Would you want to spend a day learning in your class? I love this question presented recently in a post by George Couros. He writes, "This is not to say that students should have no personal responsibility for their learning. But you can’t force someone to learn.  As an educator, the thing you have the most control over is not your students, but the experience you create for those learners." So what does that look like in our face-to-face and eLearning classes? How do we engage and inspire our students? What types of questions do we ask our students. I look back on my time in higher education (and even high school) as a student for a point of reference. When did I become bored and check out? It was usually when an instructor droned on and on and never tried to engage in any type of conversation or feedback. It was when the topic did not interest me and the instructor didn't explain to me why it was relevant or what important point we were building towards. So I look critically at my learning experiences and begin to see how I can make them more engaging and dynamic. What would I want to hear if I was sitting in my students' places? This idea is something that I was first exposed to by the research of Dr. Stephen Brookfield. His focus on critical self reflection has helped me to continuously remain vigilant about growing. He also inspired me to journal  in order to use the data to improve my teaching. So I return where we began. Would you want to spend a day, week, or semester in your class?

Since we have learning objectives for each class we teach that correspond to broader course objectives, it is important to do a self check from time to time to make sure we are staying on track with both. Continuing to explore this topic, I have become more aware of alignment between the two in relation to my teaching. One of my course objectives is to help student to become better at critical thinking. Posing problems for them to solve and engaging them in group discussion while allowing for reflection time has created a truly active learning experience in my classroom. Lisa Nielsen's recent post about George Couros' book The Innovator’s Mindset provides a really clear visual for this process. Couros says that if we want innovative students, we must become innovative teachers. He goes on to list eight elements that he has noticed innovative teachers use to create this active learning environment that allows students to unleash their creativity. Continue reading here.

As we begin our 12 week classes today, I thought it would be good to revisit some of the strategies we can use to integrate active learning into all of our classes. The goal is to create self-guided learning. Not stressing about coverage allows us to teach our students how to learn and thus create critical thinkers for the future. Students may approach coursework from a fairly mechanistic stance: If the instructor gives me information, I will memorize it, and get a good grade. This approach to learning doesn’t lend itself well to an active classroom, which requires students to wrestle with difficult ideas in order to lead to deeper conceptual learning. The good news is that most of your students are looking for cues from you on what you expect so they are malleable to your ideas. First, you might want to reflect on your own ideas about learning? Your own implicit ideas can have a big impact on how you teach (Good, Rattan and Dweck, 2012). Do you implicitly have performance goals for your students – and yourself -- and a "fixed" rather than a "growth" mindset about intelligence? Think about the messages that you send students. Do you show your students that you want to be questioned during class, that you own up to your own errors, and that you also can learn from them? Do you praise students for their effort or their grades? Consider intentionally framing your classroom for learning mastery. You can emphasize that learning takes effort and that anyone can improve if they work hard (Dweck 2010; Good, Rattan and Dweck 2012; Anderman and Dawson, 2010). You can create opportunities for students to reflect on the process of their own learning so they become more self-directed learners (Elby 2001; Redish and Hammer, 2009; Bransford, Brown and Cocking, 2000). Helping students reflect on their own learning, or “think about thinking” is termed “metacognition,” a learned skill that is unfortunately not directly addressed in many college courses. Spending a few minutes in each session about metacognition can pay off in big dividends when it comes to self-guided learning.

Beginning another semester always draws our focus to the tools of teaching. Things like the syllabus, the text, our learning experiences, and the course learning objectives. Good learning outcomes are a helpful reminder for us and our students. I challenge students to use the daily learning objectives as a tool to measure their learning. Using Linda Nilson's suggestions in her book Creating Self-Regulated Learners (BRCC Library LB1060 .N55 2013) helps us to understand how we can facilitate life-long learning habits in our students. Inside Higher Ed has a good article today written by Cathy Davidson about learning outcomes and the path that a senior faculty members takes as she tries to understand (in her own words) "what we require, how we organize knowledge, how we facilitate learning and what we hope our students will gain from what they learn." It is a terrific starting point to help us decide what it is we will truly focus on during that precious class time (or synchronous instruction time in our elearning courses). As our students move through the material we teach, how will they themselves know when they have truly learned something? Ms. Davidson concludes the article with samples of what she has come to determine to be good learning objectives. One of her aspirational learning objectives is, "Form an appreciation of the importance of critical and creative thinking and problem-solving and use these to guide my future life and work." A good standard for all of us to use I think.

Before adult learners will learn something, they often need to know why they need to learn it. That sounds really easy right? Just like you and me, understanding the relevance to our lives will cause us to focus more deeply on something. So translating that to our classroom makes great sense. Just develop and deliver learning experiences that have direct applicability and relevance to our student's lives. The other important concept to remember as we develop our curriculum is that adult learners are autonomous and self-directed. Now this may be where some of our student persistence issues begin to occur. If most of your students are first-timers and recent high school graduates, they are very much set in something we like to call the 80/20 model. Eighty percent of everything that happened to them in high school was delivered by their teachers. Books are free. The bell rings to change classes. The bus picks you up and takes you home. You get a study guide for all tests. So it is understandable that many of our students are expecting the same thing from us. But college is not high school in so many ways. So getting our students to not resist the college experience begins with that simple statement. Turn 80/20 on its ear and tell your students that it is time for them to begin to write their own future. Asking them questions like "what do you want to do with your life or what type of job are you hoping to find once you earn your academic credential" (degree/certificate/etc.) can begin to help them understand that college is the beginning of their adult life. Then have them create goals for themselves. Suggest they do this for each class, for the semester as a whole, and for the next 5 years of their lives. You should also remind them to revise them as the semester progresses. It is a subtle thing but it helps them to begin to understand that becoming a self-guided learner is the optimal goal. After all, once they complete college, they will still need to continue to build their knowledge base on their own. Holding this type of conversation during the first class session will certainly help our students to begin the semester moving in the right direction and should also improve our student persistence rates.

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.

Foundational or “soft” skills occupy an unusual position in the debate over America’s workforce. Employers say these skills are hard to find, but they are also notoriously hard to define. Soft skills are called crucial and then treated dismissively in the next breath, as if these were abilities any child should have. “Works well with others” is a cliché on a school report card, but businesses grind to a halt when employees can’t meet deadlines, treat customers with respect, or waste time scrambling to properly format a document. Take a look at what employers want in the full report.

Regardless of their credentials, many freshmen doubt that they have the necessary brainpower or social adeptness to succeed in college. This fear of failing hits poor, minority and first-generation college students especially hard. If they flunk an exam, or a professor doesn’t call on them, their fears about whether they belong may well be confirmed. The cycle of doubt becomes self-reinforcing, and students are more likely to drop out. The good news is that this dismal script can be rewritten. Several recent research projects show that, with the right nudge, students can acquire ways of thinking that helps them thrive. Continue reading here.

Have you ever wondered if your students are as concerned about their learning as you are? If you prioritize student learning, you may be the only person in your classroom with that goal. Learning-centered teachers seek to coauthor classroom experiences with their students, whereas students may seek only to be taught passively. How might you inspire your students to share accountability for their learning? These five considerations can help you teach your students to be learning centered, too. Continue reading here.

What will higher education look like in 2025 or 2100? Those are two of the questions the faculty asked recently at Stanford University. They were specifically looking at the student experience and how they imagined it will change. In their own words, "A design team from the Stanford d.school worked with hundreds of perceptive, creative, and generous students, faculty, and administrators over the course of a year to explore this territory." The project culminated in Stanford2025, an online and in-person exhibit on higher education circa 2025, imagined from the perspective of the year 2100. One of the project's leaders, Kelly Schmutte, said, "The world is rapidly changing, and the types of leaders and citizens that we need to be graduating are changing. Our problems are more challenging and ambiguous." Read more here.

Larry Ferlazzo is an educationalist who strongly believes that we should be helping all students become self-regulated learners. In his new book Building a Community of Self-Motivated Learners: Strategies to Help Students Thrive in School and Beyond, he provides research on extrinsic and intrinsic motivation, and describes the four qualities that have been identified as critical to helping students motivate themselves: autonomy, competence, relatedness, and relevance. He says, "A high-quality relationship with a teacher whom they respect is a key element of helping students develop intrinsic motivation." Read more here.

Students who frequently check their grades throughout the semester tend to get better marks than do those who look less often. That’s one of the findings from a new study by Blackboard, a company that sells course-management software to hundreds of colleges. It’s probably one of the deepest data dives ever done on student clicks on college web systems, analyzing aggregate data from 70,000 courses at 927 colleges and universities in North America during the spring 2016 semester. The promise: Big data could lead to insights on how to keep struggling students on track, or at least let professors test their long-held assumptions about student habits. Read more here or listen to the podcast.

Joshua Kim asks, "Is there really a war on lecturing going on across higher ed?  Do learning professionals want to kill the lecture? Read Christine Gross-Loh’s Atlantic piece, Should Colleges Really Eliminate the College Lecture?, and you would be forgiven in thinking that there is and that we do. The anti-lecture cadre is characterized as comparing the traditional lecture to "bloodletting—an outdated practice that has long been in need of radical reform". This story makes for a neat argument. Who has not experienced the power of a transformative lecture?  Who would not support the need for professors to “model the art of argument”? And who is not critical of the tendency of educational pundits and administrators to blindly follow the latest educational fads? Let me be very clear.  There exists no campaign - no organized plot or plan - to eliminate the college lecture.  There is a movement across many schools to improve learning.  The lecture is, and always will be, part of the mix of a rich and varied learning ecosystem." Continue reading here.

Now that you’ve finished assessing your students, it’s time to turn the assessment process around by looking in the mirror. If you limped across the finish line last semester, it may be time to identify some new strategies for self-care. In our “Tending the Teacher” session at the recent Teaching Professor Conference in Washington, D.C., we presented a menu of ideas to help faculty design a balanced and productive work life.  Here are our top tips.

Aubree Evans writes, "Let’s face it, most faculty were good students and always did well in school. For students, having a professor who is adept at learning can be inspiring. But what if academic work comes so naturally to faculty that they have trouble relating to the average student? I’ve worked with several faculty members who fall into this category. “Rose,” a business professor, stands out in my memory. When I suggested that she break her online course into modules to make the weekly tasks more manageable for students, she was baffled. “Everything is in the syllabus!” she responded. She then explained that when she was in college, she began each course by carefully reading the syllabus and organizing the assignments into a schedule that she diligently followed throughout the semester. It didn’t make sense to Rose to repeat that information again in modules. When I suggested that school must have come easily to her, she agreed. However, our university serves many students who don’t have much experience with academic learning strategies that may come naturally to faculty." Continue reading here.

CREATING DYNAMIC LECTURES
Over the last 25 years, traditional lectures have taken a beating often portrayed as bad pedagogy. While some of the criticism is warranted, there are ways you can take your lecture-based learning experience and infuse it with active learning methods that promote student success. That is what the upcoming faculty professional development session is all about on March 17. Come and hear about the latest research, like Linda Nilson's self-regulated learners approach, that you can use to deepen your students recall and learning. The session begins at 3:00 pm and will be held in the Teaching+Learning Center (311 Magnolia Building) at BRCC-Mid City. Register now.

MORE EFFORT CAN LEAD TO BETTER LEARNING
Effort and habit are instrumental to learning and writing, but they are often dimly lit in our grading systems according to Dr. Gary Hafer. He says that light needs to brighten with the help of new research and popular literature that highlight how essential habit, effort, and perseverance are to learning. "I’ve used an effort-aware grading system in my teaching for some time now, a B-grading contract that locks hardworking students into a minimum final grade of B. For grades rising above B, the quality of the writing is the focus (the product), but only for students who fulfill the contract (the process). I’ve become a proponent of the “Contract for B,” first proposed by Peter Elbow, because I like how it encourages students to experiment with their college writing in new and novel ways. As experts in our own disciplines, we can write stipulations of the contract to identify how and what we see prolific writers do in our disciplines. Even habits such as writing daily and talking about their writing in specific ways are tasks that students can achieve no matter their writing proficiency. Moreover, it’s important for students to read in the syllabus that 'any student who works really, really hard can achieve these tasks because they are habits that define a process.'”Continue reading his article here.

WE CAN'T IGNORE STUDENT'S REALITY
Joshua Block's latest post on the Edutopia blog  reminds us to understand where our students have been before we help them to move forward. He writes, "At their best, schools and classrooms affirm the power of community and what it means to be human. Teaching is complex work, and the challenges make it all too easy for teachers to lose focus of a greater vision for students and for society. Celebrating the potential of young people and the power of democratic education also means acknowledging and understanding the different ways that our society falls short." Continue reading his post here.

GIVERS OF ALL KNOWLEDGE NO MORE
Shana Oliver has done an exceptional job of pulling together all of the best ideas that have emerged from the research about faculty and student engagement. The article provides a nice concise list of ten ways you can use to engage under-performing students. She writes, "What is the intended goal of the lesson? Remember, there is one essential question per lesson, and students must be able to answer this question by the end of the lesson. With essential questions, teachers really have to be intentional about what they want the students to be able to do, and it has to be at the highest-level of learning. The students have to be able to analyze and apply; they cannot just answer the question with a yes or no. It has to be an extended response. An essential question must be "multi-skill" in order for it to be a good one." To read the rest of the article, click here.

ADOPT A BEAR TIPS
If Santa Monica College had relied solely on data analytics to predict whether Jaime J. would succeed, the picture would have looked bleak. He was, after all, a financially struggling, first-generation Hispanic student who was juggling a job with classes. His math skills were shaky. But there was more to the picture than that. Using a 30-minute online assessment that focuses on noncognitive skills, advisers at the two-year institution in Southern California learned that Jaime was also a conscientious student with good study habits who had long dreamed of becoming a computer engineer. The college assigned him a success coach (the college’s dean of counseling and retention), who met with Jaime weekly to keep him motivated. Continue reading.

GRADING IS ABOUT LEARNING
When students talk about the grades we’ve “given” them, we are quick to point out that we don’t “give” grades, students “earn” them. And that’s correct. It’s what the student does that determines the grade. But that statement sort of implies that we don’t have much of a role in the process—that we’re simply executing what the grading policy prescribes. We shouldn’t let that response cloud our thinking. Who sets up the course grading policy? Who controls it? Who has the power to change it or to refuse to change it? It’s these policies that involve us up to our eyeballs. Continue reading.

PLANNING FOR COLLEGE CLOSURES
The weather is wreaking havoc with our academic calendar this spring semester. We will not be holding classes on Tuesday, January 28 due to icy (and possibly snowy) conditions which also caused us to cancel classes on Friday, January 24. Losing one class time may not be too disruptive but two days lost may be causing you some stress. We suggest you look over the missed lessons and decide what is the most important information that students will need for future learning. When you do get back to class, focus on that and perhaps post videos or fact sheets about the other material you had planned to teach during those class meetings. In addition, you can certainly use your Blackboard page to assign readings, hold virtual office hours or give an online quiz. You could even have an online discussion with your students using Blackboard. This assumes that all of your students will have access to the web and that our electricity will withstand the freezing temperatures. We recommend that, at minimum, you remind students of important upcoming dates and deadlines now by posting this information on your Blackboard page and sending an email blast to your classes. This will allow you to continue to move forward with student learning despite the weather interruptions. By the way, the last day to add or drop classes has been extended to January 31 because of the weather disruptions.

CELEBRATE ENGAGEMENT DAY

We celebrated engagement at BRCC today and captured some pictures from classrooms and support Division of Innovative Learning and Academic Support staff also wore their t-shirts to celebrate engagement at BRCC. Research shows that using engagement techniques early and often is one of the best ways to improve your class participation and retention rates. As Dr. Mary Clement Keep Calm and Be Engaged t-shirts on today. All of the members of the pointed out on BRCC Faculty Development Day, engagement also improves your student ratings. Faculty Focus provides us with a nice overview of engagement practices and I want to mention two here. First, recognize that teaching and teachers are central to engagement. Much research places teachers at the heart of engagement. For example, one study found that “if the teacher is perceived to be approachable, well prepared, and sensitive to student needs, students are committed to work harder, get more out of the session, and are more willing to express their opinion.” We continue to promote active learning as the preferred delivery method for your teaching. The engagement research provides another opportunity to create self-directed learners. There is no agreement in the research literature as to what motivates learners to engage, but the

offices around the Mid City Campus. You may have seen some of our faculty engagement experts with their

dominant view is that students engage when they act as their own learning agents working to achieve goals meaningful to them. This means that what students believe about themselves as learners is very important. They must believe they can learn, including that they can overcome and learn from failure. Giving students some control over learning processes helps develop this confidence and commitment to learning. Remember to Keep Calm and Be Engaged and sign up as a follower of the Teaching+Learning Center's twitter site @brcctlc to receive the latest news.