FACULTY GATHER FOR CIVIL DISCOURSE
The first Mid-Day Musings attracted a nice group and the conversation was rich and filled with great ideas. The question of the day was "What Should We Be Telling Our Students At Orientation?" The focus was on having consistency between what the students hear in the orientation sessions and what they are hearing, seeing and experiencing in their classes. Part of the conversation was about how we present ourselves as an institution. "It is important that we share the benefits of attending a community college as opposed to entering a 4-year school right out of high school. We need to compliment our students on making a good choice. Share the data that shows them that students who start here do very well when they transfer," said one participant. Most of the participants agreed that orientation would be very impactful if it was presented by our students. "Having student testimonials would be powerful. Having a student talk about the top ten insider tips of how to succeed at BRCC would be great as well," said another participant. We also spent some time talking about how we can attract more students who have spent some time working or raising a family and now want to return to college. "What they care about is very different from what a typical 18 year old cares about. Catering to this group of students could prove beneficial as I have found them to be very motivated and focused and their presence can help some of the younger students in the class," said another participant. We will gather again on September 24 at noon in the Bienvenue faculty dining room. Please plan to join us then and watch your email for the next topic.

DAILY EXPERT STRATEGY FOR LARGE CLASSES
Dr. Angi Thompson has written an interesting article on how you can encourage student participation in large classes. She writes, "If you’re interested in approaches that encourage students to participate in class and develop their public-speaking skills, as well as techniques that help you learn student names, then my “daily experts” strategy may be of use to you. What are daily experts? I list five or six students’ names on a PowerPoint slide at the beginning of my classes (which are typically 65-150 students). These individuals, assuming they are in class that day, then become my daily experts—the first ones I ask questions to or opinions of before opening discussion to the whole class. The approach provides for one-on-one dialogue in the midst of a larger class creating an environment that encourages interaction." She goes on to explain the benefits of using this active learning method for the students, faculty and the rest of the class.

THE ARTS OF LIBERTY
Did you know that liberal arts is the single most popular major at community colleges in the United States? Take a look at Dr. Matt Reeds blog post about this fascinating fact. He notes, "I mention this because it’s almost entirely absent from national discussions of higher education. In the popular press, 'liberal arts' are assumed to be the exclusive province of the affluent, particularly at older small colleges that are full of people who use words like 'problematize.' (I attended one myself, so I know whereof I write.)  When higher ed policy types talk about liberal arts, they usually have in mind literature majors at places like Sarah Lawrence. Which is fine, as far as it goes, but it’s only a part of the picture." It is also the largest major at BRCC but some of that is because of things that Reed writes about in his blog. With the recent completion of "Concentration Week" it will be interesting to see if things have changed for us.

ADVISING MOVEMENT TAKES SHAPE
The movement to create a academic advising program of excellence for our students continues to move forward. A good number of our colleagues gathered on Tuesday, April 29 to discuss a number of issues that included the need for a guidebook, academic progress checklists, a database on student advising, selection of an appropriate advising model, and the creation of a discussion board. Two ad-hoc committees were created to handle the main issues. The Academic Advising Handbook ad-hoc committee is being co-chaired by Science Department Chair Laura Younger and Nursing and Allied Health Academic Advisor Martha Sealey and includes the following members:  Dr. Mary Boudreaux (STEM Division), Gery Frie (Construction Management), Dr. Sandra Harris (Title 3), Leigh Potts, (Title 3), Jeanne Stacy (Academic Learning Center), Leroy Waguespack (Computer Information Systems), and Rebecca Wesley (Veterinary Technology). The Student Advising Records ad-hoc committee is being co-chaired by Business and Social Sciences Department Chair Amy Pinero and Business and Social Sciences Division Academic Advisor Eric Whitfield and includes the following members: Nisha Aroskar (Business), Vinetta Frie (CSSK) Peter Klubek (Library), Marla Kameny (Business), and Krista Schmitt (Business). If you would like to be involved in either ad-hoc committee, please contact one of the co-chairs.

MEASURING TEACHING EFFECTIVENESS
Faculty Focus presents us with a timely article on an issue that we are currently wrestling with; namely student ratings of faculty. She writes, "When we talk about teaching effectiveness, it’s usually in the context of evaluation. Student ratings are frequently described as measures of teaching effectiveness, and that makes our understanding of the term important. Researcher Leslie Layne wondered whether students and teachers define the term similarly. If they don’t, Layne writes that understanding the differences “is crucial to faculty and administrators when interpreting student survey results.”

WHERE DO THE LIBERAL ARTS FIT
Dr. William Durden has written a very provocative opinion piece on the current state of affairs concerning liberal art degrees. He writes, "Americans don’t like cheaters. When it comes to how we learn and what we’re able to do with our acquired knowledge, a game has been going on. And many will find themselves systematically locked out of opportunity. This is not about students cheating on tests or principals downplaying ineffective teaching strategies. Nor is it about the latest argument concerning higher education — that college is too expensive and there’s no guarantee of gainful employment. It a national reckoning of how much we’re willing to tolerate regarding class, status and the suppression of economic mobility. This issue demands that we take responsibility for the way that our educational decisions play out in our lives and throughout our communities. Until we take ownership of these things, we will continue to play a fool’s game of winners and losers."

MEASURING THE EFFECTS OF TEACHING
One of the burning questions for us as teachers will always be "Are my students learning?" One of the ways we determine that is by assessing what we have taught. Good assessment provides the answers to the questions "Am I teaching?" and "Are my students learning?" The faculty development workshop set for October 17 is designed to help you create assessment instruments that can provide the data to answer these questions. Testing 101: Assessing Student Learning, to be held in the Teaching+Learning Center (311 Magnolia Building/Mid City Campus) promises to be an active learning experience. We will delve into the rich and interesting topic of testing on many levels. So let's take some of the guess work out of testing and assessment together. If you would like to join your colleagues for this workshop, register now.

DON'T LET TEACHABLE MOMENTS SLIP BY
Have you ever had a bird fly into your classroom while you were teaching? What about planning to show a really compelling video and having the technology malfunction? Do you remember what class you were teaching the morning of September 11, 2001? All of these examples provide a teachable moment. Don't get me wrong. I am not comparing the three incidents in any way. What I am urging you to do is to not let a change in your plans cause you to miss the great opportunity. Nothing resonates with our students like real life. Dr. Judy Willis says, "Rather than viewing a spontaneous teachable moment as a distraction, planning for these moments in advance facilitates making the most of a moment to engage students who are already at a heightened state of attention and awareness." She suggests you have your students write a quickwrite about how the experience made them feel. Quickwrites require students to write for three to five minutes without stopping. If their inspiration stops and they don't know what to write, tell them to write the last word over and over again until inspiration hits them again. After the time limit is complete, have them read what they wrote silently and ask them to underline one or two phrases they consider most important. You can then have them share those highlights with the class. If you determine that this really sparked great interest, you can turn this into a larger assignment and have them write an essay, expanding what they started in class. Teachable moments provide us with a wonderful opportunity to use a sometime emotional moment to build class community and make lasting connections.

CAN YOU BLACKBOARD
The turnout was terrific for the two Blackboard workshop sessions on Thursday. It was extremely nice to see some of our new colleagues from the former CATC on the Mid City Campus. The feedback was great as well. Sandra Guzman, science, wrote, "My lab reports are going paperless!" Barbara Hasek, science, wrote, "The presentation was very helpful and I will start using the due date feature immediately." Jessie Hornbrook, liberal arts, wrote, "I am definitely using this now to grade my 50+ student writing assignments in all of my classes!"  Angela Pursley, business and social sciences, wrote that she likes using the "student view of the grade center." Darnella Jackson, nursing and allied health, wrote that she appreciates "how easy it is to create a course in Blackboard." The next session of the Blackboard Series is just around the corner. Gradebook: It's Not Just for eLearning Classes will occur on Tuesday, October 8 with sessions for the two levels of learners. The 3:00 PM session is for beginners while the 4:00 PM session is for advanced users. You can register for this faculty professional development opportunity now.

ARE YOU FRIENDS WITH GRANDMA ON FACEBOOK
Barbara Fister's recent post on her blog raises some interesting questions about college writing instruction in the age of digital overload. She writes, "How do we prepare students for a world in which so much of their writing will be digital and published in a fluid, communal, multivocal space? How do we talk about the rhetorical issues of purpose, audience, argument, evidence, and tone when we aren’t limiting ourselves to certain academic forms of writing? As the Stanford Study of Writing has shown, students may be better at rhetorical moves than we think precisely because they have practiced them in digital spaces with real purposes and real audiences. But given the complexity of modern forms of public writing, what issues beyond the usual writing issues might be worth considering? Should we be talking about the difficulty of self-representation in a space with multiple audiences, including your friends, your future employer, and your grandmother? Should we talk about who owns our texts online and what platforms such as Goodreads and Facebook can do with our contributions? Should we talk about balancing free speech and civility with case studies of people behaving badly online?"

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.”

SHINY AND NEW
The promise of a new semester is always exciting. Our old ideas are new again. We will have a new roster of motivated students. All of our teaching will be met with enthusiasm. All of our carefully thought out learning outcomes will be achieved. Of course reality can be anything but the scenario just described but the possibilities keep us motivated. It is, after all, the reason you became a teacher. Your great desire to share the excitement of discovery and inquiry along with a sense that the world's problems are just one student away from being solved. The person that finds a cure for cancer could be in your class. The person that determines how to pull our economy back from the fiscal cliff might be sitting in the back row this semester. The person that writes the next great novel could be enrolled in your elearning course for the spring. Even more likely, the nurse that helps during your hospital stay or the vet tech that saves your cat or the police officer that provides the first line of defense between you and a criminal is very likely to be here at BRCC ready to start the path to their new career. It is an exciting time for all of us and I hope that I can be a resource for you this semester. As you continue to plan for your upcoming semester, feel free to contact me with any requests for help that you may have. I am ready to assist you so that each and every course you teach will have maximum impact. You are the key to improved student learning at BRCC and I am ready to help.

WHAT IS THIS TEST FOR AGAIN?
A new study by Liu, Bridgeman and Adler reveals that motivation plays a big part in the performance of students on standardized tests used to measure general student learning. Many colleges are using tests of learning outcomes, such as the Collegiate Learning Assessment to prove to their stake holders and accreditors that higher education matters. They note that the CLA, and popular alternatives from ACT and the Educational Testing Service, tests the critical thinking of small groups of entering and graduating students. In theory, comparing the scores of new and graduating students yields evidence either that students are or are not learning. Many call the difference between the entering and graduating students' performance the "value added" by a college degree. The researchers note that when students were told that the test (which typically are not graded and therefore hold little value to the students) were being used by potential employers, the scores improved.

GETTING STUDENT FEEDBACK YOU CAN USE
Gary Cooper has written an excellent blog post about the merits of student ratings. He suggests that you survey your students throughout the semester so that you can circumvent any big problems that may crop up during the term. I have suggested, in faculty development seminars, the use of the Stop-Start-Keep Doing student survey to improve student learning. He gives a number of other suggestions that could be put to use in your course.

THE ALT-AC TRACK
One of the highly attended sessions at the recent Modern Language Association's annual meeting had to do with life as an adjunct professor. Brian Croxall, a steadily employed digital-humanities strategist and lecturer in English at Emory University, extolled the virtues of life as an adjunct. Others on the panel added emphasized the need to be flexible and to acquire potentially useful talents along the way. Learning administrative skills, for instance, comes in handy whether you work in faculty development or as a digital-humanities project manager or any number of other jobs in and around academe.

WHY DO YOU TEACH
Sam Intrator and Megan Scribner are  co-editors of the upcoming book Teaching with Fire, Leading from Within and Teaching from the Heart. They are looking for folks to submit a poem and a brief 250-word commentary describing how that poem inspires you, informs your work, or provides sustenance as you negotiate the complex challenges at the center your vocation. Importantly, this project is not just seeking poems about teaching and the classroom but poems on any topic that intersects with how you think about your life and work as a teacher. The deadline for submissions is February 1, 2013. This book will be a brand-new edition modeled on their best-selling Teaching with Fire: Poetry that Sustains the Courage to Teach. If you have questions, email megan@couragerenewal.org .

HOVERING SLINKIES AND SCIENCE EDUCATION
Brian Mathews has a very interesting blog post today that suggests that research should be more accessible. He notes that a new physics paper is being promoted using a YouTube video about slinkies. He writes, "This is exactly what research libraries are talking about: data, visualization, modeling, social media, etc. While the open access aspect of the article enables people to read the work, it’s the YouTube video that creates buzz building word of mouth and fueling discovery."

NO CRITICAL THINKING REQUIRED
Kim Blank wants to kill the use of term papers as a type of assessment. Blank notes that the term paper is a practice adopted from the Germans in the early 20th century and writes, "It was one way for students to demonstrate that they could absorb what they had read, in a form fairly close to what we now call a research paper. The practice exploded in the second half of the century, and it continues today, having also devolved into variations of the now ubiquitous five-paragraph essay." Blank argues that the term paper has no connections to what students will encounter in the work place as one of the reasons (there are others) that we should discontinue the practice.

YOUR PRESENCE IS REQUESTED
You have one more opportunity for faculty professional development before the fall semester ends. Lisa Hibner, Director of the Career Center at BRCC, will present a fascinating seminar on how you can integrate career activities in your courses. Helping your students to discover their strengths and abilities is a rewarding endeavor. Providing students with the knowledge they need to be productive citizens has always been a hallmark for community colleges. The seminar will be held on Wednesday, November 28 at 3:00 PM in the Teaching+Learning Center (311 Magnolia Building). You can register now but walk-ups will be accepted. Your participation provides you with one professional development credit.