ARE YOU STRESSED OUT?
Instructors who regularly use stress-reducing strategies increase their abilities to cope with the demands of the career and are positioned to do a better job educating students, according to results from a program administered by the University of Virginia’s Curry School of Education. Want to learn more? Register for the upcoming professional development session sponsored by the Center for Teaching+Learning Enhancement. You can view other professional development opportunities here.

MOVING TO HAPPINESS
It’s helpful to know that the brain is plastic and can adapt to challenges. And when it comes to learning new things, we can build up mental resources through intentional effort. People can get better at realizing self-regulation, executive functions, a sense of perspective or meaning, positive emotions like gratitude, a sense of strength and the feeling of being cared about. “Any kind of mental activity, including experiences, entails underlying neural activity,” said Rick Hanson, a psychologist and senior fellow at the Greater Good Science Center at UC Berkeley, at a Learning & the Brain conference. He has developed practices to help people build up their mental capacity for happiness by creating patterns of neural activity that with time and repetition become neural pathways. Read the entire article here.

KEEPING THE HUMAN ASPECT IN ONLINE COURSES

“Wow. I always thought my online instructors were computers.” An online student shared this comment with his instructor after receiving an email from her that included feedback on an assignment. This story, shared with me by the student’s instructor several years ago, resonates with me on an emotional level each time I reference it. It motivates me to ensure online instructors understand how vital their authentic, human presence is to their students, and it conveys how deeply meaningful online classes can be when they are facilitated and designed with a focus on the student experience. To continue reading Michelle Pacansky-Brock's post click here.

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.

ORGANIZING FOR STUDENT SUCCESS
Josh Wyner writes in an editorial for The Chronicle of Higher Education that community colleges should be organized for the students they have rather than those who attend four-year residential colleges. He says that the re-envisioned version of community college would offer far greater numbers of block-scheduled programs. "Most students should be directed to enter comprehensive programs built around specific degree goals and schedules. Re-envisioned, community colleges would focus their hiring, professional development, and tenure systems on a single goal: improved teaching and learning," he concludes.

WORKING HAPPY
A lot of folks start out at a community college thinking they might try to "move up" at some point, but then they find themselves liking the work, liking their students and colleagues, and liking the lifestyle. And so they end up staying. For 30 or 40 years. So says Rob Jenkins in a piece he wrote for Inside Higher Ed earlier this year. He goes on to respond to the question what's it like working at a community college?  by saying "I take that to be a lifestyle question, and all I can say is: I wouldn't trade careers with anybody. I enjoy the work that I do, I like my students and colleagues, I believe that I've been able to make a difference in people's lives, I've found it relatively easy to maintain an acceptable balance between work and life, and I've been able to make a decent living. What more can anyone ask from a career?"
 
MAKING CLASS MEANINGFUL AND PURPOSEFUL
A research project by Trudy Hanson, Kristina Drumheller, Jessica Mallard, Connie McKee, and Paula Schlegel determined that although students want to make academics a priority, they have a difficult time balancing their school life with their need for financial and social support. Sleep was often sacrificed as students frequently mentioned pulling all-nighters for completing projects. They also note that growing up with instant gratification might result in Millennials facing difficulty planning for long-term projects. Their survey sample expressed confidence in their abilities, those in the focus group acknowledged that they take short cuts because of their time demands. Students who feel they have to learn the material in class choose which assignments should be given higher priority based on rewards and consequences, and they  determine which classes are most important to attend and pay attention to which assignments and classes can be sacrificed. Going to class is a higher priority than doing homework or studying because it is the only time students have set aside in their day to accomplish the learning of course content. For instructors, this means class time needs to be more meaningful and purposeful, because it might be the only time a student spends with the course material.

WHAT IS MISSING
James M. Lang is his book On Course, writes about the situation that is created when faculty are saddled with the "Coverage Model." This model asks the question, what do I need to cover during this semester? "The problem with the coverage model, Lang says, it that it only considers two elements in teaching: the teacher and the course material. The missing element is the student in the teaching-learning triad." He notes that this model constructs teaching as a performative act that involves pulling material out of your head and throwing it on the desks of your students. Their job is then to figure out the best way to lap it up and hold it down.