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?

Is Linking Learning and Work a Must Do for Faculty?

The latest white paper from the American Council on Education (ACE) is creating a healthy discussion about what is and isn't part of a faculty's responsibilities when it comes to their students. The ACE paper suggests that having students career-ready should be something that faculty should be doing. The paper's authors acknowledge that both community college and university faculty influenced the work. Working at a community college and teaching a course called College Success Skills (CSSK) may be influencing my opinion on this matter but in talking with employers, local chamber members, and students themselves, many see it the same way. Our CSSK course provides knowledge about the obvious college success issues (test anxiety, taking notes, engaging with faculty, study habits) but we also spend time on what some would call soft skills (communication, netiquette, time management, critical thinking). Having worked previously at a flagship research-intensive university as well as a regional doctoral university, I will be the first to tell you that each mission was different. But at the end of the day students are attending college/university to get a job. This white paper comes at a really important time as the financial support from government continues to shrink and the public seems to have lost their faith in a college degree. Having a constructive conversation to reset our priorities is a useful thing to do and I welcome your feedback on this issue as well.

First Day Of Spring Semester Is Great Time to Revisit Goals

When setting personal goals for yourself, we teach in the College Success Skills 1023 course to use the SMART method. It is an acronym that stands for Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic, and Timely. Each year at BRCC, we are asked to set personal goals and January is always a good time to review the selections we made since it is basically the mid-point of the academic year. So I encourage you to take a look at what you indicated you were going to focus on to help you improve your teaching and your student's learning. I also want to remind you to check out the Center for Teaching and Learning Enhancement's blog from time to time for new ideas you might want to implement in your classes. In addition, take a look at the upcoming events for faculty development opportunities. We also tweet daily and try to focus on issues that are relative to BRCC and our student population. Here is to a great spring 2020 semester. As always, I am here to help you in all things teaching and learning so do not hesitate to contact me (pourciaut@mybrcc.edu). I am located in 120 Magnolia Building on the Mid City Campus.

How To Do College 101

Despite a great increase in the numbers of students enrolling in higher education, specifically at community colleges, the successful completion rates for these students has remained static since the 1970’s. When reviewing strategies to increase student retention and successful completion, the Student Success Course (SSC) has emerged as a promising and prominent strategy for community colleges. Given that, the purpose of the sequential mixed methods study by Kimbark, Peters, and Richardson (Effectiveness of the Student Success Course on Persistence, Retention, Academic Achievement, and Student Engagement) was to determine if participation in a SSC influences persistence, retention, academic achievement, and student engagement on a community college campus. Results of this study indicate that a relationship exists between participation in the SSC and persistence, retention, academic achievement in English and mathematics, and student engagement. Additionally, participants claim that taking the SSC not only altered their perceptions of the importance of the course, but their social and study skills as well.

Vibrant Middle Class Driven By Community Colleges

New research from Melissa Kearney and Phillip Levine finds that greater income gaps between those at the bottom and middle of the income distribution lead low-income boys to drop out of high school more often than their counterparts in higher inequality areas, suggesting that there is an important link between income inequality and reduced rates of upward mobility. “Economic despair” may contribute if those at the bottom do not believe they have the ability to achieve middle class status. This research is really fascinating but not all that shocking to the thousands of us that work at community colleges. This tells the all-to-often tragic story of many, if not most, of our students. The upside to all of this is that the opportunities do exist to create a vibrant middle class and more community colleges are opening each year. Moving into the "classroom" (whether onsite or virtually) just how do we introduce this idea. I say early and often. I talk about upward mobility and the quality of life provided by a middle class career all the time. Making the subject relevant, experts say, is the best way to get your students to learn and retain new knowledge. What better way to tie this into everything about them than to talk about the life that can be had by using the fulcrum of higher education (or adult basic education for those seeking a high school equivalency)? You can read the entire report here and I would love to hear your feedback.

Have you ever thought about what we are all doing in higher education (or any level of education for that matter)? We are teaching students from the things we know now to help them be the leaders of the future. We are literally teaching then for things that will happen that we may or may not know anything about. It really drives the point home that we can't just worry about covering the material but must focus on helping them become self-guided learners. They need to be adults who can learn things on their own so that they will be able to handle the problems of the future. That was one of the reasons I was excited to attend the American Association of Community Colleges conference in Louisiana last weekend. As I participated in a session about innovative learning going on at several of the City University of New York schools, I marveled at how most of my colleagues are wrestling with the same issues that we are encountering. Today I encountered a special section in the The Chronicle of Higher Education that talks about a student leadership development program at CUNY. The program is aimed at creating leaders for the future. The City University of New York’s Futures Initiative, founded in 2014, is a program that advocates for both authentic innovation and equity. According to Cathy Davidson, the Initiative’s founding director and a distinguished professor of English at CUNY’s Graduate Center:  “Normally when we think of innovation in higher education, we think of extremely well-funded programs for typically wealthy students who plan on going into jobs at the very top of the technology world. Not necessarily innovation that serves the good for the most people. Our credo is that unless your innovation has equity built into it, it’s not really innovation.” It certainly raises a lot of questions as we come to the end of the spring semester.

AN ARMY OF ONE
Karin Fischer says if you want to find a model that works for low-income students, look no further than the armed services in the U.S. Was Daniel M. Piston college material? A decade ago, as a high-school student in Syracuse, N.Y., Mr. Piston didn’t think so. He lacked focus. His grades were so-so. And it wasn’t like he was surrounded by college graduates; of his family, only his mother had earned an associate degree. "The truth is," Mr. Piston says, "I didn’t think I was smart enough for college." After finishing high school, he signed up for an automotive-technology program at nearby Onondaga Community College — a similar course his senior year was the first thing he had been any good at, he says — but, still unmoored, he dropped out after two semesters. He found himself on the doorstep of the local Navy recruiter. The Navy promised excitement, and it offered something else: a life path. Continue reading here.

PLEASE SEE ME
It all began with a simple message that I wrote on the tests or assignments of students who were struggling: “Please see me so we can discuss your performance on the test (or assignment). Let’s see what we can do to improve your grade.” Although initially I was not collecting data on the effectiveness of my “invitation,” I soon realized that most of students—about 80 percent—responded to it. Notably, those who met with me began to do better on future tests; their assignments improved as well. When students did not respond to my invitation, after about a week I reached out to them with a simple email. Some responded, some did not. Over time it became difficult to ignore the benefits of having those meetings with students who were struggling. I think the most important message of these meetings was to convey to them that they were not simply a name in my gradebook but that I really cared about their learning and their success. Continue reading here.

STUDENT SUCCESS IN INNOVATIVE LEARNING
As we continue to broaden the innovative learning opportunities, it is always important to remember that student success is as important as providing scheduling options for our students. Rob Kelly has written an interesting article on this topic. He says, "Offering different kinds of courses is not a simple matter of taking the content and dividing it in ways to fill an unusual time slot. Imagine converting a lecture-based course that normally meets three times a week to a block format that consists of a single four-hour session. The instructor might be a great lecturer, but it’s unlikely that he or she could engage students for hours at a time. “There is a world of difference, or there should be a world of difference, between teaching a class that meets three times a week for fifty minutes, teaching that same class that meets once a week from eight until noon, teaching that class in an accelerated format that meets three or four days a week, or teaching it online,” Glenn says. “As we get better at offering these different formats, hopefully we get better at delivering the instruction in these formats.” Continuing reading here.

TEACHING THE ART OF ARGUMENT
David J. Kujawski has written a good article explaining the basics of Present, Critique, Reflect, and Refine (PCRR) as a teaching strategy. Although he writes from a science background, the pedagogy of PCRR can be altered to accommodate any type of class. The method is especially useful for creating a culture of learning through argumentation. Kujawski writes, “The PCRR strategy promotes conceptual understanding of scientific phenomena in various disciplinary core ideas through the development of explanatory models that can later be applied to enrich student understanding and help explain other phenomena. [It also] develops an inquiry-driven, evidence-based mindset that supports model-based science teaching and three dimensional learning and assessment.” You can read more in his article “Present, Critique, Reflect, and Refine: Supporting Evidence-Based Argumentation Through Conceptual Modeling” that appears in Science Scope’s December 2015 issue.

COMPLETION BUILDS SELF EFFICACY
Rod, Risely, executive director of Phi Theta Kappa, released an op-ed piece about community college completion that presents a compelling case. He writes, "One has to wonder why, when the first community college was established in 1901 to provide access to higher education, completing college was not seen as integral to its mission. Clearly, today completion must be seen as central to the mission of our community colleges. To continue with our automotive analogy, it is a moral imperative that our institutions take responsibility for providing its consumers the tools and knowledge to “build a car” with the appropriate features that will lead them down a road toward economic prosperity and well-being.  Community colleges must change their approach and accept responsibility for advising students upon enrollment on the importance of completing the associate degree prior to transferring to senior colleges. Studies show that community college students who transfer to senior colleges prior to earning the associate degree significantly increase their chances of never earning the baccalaureate degree."

LOOKING BACK TO PREPARE FOR THE FUTURE
David Gooblar urges us to encourage our students to be critically self-reflective about themselves and notes that the end of the semester is a great time to do it. He writes, "There are many reasons to have students complete self-evaluations at semester’s end, but perhaps the best is that the exercise encourages metacognition --- essentially “thinking about one’s thinking” — particularly in the context of getting students to consider their approach to our courses as they progress. But metacognition is a significantly valuable tool at the end of a course, when there are so many opportunities for self-reflection. At that point, students have been working on the same subject for more than three months; before they move on to other courses, and other professors, give them time and space to reflect on what they’ve done, and how they’ve done it. A self-evaluation is a great way to get students to assess how they approached the course with an eye to improving their learning strategies in the future. It can also help cement the particular skills they learned in your course — in effect, they remind themselves of the skills they’ve acquired, and may be more likely to put them to use in the future."

TECH VERSUS INNOVATION
Matt Read writes a blog titled Confessions of a Community College Dean. His most recent post provokes us to think about technology versus innovation, specifically as it relates to teaching. "My grandmother collected absurd kitchen technology, which made visits fun. There wasn’t an inside-the-egg-scrambler or fry baby on the market that she didn’t have. She had a microwave oven back when nobody did; I remember watching her “nuke” a hot dog, and both of us enjoying its twisty death throes. As an adult, I realize that I inherited the gadget gene from her. My platform agnosticism -- I’ve had phones that ran Android, iOS, and even webOS -- is only partially about comparison shopping or avoiding cultism; it’s largely an excuse to try all sorts of new stuff. PC at work, Chromebook on the road?  Why not?  On Wednesday, though, I had two separate conversations about innovation on campus that I realized later had a common theme: tech and innovation aren’t the same thing." Read more here.


WHY DID YOU GIVE ME A BAD GRADE
Feedback that is both affirming and corrective is necessary for people to learn. Defined as information on the results of one’s efforts, feedback that is clear, specific and timely motivates students to improve. Since feedback is most often connected to grading that follows assigned work or assessment activities, Walvoord and Anderson say that grading “…encompasses tailoring the test or assignment to the learning goals of the course…offering feedback so students can develop as thinkers and writers, communicating about students’ learning to appropriate audiences, and using results to plan improvements in the classroom…”. Thus assessment provides feedback for both learners and teachers. Read more here. 

WIKIPEDIA AS A SOURCE
The battle to stop our students from using online resources like Wikipedia is long over. What we must do now is help our students to understand how best to use Wikipedia. Matthew Vetter, an academic specializing in digital rhetoric and humanities, has a nice post about his efforts in this area. He writes, "Working with Wiki Ed opens up possibilities for how we teach, how that teaching engages the world, what our students accomplish in the classroom, and what kinds of conversations we can have about critical issues related to humanities and digital culture." Read more here.

EVERYBODY IS GOING TO COMMUNITY COLLEGE
Did you know that the community colleges in the United States provide access to higher education for over 10 million students each year? Bailey, Jaggars, and Jenkins in their book Redesigning America's Community Colleges: A clearer path to student success say that because community colleges are designed to provide access to a wide variety of students with a wide variety of goals, community colleges give students many choices which may be one of the causes for low completion. But they don't just give us the gory details and horror stories, they also provide some paths for solutions. The Teaching and Learning 101 Faculty Learning Community is using this book along with material from other educational scientists during the summer session. Although FLCs are mainly professional development opportunities, the structure and focus often lead to new ideas, movements, or proposals that can lead to positive change for their institutions. If you are interested in learning more I encourage you to talk with one of the FLC members who include: Amy Atchley, Cristi Carson, Pearce Cinman, Cindy Decker, Christopher Guillory, Divina Miranda, Rhonda Picou, and Todd Pourciau. The FLC meets on Wednesdays at 1:00 pm in the Teaching+Learning Center.

MOVING FROM COVERAGE TO LEARNING
Dr. David Gooblar has written an interesting blog post about an issue that dogs many of us. The difference between covering all of the material versus helping students learn. I did say versus but it doesn't have to be that way. In fact, research shows that if we work to help our students become independent scholars who are interested in the subject at hand, the coverage can occur naturally. Goobler writes, "How do I balance my desire to integrate student-centered learning practices with my almost pathological need to have every last bit of the course planned out and thought through? Most of my pedagogy research has suggested that we as faculty should be looking for ways to give students a real sense of ownership in the classroom. One of our goals should be to create an atmosphere that leaves space for students take an active role in their own learning. How, then, do we design a course before even meeting our students? Isn’t there a danger in showing up to the first day of class with a syllabus that shows the whole course planned out? By doing so, aren't we clearly communicating to the students that the instructor is in charge, that if you know what’s good for you, you’ll follow these rules?"

FITNESS FOR THE BRAIN
Studies have consistently shown that when we exercise we are more aroused: there is increased blood flow to the brain, greater neurotransmitter secretion, and increased brain growth and plasticity over time. All of this improves our memory, attention spans, and executive functions like reasoning, problem solving, and planning. Our brains are alert and we experience a decrease in stress, which has proven to be a performance killer. So what am I telling you? Do I want you to have your students do a little physical activity in the classroom? Why not? That is what active learning is all about. Get your students to move around (group to group, pairing off, or going to the board) and see what happens.

TO DO LIST FOR SUMMER
Finals week is upon us and soon we will be preparing for another exciting commencement day (May 22). But there is still work to be done. We all need to submit our grades by Monday (May 18) and while we have prepared and given our finals, there is grading so this weekend may be very busy for many of us. I thought I would continue the end-of-semester theme for you. While many of you are transitioning your online content to the new LMS Canvas, some of you may be too busy for that now. The good news is that Blackboard does not go away until June but then, that is it. Dr. Steve Volk of Oberlin College provides us with an interesting post that is filled with great end-of-semester ideas. One that I particularly like concerns looking back at the semester and judging our progress. Dr. Steve Krause at Eastern Michigan University has a nice post also. One of my favorite quotes from his post is this gem, "When I was growing up, my mother—who, like me, was a “contingent” professor—would sequester herself for days to grade, emerging Medusa-haired and demanding of sympathy. But the older I got, the more that sympathy dissipated: “If you hate grading papers so much,” I’d say, “there’s an easy solution for that.” My mother, not to be trifled with when righteously indignant (that favored state of the professoriate), would snap: “It’s an English class. I can’t not assign papers.” Be at peace and send me your thoughts.

BEST USE OF YOUR CLOUD
So that brings us to another topic that is top-of-mind at this time. How and where are we going to store all of our electronic data and files? Hopefully you are using one of the Teaching+Learning Center USBs that I have been distributing but that is mainly for things you use frequently. The cloud is the obvious place that you want to save things, especially long-term. EdTech, the epublication that focuses on technology used by higher education, has an informative article about using the full potential of the cloud. Take a look here for more information.

ACADEMIC ADVISING TOPIC
A report recently released by the William T. Grant Foundation sheds some light on how we can best advise our students about alternative paths to the baccalaureate. This new research indicates progress on the access front, but many unexpected obstacles (lack of counseling, confusing choices, chaotic schedules) that contribute to students failing to complete.  While 37 percent of on-time high school graduates enrolled in a community college with the intention of getting a bachelor's degree, nearly half drop out within eight years often taking on debt and gaining no wage advantage from the experience. Just 33 percent of community college students earn an associate degree in eight years, the report found. Read more here.

STUDENT RATINGS EXPLAINED
Tomorrow's professional development workshop "Interpreting Your Student Ratings and Using Them for Professional Development" will be your opportunity to have a frank and open discussion about the student rating currently being used at BRCC. I encourage you to bring your ratings with you so that we can focus our time and energy on the issues you find most important or most in need of improving. You can register now for the workshop set to begin at 1:00 pm in 311 Magnolia Building. This professional development event is sponsored by the Teaching+Learning Center.

WHAT ABOUT THE NON-COMPLETERS
Inside Higher Ed reports that most research on the payoff of attending community college actually doesn’t measure the effect of attending, but rather what happens for those who graduate. Yet when the majority of students who enroll in community colleges don’t complete their programs, the financial benefit should be adjusted given the likelihood of failure. That’s the philosophy driving a recently published report that tries to measure the economic benefit of two-year college for the mass of dropouts. The report was published by the Center for Analysis of Postsecondary Education and Employment at Columbia University’s Teachers College. The report also compares the outcomes of completers and non-completers based on the students’ stated intent or goal. The algorithm, intent and goal models delivered different outcomes, demonstrating that students often don’t pursue the path they intended. (Sometimes there’s a deliberate change of paths, but often this reflects students’ confusion about what courses they need to take, the study said.)

WRITING GOOD NOTES
Students nowadays can be pretty demanding about wanting the teacher’s PowerPoints, lecture notes, and other written forms of the content presented in class. And a lot of teachers are supplying those, in part trying to be responsive to students but also because many students now lack note-taking skills. Maryellen Weimer writes in an article on this topic, "If they can’t take good notes, why not help them succeed by supplying them with notes?" She answers her own question by noting that providing the notes denies students the chance to improve their critical thinking skills. We know that once students hear new information they should spend some time writing and talking about it and then forming questions in their own words about the knowledge.  She concludes, "Students should find out in college (as they will in life) that they don’t always get what they want. They need to take their own notes and not think they are excused from doing so because they’ve got the teacher’s notes."

THINKING ABOUT VARK WHEN PLANNING YOUR TEACHING
Realizing that you have visual, aural, read-write and kinesthetic learners in each of your classes helps you to plan more effective learning experiences. Understanding that students self-identify themselves as usually fitting into two of these types and sometimes three or all four creates new opportunities for us. I have come to realize more and more that I tend to be a visual and kinesthetic learner. I like to see the situation in person and put myself in it before I begin to develop a solution or plan. Don't get me wrong, I still enjoy reading (especially for pleasure) but love when someone can put things into motion for me to watch. Which brings me to a website I want to recommend to you. If you are looking to show your students how things work, take a look at the Animagraffs website. It's never to late to learn how to properly moonwalk!

SEND THE GRINCH PACKING
Dr. Maryellen Weimer never fails to come up with a great post just when you need it most. Her latest comments concern the end of the semester. She notes, "For most of us, it’s that time of the semester when we are least likely to think positively about students. We’re tired, they’re tired, and there are still the proverbial miles to go. Some students have finally figured out they’re in trouble in the course, but none of their difficulties derive from anything they’ve done (or haven’t done), or so they think. Others remain lost in a thick fog that obscures even very fundamental course content. Passivity is the default mode for what feels like an increasingly large group. If there’s any lull in the action, they settle back, quickly finding their way to places of mental relaxation." Read more to find out how she turns this into a positive opportunity.

COMMUNITY COLLEGES ARE THE NEW SUPERHEROES
Emanuella Grinberg, Jamie Gumbrecht, and Thom Patterson, who write for CNN.com, have a terrific story about community colleges. They write, "[Community colleges] provide technical programs for emerging careers in science, technology, engineering and mathematics that are comparable to -- if not better than -- some of their four-year counterparts, at a fraction of the cost. Often, they're the launchpad to baccalaureate programs for people without the time, money or academic skills to jump into a four-year program straight out of high school. And as part of the American Association of Community Colleges' 21st Century Initiative, they're updating their missions and nimbly shifting to serve the economy of the future. Here are some of the ways they're facing problems that weigh down all of higher education -- and succeeding." Click here to find out how they think community colleges are fixing higher education.

DID YOU ENRICH YOUR LIFE AT ARTS FEST

BRCC Arts Fest 2014 comes to a close on Friday, April 10 but the effects of this years fantastic event will echo for a while. The faculty and staff, most of whom teach in the Division of Liberal Arts, are to be commended for putting on such a first rate event. The extensiveness of the schedule alone illustrates the enormous time and effort it took to create this event and the results have been incredible. This year's event was held in partnership with the Arts Council of Greater Baton Rouge. You still have a chance to enjoy the student art showcase and closing reception to be held on Friday, April 11 from 11:00 am until 1:00 pm in the Magnolia Building's gallery. Music will be performed by Dr. Charles Brooks, instructor of entertainment technology and music.

DEVELOPMENTAL EDUCATION POLICIES EMERGE
As the pressure on community colleges (like BRCC) to accelerate or even eliminate remedial-education requirements intensifies, vexing questions are being asked about the impact such a shift could have on low-income and minority students. Those who are the least prepared for college stand the most to lose from policies that push students quickly into college-level classes, according to some of the educators gathered at the annual meeting of the American Association of Community Colleges. And those students tend, disproportionately, to be minority and poor. But others argue that struggling students are ill served when they have to pass through a lengthy series of remedial courses before they can start earning college credit. Too often, they get discouraged and drop out before earning a single credit. “For many of these students, a remedial course is their first college experience, as well as their last,” Stan Jones, president of the nonprofit advocacy group Complete College America, said on Monday during a session that delved into the politics behind developmental-education reform. Here is the rest of the story published by The Chronicle of Higher Education. This issue received some local attention as the developmental education annual symposium was held on the Mid City Campus today. Nationally known experts including Dr. John Roueche, President of the Roueche Graduate Center at National American University; Dr. Terry O'Banion, President Emeritus and Senior League Fellow at the League for Innovation in the Community College; Andrea Hendricks, Associate Professor of Mathematics at Georgia Perimeter College and Interim Department Chair for the Online Math/CS Department; Susan Bernstein, Lecturer in English and a Co-Coordinator of the Stretch program at Arizona State University in Tempe; and, Riki Kucheck, Professor of Mathematics and Computer Science at Orange Coast College, discussed present and proposed solutions to the issues that many of our under-prepared students face. The symposium was coordinated by the BRCC STAR Gates Title III staff.

HARD AT WORK TO MAKE A DIFFERENCE
Professors work long days, on weekends, on and off campus, and largely alone. Responsible for a growing number of administrative tasks, they also do research more on their own time than during the traditional work week. The biggest chunk of their time is spent teaching. Those are the preliminary findings of an ongoing study at Boise State University of faculty workload allocation, which stamps out old notions of professors engaged primarily in their own research and esoteric discussions with fellow scholars. “The ivory tower is a beacon — not a One World Trade Center, but an ancient reflection of a bygone era — a quasar,” says John Ziker, chair of the anthropology department at Boise State University. “In today’s competitive higher-education environment, traditional universities and their faculty must necessarily do more and more, and show accomplishments by the numbers, whether it be the number of graduates, the number of peer-reviewed articles published or the grant dollars won." Here is the rest of this story published by Inside Higher Ed.

USING TECHNOLOGY TO IMPROVE STUDENT ACHIEVEMENT
The Blackboard Series continues with a workshop on Thursday, March 27 at 1:00 pm. The professional development session is sponsored by the Teaching+Learning Center and will be held in 311 Magnolia Building (Mid City Campus). Susan Nealy and Lenora White will be sharing some of the latest Blackboard features that you can use to help your students succeed. Todd Pourciau will add some pedagogical practices using technology that have been proven to help student achievement. Some of the topics to be shared include group work, material chunking, and homework. You can register now.

THE CHAIRLIFT LESSON
Chemistry professor Steven M. Wright's one-pager on learning about teaching through his experience with his niece on a chairlift is humorous. Even better, his outcome sheds some light on the connection between teaching and learning. He writes, "Successful teaching isn’t measured by what I have covered; it is measured by what students learn. Teaching that promotes little or no learning does raise some interesting ethical questions."

ACADEMIC RIGOR IN COMMUNITY COLLEGE
Inside Higher Ed has an interesting piece for all of us folks who work at community colleges. Paul Fain shares some information about a recent study that examines why community college transfer students are not succeeding. He writes, "Students are much less likely to earn a four-year degree if they first enroll at a community college. A key reason, according to a newly released study, is lost credits in the transfer process." The research also dumps cold water on several other explanations for why many community college students fail to eventually complete bachelor’s degrees, such as assumptions about lowered expectations, a vocational focus or inadequate academic rigor during their time at two-year colleges.

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.

THE COMMUNITY OF SCHOLARS

Building community among our faculty is very important for us to function as a disconnected group of disciplines that must come together cohesively to address systemic problems such as student retention and success. Part of our jobs as faculty has always been to focus on the needs of our students. Whether it is showing your students how to annotate, suggesting better study skills, or advising them about time management, when we take the time to teach students how to navigate college, we are also helping our colleagues. If a student learns a valuable college success skill in one class, we all benefit. So as the landscape continues to shift and the opportunity to attend college is an option for more students, we know that the number of underprepared student will continue to grow. Here are a few suggestions that you can use to create a stronger foundation for students who are faced with multiple impediments. Suggest during your advising sessions that taking the College Success Skills course provides a solid orientation for surviving and prospering in college. When you notice students are struggling, whether by formative or summative assessment or simply through observation in your classes, suggest that they make a trip to the Academic Learning Center. Make sure you send them with a referral sheet. Once they have made their visit, have them return the referral sheet to you so that you can see what intervention was offered and what the ALC professional staff suggests as the next step. The entire process can be viewed on the ALC website. The most important thing in this situation is to talk with your students who are struggling. A high level of engagement, often marked by the student-faculty relationship, is key to improving student success.

THE VALUE OF COMMUNITY COLLEGES

LCTCS President Joe May recently had a guest editorial published by The Advocate. In trumpeting the merits of the community college experience, Dr. May uses one of our own BRCC student’s story to make his point. He says, “Students who often choose to enroll in community colleges value their low cost, easy access, small class size, and high quality instruction that aligns with the needs of the local economy. Many of these students, such as Laketa Smith at Baton Rouge Community College, acknowledge that many of their previous education and career choices were not in their long-term best interest. Laketa, like a great number of students, needed developmental education in reading to help her prepare for college-level courses. As the result of her developmental education courses, she is successfully enrolled in honors courses at BRCC. At the same time, she not only saved herself money she saved the state of Louisiana as well.”

END OF SEMESTER SUGGESTIONS

As you begin to create your final exams, I would encourage you to use the comprehensive approach. What we know about the brain and learning is that it requires prompts and redundancy in order to create deeper learning. Repeating questions from your past quizzes and tests is a good idea, especially if a high number of students did not demonstrate mastery on the previous assessment. You should also be looking to see if the students are using the feedback you have provided them by assessing their ability to integrate changes and new knowledge. Test anxiety is a very real impediment for many of your students. Positive messaging and confidence building are two key components to allowing your students to give you their best effort. Encourage them to build study guides individually and then allow them some class time to share their efforts with other students in the class. The sum is always greater than the parts when it comes to knowledge. Finally, you may want to have each of your students bring in a self-addressed stamped envelope. That way you can send them feedback on their final exam. You could also email this information or create a general feedback document that you could post to your Blackboard site. This allows us to continue to scaffold the knowledge they learned this semester and connect it to new knowledge in the semesters to come.

THE HONOR CIRCLE EXPANDS

Join us in congratulating Dr. Sandra Guzman as the most recent recipient of the Keep Calm and Be Engaged shirt of honor. Watching Dr. Guzman in her classroom is an inspiring experience. Her love of both teaching and her discipline is readily obvious. She is a big proponent of active learning and making sure that her assessment instruments are aligned with her teaching. Dr. Guzman is also a disciple of Bloom’s Taxonomy and champions its worth to her colleagues. As a biologist, she is concerned about the environment and shares her passion with her students in this area as well. Her students tell us she is tough but caring. They also say that she is able to take a difficult topic and relate it to their lives in ways that help them learn and make connections to previous knowledge. So we welcome Dr. Guzman to the Keep Calm and Be Engaged honor circle where she joins previous recipients Paul Guidry, Wes Harris, Dr. Mary Miller, and Amy Pinero.

REMEMBERING OUR PAST IMPROVES OUR FUTURE

Today marks the 50^th anniversary of one of the most terrible days in our history as a nation. President John F. Kennedy was assassinated while riding through the downtown area of Dallas, Texas. Some say it changed America forever. It certainly provides a teachable moment for you in your courses. Kennedy was the youngest person elected to be President of the U.S. His education agenda was part of his New Frontier program. He was also active on the Civil Rights front which had broad impact for education as well. One example includes his intervention when Alabama Governor George Wallace blocked the doorway to the University of Alabama to stop two African American students from attending. Wallace moved aside only after being confronted by Deputy Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach and the Alabama National Guard, which had just been federalized by order of the President. That evening Kennedy gave his famous civil rights address on national television and radio, launching his initiative for civil rights legislation—to provide equal access to public schools and other facilities, and greater protection of voting rights.

WORKSHOP PARTICIPANTS SHARE BEST PRACTICES

The faculty development workshop, Teaching and Learning Interventions for Student Success, held yesterday is still generating conversation. The comments started during the workshop, increased at the end of the session, and have continued to come via email. As a community of scholars, we are learning to depend on each other to solve our problems and it is encouraging. Facilitated by Dr. Todd Pourciau and Jeanne Stacy, every participant was actively engaged throughout the workshop and idea generation was at an all-time high. Tommy Domangue, psychology, said he will begin to model his thought processes “out loud” to help his students learn about learning. Paul Guidry, criminal justice (and a Keep Calm and Be Engaged professor) plans to use the stuff happens cards to reduce student excuses and the parking lot active learning strategy to prevent his classes from being hijacked. Raven Dora, computer science, plans to use the roundtable review to help her students scaffold information from previous classes, create study guides, and center her students to begin class. April Witting, practical nursing, wants to implement the question and answer match intervention to allow her student to learn from each other and build classroom community. Lee Buckner, economics, plans to use the Stop-Start-Keep Doing intervention to increase his awareness of his students needs and more closely gauge the “temperature” of his courses. All of these intervention and more can be found in the Active Learning Manual, which is currently being updated. Look for an electronic copy in your email in early December.

COURSE REDESIGN OPPORTUNITY

The upcoming holiday break during December and January is a great time to take on a course re-design project. Building meaningful learning experiences that are student-centered can greatly enhance student success. Dr. Gary Smith, University of New Mexico, has a terrific article in the National Teaching and Learning Forum about how he went from a lecture-based presenter to an active learning teacher. His story includes the level of critical self-reflection he was willing to do in order to improve student achievement and his student ratings. In fact, his article was the pre-reading assignment for the most recent faculty development workshop sponsored by the Teaching+Learning Center. 

FOCUS ON COMMUNITY COLLEGES

While attending the Association for the Study of Higher Education conference last week, I heard so many presentations about the community college experience. What was surprising (and a little alarming) is that none of the expert presenters worked at community colleges themselves.  That tells me that the missing link in the international conversation about community colleges is us. I also learned that recent research shows that students prefer teachers who are organized and clear. That sounds simple yet how often are we challenged by multiple deadlines, responsibilities, and life in general? The Chronicle of Higher Education actually published an article about the conference presentations in today’s online issue.  One of the presentations highlighted by the article is by Dr. Chad Loes, a professor of criminal justice at Mount Mercy University, who studied how students' perceptions of organized teaching correlated with gains in critical-thinking skills measured at the beginning and end of their first year. After controlling for students' background characteristics, Dr. Loes and the other author, Dr. Mark H. Salisbury of Augustana College, in Illinois, found that well-organized teaching had only a small effect on the critical-thinking skills of students in general. But the perception of such teaching had a pronounced effect on students in minority groups, whose gains in critical-thinking skills were nearly five times as large as those of white students.

FACULTY LEARNING COMMUNITY BEGINS WORK
The Common Reader Faculty Learning Community kicked off with an abundance of enthusiasm and participation on Wednesday. So much so, that there is currently a waiting list of folks who would like to join the FLC. The Teaching+Learning Center is currently exploring the idea of opening another section of the FLC to accommodate the need. Participants discussed the profession of teaching, explored the syllabus, and examined the learning outcomes at the first faculty professional development session. The FLC is developing a set of group objectives as well. FLC members include: Nisha Aroskar, Robbie Burleigh, Emily Graves, Wes Harris, Susan Nealy, Jennifer Perkins, Todd Pourciau, Angela Pursley, Kathleen Schexnayder, Jeanne Stacy, and Lin Warmsley.

GROUP WORK TEACHES VALUABLE LESSONS AND SKILLS
Group projects are a great active learning experience that has proven benefits for student learning. Randall Hansen's article Benefits and Problems with Student Teams: Suggestions for Improving Team Projects published in the Journal of Education for Business lists a number of great suggestions that you may want to employ. Hansen says that we should emphasize the importance and benefits of teamwork by pointing out the special skills acquired that are useful in any job the student may be seeking. Team-building exercises help to build cohesive groups and promote engagement. If you are looking to have your students learn how to work with others whom they may not know (similar to most work environments), you should form the groups. The workload expectations should be reasonable and you should provide some class time for meetings. The goals of the project should have clearly defined learning objectives and you should require interim reports and group process feedback. Always remind the students that they should keep a log or journal of their experience that indicates their contributions and peer assessment should be part of the evaluation process.


THE RANKING BUSINESS EXPANDS
Did you know that the U.S. Department of Education is set to launch a rating system for all colleges and universities by 2015? It will apparently reward colleges with a high rating if they graduate large numbers of students from disadvantaged backgrounds and do not saddle such students with heavy debt without graduating them. Once in place, the program would give larger Pell Grants and more-affordable loans to students attending higher-rated institutions. The focus on college completion sharpened this past year, as campus leaders pursued national goals for higher-education attainment, and more states tied a portion of colleges' appropriations to performance measures such as graduation rates. Louisiana of course has the GRAD ACT. The US News and World Report ranking focuses on the national level. Washington Monthly started publishing a national rankings system as well in 2005. The rankings, whose most recent edition was published last month, "give high marks to institutions that enroll low-income students, help them graduate, and don't charge them an arm and a leg to attend," the magazine said.

CAN A ROBOT DO YOUR JOB
As the debate about the role of technology in education builds, two California community-college professors have published their own commentary on the automation of teaching—in the form of an illustrated comic according to the Chronicle of Higher Education. Adam Bessie and Arthur King, who teach English and studio and computer arts, respectively, at Diablo Valley College, have weighed in with a piece of graphic journalism titled “Automated Teaching Machine: A Graphic Introduction to the End of Human Teachers.” The comic, published by the left-leaning Truth Out, has been circulating among faculty members on California community-college e-mail lists. It was inspired by the introduction of an automated reading machine to score English-placement assessments at Diablo Valley College, Mr. Bessie said in an e-mail. Previously, English-department faculty members had created and reviewed the assessments manually, a collective exercise that gave them the opportunity to discuss standards, he said. “We were told that the robo-reader could do the same job as us for cheaper, which seemed an absurd notion,” Mr. Bessie said. “I had, before this, never heard of a robo-reader and thought that I had the one job that couldn’t be automated: that written human communication was one area that technology could augment, but not replace.”

EMPLOYERS WANT STUDENTS WITH REAL WORLD EDUCATION
An article in today's Chronicle of Higher Education reports that students worried about landing a job after graduation might be attracted to a narrow education that focuses on building their knowledge in one area. But that isn't enough to help them pursue successful careers, according to the Association of American Colleges and Universities. The AACU survey shows employers' support for the idea that students should be broadly educated and should apply their learning to the real world during college. More than half of employers indicated that recent college graduates should have "both field-specific knowledge and skills and a broad range of skills and knowledge."

GRANT WRITING WORKSHOP
Ann Zanders will present the second grant writing workshop on Thursday, April 11 at 3:00 PM in the Teaching+Learning Center (311 Magnolia Building). The faculty development opportunity will focus on BRCC's internal grant process, approval of projects, and proposal writing. It is not required to have attended the previous workshop last Thursday in order to participate this week. You can reserve your spot by sending an email to Ann Zanders at zandersa@mybrcc.edu. The event is sponsored by the Grant Resource Center and the Teaching+Learning Center.

ANNUAL SYMPOSIUM FOCUSES ON STUDENT SUCCESS STRATEGIES
BRCC will host its 5th annual development education symposium on Thursday, April 11 from 8:00 AM until 4:00 PM in the Board Room located in the Louisiana Building. Dr. John N. Gardner, President of the Gardner Institute for Excellence in Undergraduate Education, is the keynote speaker for the faculty development symposium focused on providing the tools to promote student success, retention, the first year experience, and best practices. The event is sponsored by BRCC STARS Gate Title III and the Teaching+Learning Center. Registration is continuing and open to everyone

UNDERSTANDING YOUR STUDENTS
Understanding what stage of cognitive development your students currently reside at is a key component to determining how you will approach teaching that class. William G. Perry's classic study Forms of Intellectual and Ethical Development in the College Years (LB3609 .P4 1998) gives us the four stages of cognitive development your students will typically experience. These include dualism, relativism, multiplicity, and commitment. Belenky, Clinchy, Goldberger, and Tarule modified Perry's categories based on gender in their book Women's Ways of Knowing (HQ1206 .W88 1997). They write about connected knowers versus separate knowers. Teaching at a community college, we know that economic issues also influence many of our students’ abilities to focus on their academic progress. This is often compounded by academic preparation, mental models, and learning styles. The key to providing an environment that promotes deeper learning is by being engaged with your students. Understanding their "story" and how they have come to be enrolled in your class will help you to provide the support they need to succeed.