Using Faculty Portfolios in a Faculty Inquiry Group

January 11, 2009

Faculty Inquiry at Cerritos College (Frank Mixson and Jan Connal) As part of the Cerritos College Faculty Inquiry project (SPECC), participating faculty began a process of thinking deeply about their teaching practices within a selected developmental class. Throughout the semester, participating faculty researchers were mentored in a sequence of guided reflections by faculty outside their […]

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Developing Questions, Faculty Inquiry Groups (FIGs), Faculty Portfolios | Comments Off

Classroom Research (“Some Complicating Evidence”)

January 11, 2009

adapted from, “Asking Their Own Questions: Some ESL Students Take Chare of Their Reading,” Annie Agard (Laney College) In this presentation, Annie Agard presents a whole range of evidence gathered from her ESL classes. In this PowerPoint presentation, Agard shares many different findings from her classroom research on her ESL. class. The evidence is not […]

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Faculty Inquiry Groups (FIGs), Faculty Portfolios, Performance Assessment, Pre/post Testing, Reading, Surveys, Uncategorized | Comments Off

From Special Occasion to Regular Work

January 11, 2009

A Carnegie Perspectives repost By Pat Hutchings The author of this month’s Carnegie Perspectives is Pat Hutchings. Pat is Carnegie’s vice president, and among her many responsibilities is her deep involvement in Strengthening Pre-collegiate Education in Community Colleges (SPECC), a joint initiative of Carnegie and The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation to address basic skills […]

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Carnegie Perspectives, Faculty Inquiry Groups (FIGs) | Comments Off

Pipeline or Pipedream: Another Way to Think about Basic Skills

January 11, 2009

A Carnegie Perspectives repost By Rose Asera If I asked you—as an educated adult—what you remember about learning to read or to do basic arithmetic, you might recall some fleeting images: being read to by a parent or studying a book with big letters and pictures at your school desk. But by now these skills […]

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FIGs: The Importance of Collaboration

November 14, 2008

Faculty Inquiry Groups (FIGs) treat professional development as a collaborative enterprise. One of the most persistent impediments to educational improvement is that teachers have-because institutions provide-so few purposeful, constructive occasions for sharing what they know and do with one another. Thus, one of the most important moves a campus can make is to create occasions […]

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Faculty Inquiry Groups (FIGs), Uncategorized | Comments Off

Common Exams as Prompts for Improvement

November 14, 2008

Glendale Community College’s mathematics program, in 2000, instituted a common final examination for all sections of pre-collegiate algebra. The department produces tabularized information after each examination in order to show, among other things, the dropout rate and mean GPA for each class, as well as the performance of each class (properly coded to ensure anonymity) […]

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Using Institutional Data to Guide Inquiry

November 14, 2008

What has also become clear through SPECC’s exploration of FIGs is the power of viewing classroom data through the lens of larger trends and patterns. Most campuses have a good deal of information available at the institutional level: data about student demographics, enrollment, retention, and the like. And some institutions seek out information that allows […]

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Faculty Inquiry Groups (FIGs), Institutional Data, Uncategorized | Comments Off

Common Exam as Inquiry

November 13, 2008

While one would think that mathematics would be less susceptible to the problem of coordination and grade variability (it is, afte all, more “objective” than reading and composition), that turns out not to be the case. Math teachers also vary in how they teach and how they grade, creating similar concerns about whether all their […]

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Faculty Inquiry Groups

October 14, 2008

Yu-Chung Chang (Pasadena), “No Longer Lost in Translation: How Yu-Chung Helps Her Students Understand (and Love) Word Problems” Yu-Chung says: I started a faculty Inquiry Group (FIG) to investigate why so many math faculty find Intermediate Algebra onerous to teach. The FIG discovered that… 1. Word problems are hard: Students avoid doing them and teachers […]

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Developing Questions, Faculty Inquiry Groups (FIGs) | Comments Off