventually we found that facebook postings were too technically challenging and we reverted to emails.

http://qtss.elac.edu/elac/oid/kevin/readerA.mov

Click to view the Keynote Presentation by the Faculty Inquiry Network

Click to see FIN CTE Coach, Lin Marelick’s (in collaboration with Maryanne Galindo from LATTC) presentation.

Click to view FIN Coach and Team Leader, Jan Connal’s presentation (in collaboration with Cerritos team member, Lydia Alvarez).

Click here for the Intersecting Literacies  Multi-Modal Packet

Click above to see the Post its we compiled at Mesa, April 16th

Click the fun colored paper to read the “Queens” produced by the participants of Intersecting Literacies.

Click to go back to the Flyer and Intersecting Literacies’ Homepage

Mt SAC Save the Date

Click here for the Registration Form

Recommended by our very own Inquiry coach and internal evaluator, Jan Connal.

About Many Eyes

Many Eyes is a bet on the power of human visual intelligence to find patterns. Our goal is to “democratize” visualization and to enable a new social kind of data analysis. Jump right to our visualizations now, take a tour, or read on for a leisurely explanation of the project.

All of us in CUE‘s Visual Communication Lab are passionate about the potential of data visualization to spark insight. It is that magical moment we live for: an unwieldy, unyielding data set is transformed into an image on the screen, and suddenly the user can perceive an unexpected pattern. As visualization designers we have witnessed and experienced many of those wondrous sparks. But in recent years, we have become acutely aware that the visualizations and the sparks they generate, take on new value in a social setting. Visualization is a catalyst for discussion and collective insight about data.

We all deal with data that we’d like to understand better. It may be as straightforward as a sales spreadsheet or fantasy football stats chart, or as vague as a cluttered email inbox. But a remarkable amount of it has social meaning beyond ourselves. When we share it and discuss it, we understand it in new ways.

Click here to visit Many Eyes

Examples of Representations:

The Faculty Inquiry Network was well represented at the recent Achieving The Dream Conference held  February 2nd through the 4th in Charlotte, North Carolina. Tom deWit, Katie Hern, and Sean McFarland presented at 4 breakout sessions:

• Engaging Faculty and Staff in Student‐Centered Inquiry about Teaching,
• Learning and Student Success, Accelerating Students’ Progress to College‐Level English and Math,
• Listening to the Room: The Promise of Integrating Student Voices into Basic Skills Initiatives,
• Equity as the Practice of Love and Liberation.

deWit and Hern also served as panel members in two Strategy Institute’s Focus Area Networking Sessions: Developmental English and Success Initiatives for Men of Color.

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FIN Co-Directors hold all the secrets to successful Inquiry in the Red Suitcase.

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Below are documents passed out in Charlotte, North Carolina:

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Engaging Faculty and Staff in Student‐Centered Inquiry about Teaching,Learning and Student Success:

Inquiry Process Graphic

FIN’S Guide to Faculty Inquiry

FIN’s Fall 2009 Newsletter

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Accelerating Students’ Progress to College‐Level English and Math:

Accelerating Student’s Progress Through College-Level English and Math PDF

Chabot College’s acceleration data

Paulo Freire excerpt from Ways of Reading: an Anthology for Writers

Stat Path Handout from Los Medanos College

Link to LMC Puente Math’s StatPath Video

Instructor Myra Snell’s Observations about this Video

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Listening to the Room: The Promise of Integrating Student Voices into Basic Skills Initiatives:

Summaries of all 778 Films Movies

Link to the movie “Listening to the Room”

Student Voices Across California Brochure

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Equity as the Practice of Love and Liberation:

Equity as the Practice of Love and Liberation PDF

Umoja’s Live Learning Handout

The Umoja Community’s Brochure

Link to the Umoja Community’s Website

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