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.

WHAT SHOULD ACADEMIC ADVISING LOOK LIKE AT BRCC
Jeffrey Selingo's article on academic advising lists many of the same issues we are currently experiencing. In his article, he notes that academic advising "has always been one of those intractable problems on college campuses. Students rarely think about it until that frantic moment when they need someone to sign the registration form for next semester's classes. Only 4 of 10 students consider counselors their primary source of advice regarding academic plans, according to the National Survey of Student Engagement, an annual poll of freshmen and seniors. A third of freshmen turn to friends or family. One in 10 students never even meet with an academic counselor." Please remember to join us tomorrow at 1:00 pm in the Teaching+Learning Center as we continue with our discussion on creating an academic advising program of excellence.

CAN YOU HOLD THAT IDEA FOR A MINUTE
Dr. Maryellen Weimer's latest blog post offers some solid assistance for those who like to use classroom discussion. She writes, "The classroom discussion is going pretty well. Students are offering some good comments and more than one hand is in the air. Then a student makes a really excellent observation that opens up a whole avenue of relevant possibilities. You follow-up by calling on a student whose hand has been in the air for some time. Her comment is fine, but it’s totally unrelated to the previous comment. How do you get students to respond to each other’s comments? How do you get student comments to build on a key topic so that it becomes more like a real discussion?"

DEVELOPMENTAL EDUCATION IS AN OPPORTUNITY
Dr. Hunter Boylan's editorial on community colleges and remedial education strikes a few familiar chords. He writes, "Members of the professional community in developmental education agree with many studies suggesting that simply placing students in remedial courses is an inadequate response to the problems of underpreparedness among entering college students. They would further tend to agree that the current process of identifying and placing underprepared students is flawed and that the entire process of assessing, advising and teaching them needs reform. But if there is a 'solution' to the remediation education 'problem,' it is vastly more complex than many reform advocates and most policy makers acknowledge. It will require that community colleges change the way they do remediation. It will also require that they address non-academic issues that may prevent students from succeeding, improve the quality of instruction at all levels, revise financial aid policies, provide better advising to students at risk, integrate instruction and support services, teach college success skills, invest in professional development and do all of these things in a systematic manner integrated into the mainstream of the institution."