FACULTY DEVELOPMENT DAY 2014
Plan to join us on Friday, January 17 for Faculty Development Day at BRCC. We will joined by Dr. Mary Clement who serves as Director of the Center for Teaching Excellence and Professor of Teacher Education at Berry College. Dr. Clement teaches graduate courses in curriculum theory, instructional management, and supervision and undergraduate courses in foreign language methods. She earned her doctorate from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and served as the director of the Beginning Teacher Program at Eastern Illinois University for six years. Dr. Clement is the author of ten books including First Time in the College Classroom: A Guide for Teaching Assistants, Instructors, and New Professors at All Colleges and Universities which covers critically important aspects of organizing and teaching curriculum. She will be presenting on three topics while in Baton Rouge including: how to engage your students on day one; creating learning experiences in four easy steps; and, how to use student feedback to improve your teaching and their learning. This event is being sponsored by the Teaching+Learning Center.
BERKELEY JOINS TESTING CENTER
We are very excited to announce that Brandi Berkeley is joining the Division of Innovative Learning and Academic Support. She will join the staff of the Testing Center on December 17 filling the vacancy created when Tressa Thomas Landry moved to Lake Charles. Brandi will serve as a Testing Center Specialist providing support to our student testers on the Mid City and Acadian campuses. She was most recently employed in the same capacity at Delgado Community College. Watch this space for new operating hours for the Testing Center for the spring 2014 semester.
CAREER FUNDING PROPOSED FOR COMMUNITY COLLEGES
Inside Higher Ed posted an interesting story about federal funding that could have a big impact on community colleges across the nation. Opportunity Nation, a nonprofit group that produces a national index on economic opportunity, has joined two U.S. senators in a push to encourage closer ties between employers and colleges, particularly two-year institutions. The group has endorsed a bill from Sen. Michael Bennet, a Democrat from Colorado, and Sen. Rob Portman, an Ohio Republican. That legislation seeks a better return on investment for the $15 billion the federal government spends on 46 different job training programs each year, Portman said recently. “We’d like to consolidate some of those programs,” he said, arguing that there is overlap in almost all federal job training efforts. Those funding streams include several that are important to community colleges, including the Workforce Investment Act and the Trade Adjustment Assistance Act. The proposed legislation probably wouldn’t cut funding for higher education, however. That’s because the two senators give two-year colleges and other career-focused institutions “priority access” to dollars for job training in the legislation, which is dubbed the Careers Through Responsive, Efficient and Effective Retraining (CAREER) Act. “We’d like to include community colleges more,” Portman said.
