Civil Unrest is Part of America and Provides a Teachable Moment

Earning a college degree is about getting a job. But it is also so much more. A good educational experience inspires life-long learning. It can also impact the area because it creates an informed citizenry. Folks who can think critically begin to impact and shape the environment they choose to make their home. The civil unrest occurring now provides us with a great opportunity to connect the real world to the learning that is occurring in your classes this summer. Yesterday, I posted a tweet to the Center for Teaching and Learning Enhancement Twitter account with a link to an opinion piece on the Inside Higher Ed website. Colleen Flaherty included the following as a subtitle to her article Making Sense of the Senseless: Academics are called to help interpret and guide a national response to police violence and related civil unrest. It is a role that we have played for a long time but the current situation provides us with an opportunity to have uncomfortable conversations. Of course and learning experience should be related to what you are teaching but at times, when something horrific occurs, we are distracted and that includes our students. So begin by creating a safe environment in your classes. Since we are fully online, this means netiquette. Respect is important, so if you are holding a Zoom meeting or using the discussion board, make sure you set the ground rules and hold everyone to them. Using the article as a starting point and asking for reflection in light of your discipline would be appropriate. Here is a resource provided by colleagues at SUNY Empire State College that contains not only some good parameters but a number of videos you might want to use to help your students understand the history of social unrest in our country. As many of us can attest, we have been in this place before and we know that change can occur. What is more natural than a community college that helps to heal the community around it?

I Want to Finish But I Have To Work

Well if I didn't have to work to pay for my college, it might be a lot easier to finish. You have probably heard one of your students make this or a similar statement as you talked with them about their poor performance in your class. We as academics often use this anecdotal information when we are discussing how to help students improve their completion rate. Now there is some verified research that may help all of us as we continue to look for solutions. Researchers at North Carolina State University released the results of a survey they produced using the Revealing Institutional Strengths and Challenges instrument. In a news story by Inside Higher Ed, the data show "that working and paying for expenses were the top two challenges community college students said impeded their academic success. The researchers surveyed nearly 6,000 two-year college students from 10 community colleges in California, Michigan, Nebraska, North Carolina, South Dakota, Texas, Virginia, Wisconsin and Wyoming in fall 2017 and 2018." It is too bad that students from Louisiana were not polled but the students that did participate opened a window into the many impediments community college students face. You can read the entire article here.

Light Touch Interventions Improve Student Success

Want to improve the student success in your classes this spring? Want to improve your student rating as well? The same approach can help both and it is something that is probably already in your teaching toolkit. Engagement is something that provides multiple benefits and while we know that it works, there are still some of us who struggle with implementing it effectively. Colleen Flaherty provides some good information in her article for Inside Higher Ed. She notes, "Students benefit from increased faculty engagement. Yet many professors still resist more student-centered teaching. Part of the problem is that graduate schools are slow to adopt pedagogical training, meaning that some professors may want to up their interaction with students but don’t know how. Another part of the problem is that becoming a better teacher takes time, an increasingly scarce faculty resource. What if engagement wasn’t complicated and didn’t take that much time? Preliminary research called 'My Professor Cares: Experimental Evidence on the Role of Faculty Engagement,' presented last week at the annual meeting of the American Economics Association, suggests that even 'light touch' interventions can make a difference to students." You can read the entire article here.