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 disciplines and experienced with SoTL. The mentors assisted the faculty researchers in both thinking through the process and articulating their thoughts in writing. The mentors worked in pairs, each pair being assigned either the math faculty researchers or the English faculty researchers. The guided reflections addressed faculty interpretation and understanding about the:

• Description of Course, including a description of prerequisite knowledge, course content, students, and their satisfaction and frustration with the selected developmental course;
• Teaching Methods, including a description of their class organization, assessments, assignments, and intended outcomes;
• Analysis of Student Learning, including examples and their analysis of three levels of student performance; and
• Planned Changes, including a description of what the faculty member plans to do differently as a result of their analysis of student performance.

Responses to each faculty researcher’s reflections were posted to an electronic portfolio. Faculty reflections and responses are available here.

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 only useful for ESL teachers but as a model of going public with classroom research.

The evidence covers many different kinds of methods for gathering student performance data, such as through pre/post data.

Some of her evidence is based on student attitudes and perspectives.

One of the consequences of her classroom research is the ways that she discovers “complicating evidence” from her students. One example of this is her analysis of perforamance and atittudes related to group work, where she discovered in part that some students who performed better through group work actually prefered working alone.

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 education in 11 California community colleges. This work involves campuses in sustained, reflective, evidence-based ways to improve the teaching and learning of underprepared students. A number of the SPECC reports, essays, tools, and products from this three-year project are available at: http://www.carnegiefoundation.org/previous-work/undergraduate-education#specc

From Special Occasion to Regular Work

For the past several years the Carnegie Foundation has been working with a group of California community colleges to improve student success in pre-collegiate math and English. One of the themes that has emerged as central in this effort—which we call Strengthening Pre-collegiate Education in Community Colleges, or SPECC—is the need for different ways to think about and conduct professional development.

Part of what needs to be different is language. Though most educators aspire to be life-long learners and to improve in the various facets of their professional work, being “developed” is not an altogether appealing prospect. For starters, it sounds like something that happens to you; even worse, there’s a sense that something’s broken and needs to be fixed. In contrast, many of the SPECC sites have adopted the language of “faculty inquiry,” pointing toward a process that begins with the questions that good, thoughtful teachers have, and need to understand more fully, about their own students’ learning. In this spirit, SPECC campuses have created Faculty Inquiry Groups (FIGs) that illustrate powerful professional growth and learning characterized by three key principles.

First, opportunities for teachers to grow and develop must be sustained over time. Professional development often takes the form of one-time workshops and presentations by outside speakers that may or may not be related to the campus’s goals for student learning. SPECC participants have been energetic in pointing out the limitations of this model. “We believe that the one-hour, lunch-time faculty development workshop has little impact on the transformation of faculty attitudes and behavior,” one campus team reported. In contrast, they noted that their work in the Carnegie project “has taught us that if we are serious about making radical changes to the way we deliver instruction, we must work intensively with a select group of faculty over an extended period of time.” Some FIGs established in SPECC have continued for more than a year now.

A second principle is the importance of collaboration. 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. Thus, one of the most important moves a campus can make is to create occasions for educators to talk, to find colleagues, to be part of a community of practice. As an administrator at Merced College remarked during a SPECC site visit, “Good things happen when teachers talk.”

Of course talk is not enough, and not all talk is created equal. With this in mind, some campuses have worked their way toward carefully structured routines and protocols for collaboration. At Los Medanos College, for instance, a group of English instructors organized themselves as a kind of graduate seminar, with clear tasks in preparation for each meeting and an emphasis on developing new tools and materials—course assignments, for instance, and assessment instruments. At City College of San Francisco, several faculty groups employ a carefully structured process of classroom observation, which is then grist for discussion during their meetings.

The third defining feature is a focus on evidence about student learning. SPECC campuses have served as laboratories for exploring how to bring different kinds and levels of evidence more effectively to bear on the improvement of teaching and learning.

Most important, certainly, is information at the classroom level, generated through the regular routines of teaching and learning: student performance on exams, projects, papers, problem sets, office consultations, and grades. This kind of information is at the heart of powerful feedback loops. But an important lesson of SPECC’s work is the power of viewing classroom data through the lens of larger institutional trends and patterns. Most campuses have a good deal of such information: data about student demographics, enrollment, retention, and the like. What’s needed are occasions to raise questions that fall into what might be described as the “missing middle”—the gap between information from individual classrooms and institutional data in the form of big-picture, aggregate trends and patterns. The power of focusing between and connecting these two is nicely illustrated by a story from Los Medanos College where the Developmental Education Committee realized that their efforts to reshape curriculum and pedagogy needed to be informed by evidence faculty members did not have, including—and especially—patterns of student course taking and success beyond the level of individual courses. The Committee approached the Office of Institutional Research, and the two groups worked together to develop a data-gathering plan that would address the questions faculty wanted to understand more fully. The result was a report tracking students from pre-collegiate courses in English and math into the first level of transfer English and math courses. This was not the kind of information Institutional Research staff members were in the habit of preparing; nor was it a perspective that faculty were accustomed to seeing. But it turned out to provide a powerful rationale for redoubling efforts that keep students moving through the developmental sequence without stopping out.

Fortunately, the three principles proposed here are becoming increasingly commonplace; some readers will recognize them from Carnegie’s work on the scholarship of teaching and learning. But it’s worth remembering that this different way of thinking about professional development really is different—maybe even radical—predicated as it is on an understanding of teaching not as a matter of individual expertise employed in the privacy of one’s own classroom but as a set of practices that have and need a social and organizational context. Seen through this lens, “professional development” should not be a separate or special occasion but an integral feature of the way educators do their work everyday. What matters in such work is who talks with whom, how often, with what information in the picture, and around what shared questions, processes, and goals. These turn out to be hard things to change, which is why having new models—like the ones developed on the SPECC campuses—is so important.

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 have become part of who we are and how we see the world. In this way literacy and “numeracy” have become automatic and essentially invisible to us, so second-nature that we don’t really understand how someone could have trouble learning something so simple.

But for a significant group of college students these seemingly simple skills are opaque. Although the problem is widespread throughout higher education, it is especially vexing in community colleges. According to data from the Education Commission of the States, 76 percent of all institutions that enroll freshmen offer at least one remedial reading, writing or mathematics course, and these classes are offered at 98 percent of community colleges. When these students arrive on campus, they take a battery of tests—often without realizing that these assessments will seriously affect which classes they are allowed to take. The results place large numbers of first-time students (according to information on the American Association of Community Colleges’ Web site, up to 80 percent) in English and mathematics classes that are below—sometimes way below—college level. Facing a long series of “catch-up” courses, only a small percentage of these students ever make it to college-level work and thus to the opportunities that come with higher education.

Some background about pre-collegiate education at college may be useful here: Originally such programs were designed to reacquaint returning adults with skills that had become rusty over time; what was needed was a “refresher” where they could relearn things they had previously learned in high school. Today, pre-collegiate courses are more likely to be populated by students recently out of high school where, in fact, they never mastered these essential skills of English and math. Many of these students have had years of negative experiences with school and need courses in which they can, in effect, more successfully learn the content and learn to be students. Over the years, the jargon for such courses has changed: from remedial, to basic skills, developmental education, and pre-collegiate education.

What has not changed much is the teaching. The apparent simplicity of the skills in question seems to provoke a simplistic pedagogy: if students don’t understand it, say it louder, say it slower! Too often, that is, basic skills courses are taught through drill and memorization of rules. What’s missing is any sign of intellectual vitality and engagement, the very things that draw many teachers into their academic fields.

This kind of pedagogy presents (at least) two problems. One is boredom. Repetition and practice are good things, but memorization and drill without a connection to big ideas can frustrate students and teachers both. One doesn’t become a writer or reader only by learning grammatical rules, and memorizing a mathematical formula does not alone lead to the kinds of quantitative literacy that is needed today. More to the point, this kind of mind-numbing approach is not necessary. Even at the most fundamental levels of English and mathematics, intellectually engaging problems and issues exist. With a balance of challenge and support, students can engage in lively, authentic debate and intellectual exchange.

But the second problem is the deeper one: these so-called “basic skills” are not, in fact, so basic or simple. As the research on literacy shows, the reading process that most of us take so much for granted is highly complex. As we “decode” a text, we bring to bear a vast reservoir of linguistic and cultural knowledge, connecting new ideas with old ones, figuring out words we may not know, actively questioning what we read as we read it, trying out and refining ideas and conclusions as we read.

The long-term solution to the problem of under-preparation and student failure must be systemic, addressing alignment of curriculum and assessment across the educational sectors. Students who completed their high school mathematics requirements in tenth grade, for example, may not have seen a math problem for two years before taking a college placement test. In that time, all Xs and Ys may have vanished from their minds. Students in high school English classes may focus on literature, but in college they are assessed on composition and rhetoric.

Even as a long-term solution is required, however, the pre-collegiate classroom needs attention now. A different and better way to think about teaching “basic skills” depends on remembering what is actually entailed in successful reading, writing and problem solving—and making the complexity of those processes visible for students so that they can develop strategies for improvement. This means being explicit with students about the assumptions and processes that have become automatic for most of us. It means creating a learning environment where students learn about themselves as learners and develop strategies for success.

And of course it means that leadership is needed. While an individual faculty member can choose to make these approaches characteristic of her classroom—and the Carnegie Foundation is lucky enough to be working with some of these incredibly thoughtful faculty members—the chances of student success greatly increase when campus leaders make pre-collegiate education a campus-wide priority: when the administration takes pride in these successes, when faculty work together to create challenging pre-collegiate programs that are more than a collection of courses. Others on campus have important roles to contribute to student success, as well: tutors, counselors, institutional researchers and student peers.

The ideal of college access for all is essential to the mission of community colleges. The challenge is turning it into success. If this mission is to be real and not just a pipedream, pre-collegiate programs must be a pipeline where students who have not thrived in their K-12 educational experiences can learn and succeed.

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 for educators to talk, to find colleagues, to be part of a community of practice.

Of course talk is not enough, and not all talk is created equal. Skeptics worry that FIGs may produce energetic conversation but no real advance in knowledge or improvement in practice. One external reviewer of SPECC wondered if the open exchange encouraged in FIGs might reinforce misguided notions about, say, the capacity of certain groups of students to succeed.

Thus, it is important to stress that collaboration is not “just talk.” Indeed, many of the campuses have worked their way toward FIGs with carefully structured routines and protocols for collaboration. The English group at Los Medanos, for instance, operates as a kind of graduate seminar, with clear tasks and homework for each meeting and an emphasis on developing new understandings and products-course assignments, for instance, and assessment instruments. At Glendale Community College, FIGs employed by the math department are dedicated to the design and analysis of common final exams, and at Cerritos College one focus has been on identifying explicit student learning outcomes. At City College of San Francisco, several FIGs now organize themselves around a carefully structured process of classroom observation, which is then grist for discussion during their meetings. One might in fact observe that FIGs benefit from the same principles that operate in effective developmental classrooms: high structure, high expectations, intense engagement, intentionality, and inquiry. Teachers are developmental learners as well.

Adapted from Basic Skills for Complex Lives: Designing for Learning in the Community College. Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. 2008. Strengthening Pre-Collegiate Education in the Community Colleges.

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) on the overall test and on subtopics.

The faculty as a whole discuss topical areas in which students appear to be learning well and those they are still struggling with. Individual instructors examine the performance on the test of their own students in various ways that reveal important aspects of their teaching practice and grading standards. For example, instructors whose A and B students do relatively poorly on the final examination must ask themselves whether their standards are too lax. Instructors whose C students perform well on the test must ask themselves if their standards are unrealistically high. The entire project stimulates faculty discussion and reflection in ways that did not occur before.

Additionally, as participants in this process testify, the process of developing and coming to consensus on an assessment framework, along with the development of exercises and a scoring rubric, all tend to get faculty on the same page about what is important for students to know and be able to do. Instructors who entertain idiosyncratic notions about grading or essential content must defend their ideas to their colleagues in an open forum where departmental objectives and disciplinary considerations are the reference standards. Glendale’s experience with the common examination nicely illustrates its power to encourage honest discussion about the appropriate weight to be given to effort over outcome, to growth over absolute level of achievement, to test performance over class participation-crucial considerations in a commitment, like SPECC’s, to documenting improvement over time.

Yet Glendale enjoys an additional benefit that in its long-term effects may prove to be more important than all the rest. It is exemplified in how the math faculty use test results in professional development. Noting that some instructors’ students repeatedly performed well above average on the examinations or on particular topical areas, the department began a program in which faculty observe these highly effective instructors in action. In this way, the Glendale experience points to another important lesson about impact: while improvements in student learning are the bottom line, they are often wrapped up in other kinds of impact that are hard to untangle. Indeed, the experience at Glendale and many other SPECC campuses suggests that faculty learning may be the single most important variable in improving student learning. In today’s accountability culture, this is a point that can get left behind, and it is worth hammering home. Student learning matters; of course one wants to see an upward trajectory in student success. But faculty learning matters as well. And on a healthy campus, the two work together. (41)

Adapted from Basic Skills for Complex Lives: Designing for Learning in the Community College. Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. 2008. Strengthening Pre-Collegiate Education in the Community Colleges.

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 for a comparative perspective. For instance, West Hills College administers the Community College Survey of Student Engagement (CCSSE). Students participating in learning communities who were queried as part of the 2007 CCSSE study reported higher levels of engagement than did the overall college sample (West Hills College, SPECC Report, 2008, p. 6).

Additionally, FIGs can be an occasion for faculty to raise questions that fall into what might be described as the “missing middle”-the gap between information from individual classrooms and institutional-level data in the form of big-picture, aggregate trends and patterns. The power of focusing between (and connecting) these two is nicely illustrated by a story from Los Medanos College where the Developmental Education Committee realized that their efforts to reshape curriculum and pedagogy needed to be informed by evidence faculty members did not have, including and especially patterns of student course taking and success beyond the level of individual courses. The Committee approached the Office of Institutional Research, and the two groups worked together to develop a data-gathering plan that would address the questions faculty wanted to understand more fully. The result was a report tracking students from the capstone pre-collegiate courses in English and math into the first level of transfer English and math courses (Los Medanos College, SPECC Report, 2006, p. 8). This was not the kind of information Institutional Research staff members were in the habit of preparing; nor was it a perspective that faculty were accustomed to seeing. But it turned out to be a powerful impetus for attention to intensity and intentionality. As noted earlier in this report, the Institutional Research data gave faculty “a convincing rationale” to take measures that keep students moving through the developmental sequence without stopping out.

At Los Medanos College, mathematics faculty worked with institutional researchers to track the progress of students who took and passed elementary algebra. “Of those who completed elementary algebra but waited to enroll in intermediate algebra, only 25 percent successfully completed a transfer-level math course within three years,” reports Myra Snell, a faculty member in math at Los Medanos. “Of those who went directly to the next level, 47 percent completed a transfer course in the three year period.” As it turns out, the same pattern holds in the English department, where the numbers are 12 and 41 percent, respectively. Snell concludes, “This prompted a much greater sense of urgency about the need to counsel students about continuing in the developmental math sequence without stopping out. It also provided a convincing rationale for encouraging faculty to give up precious class time to do activities that connect students to campus resources like the career center and academic counseling. We cannot take for granted that students who successfully complete our courses will persist” (Snell, 2008). (Basic Skills, 18)

Additionally, the collaboration between faculty and Institutional Research points to the value FIGs can add as sites where educators (not only faculty, that is, but a wider group of individuals, full-time and part-time, whose work contributes to student success) can engage together with the richest and most useful range of information and evidence.

Adapted from Basic Skills for Complex Lives: Designing for Learning in the Community College. Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. 2008. Strengthening Pre-Collegiate Education in the Community Colleges.

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 students are getting the preparation they need. [Some] mathematics programs at SPECC colleges have been experimenting with common exam questions among different sections of a course, or–as the mathematics department at Glendale Community Collge has been doing in pre-collegiate algebra since 2000–administering a completely common final examination. In the case of Glendale, the effort has created opportunity for inquiry both in creating the exam and studying the results. As Carnegie senior scholar Lloyd Bond notes,

the very process of developing and coming to consensus on an assessment framework, along with the deveopment of exercises and a scoring rubric, all tend to get faculty on the same page about what is important for students to know and be able to do. (Lloyd Bond, “The Case for Common Examinations,” 2007)

When the scores scores are in for the semester, individuals can see how their students are doing in comparison to others. And, because the scores are also disaggregated by item (for example, negative exponents, complex fractions, or geometry word problems on the elementary algebra exam), the group can look at the combined results over the years to see which topics are still causing students trouble, and where they are doing better. “The entire project,” Bond concludes “stimulates faculty discussion and reflection in ways that did not occur before” (2007).

Adapted from Mary Taylor Huber, The Promise of Faculty Inquiry for Teaching and Learning Basic Skills. A Report from the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching.

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 struggle with teaching them

2. Too much to cover and too much overlapping review with Beginning Algebra

3. New concepts presented in the last chapters are rushed through and inadequately covered

4. It’s difficult to find time to show students real-word applicability.

Faculty inquiry provides instructors with an opportunity to come together on a regular basis to reflect, discuss, write, and research ways to help them learn how to help their students succeed.

Adapted from Yu-Chung Chang (Pasadena), “No Longer Lost in Translation: How Yu-Chung Helps Her Students Understand (and Love) Word Problems”