A Carnegie Perspectives repost

By Molly Breen

Every year hundreds of thousands of students begin their higher education in community colleges. Of course, these institutions also bring in large numbers of new faculty. For both groups, students and faculty alike, there are plenty of challenges to go around.

Imagine yourself in the shoes of a newly hired instructor at a community college. If you’re lucky, you’ve landed a full-time position, but more likely you’re working as an adjunct, teaching on one campus in the morning and another in the afternoon. You put in years writing an English thesis on, say, spiritual autobiography in the 18th century, or a math thesis on primal decomposition in modules and lattice modules, only to find yourself teaching basic literacy or numeracy skills in a class three levels below the first course in the transfer sequence. You don’t object to teaching students basic skills; in fact, you find it fascinating. You’ve just never had so much as a day of training on the subject. So what do you do?

Faculty members at California community colleges have been asking that question in large numbers lately, spurred on by numerous reports—from the Academic Senate, from the Hewlett Foundation, from the Chancellor’s office—that all point to the urgency around basic skills education. They have asked it of themselves, certainly, in private moments of bafflement or frustration, but as part of the Carnegie project Strengthening Pre-collegiate Education in Community Colleges (SPECC), they’ve also asked it of each other, transforming the question from “What do I do?” to “What do we do?”

Their work together has led to a number of improvements in teaching basic skills, including the innovative pairing of classes through learning communities and experiments with high-intensity teaching formats, particularly in math. But their initial questions have also led to further, sharper questions: Why do so many of my students earning a C or higher wind up dropping the class? What makes word problems so difficult for so many math students? How much of the homework that I assign do my students actually read? What is going on in my student’s head when he tackles a new equation? Is what I’m doing even working?

The faculty at work on the 11 SPECC campuses have tackled these questions through a variety of methods: observing each others’ classes; creating common finals and assessment methods; devising pre- and post- tests as a way of pinning down desired student learning outcomes; videotaping student “think-alouds” in mathematics; adapting metacognitive or “intentional” reading strategies to math and ESL classrooms, and many more.

Beyond sharing the results of these pedagogical experiments with each other, some faculty have taken the extra step of documenting their work on the web. These websites are rich with data. In one, the instructor posts the results of her department’s common algebra final and reflects on her students’ performance. Another site includes a video of four beginning ESL students, with four native languages between them, working together to unpack a poem in English. Indeed, as well as affording teachers the chance to cringe at their wardrobe choices on the day of filming, video allows instructors to capture student learning in all its compelling complexity, from a single student explaining where he gets stuck on a word problem to an entire class speculating on why an anonymous student from a previous semester had dropped out and what lessons they can take from that experience to increase their own chances of success.

These multimedia sites have been collected in the SPECC Windows on Learning Gallery. The sites can be used in a variety of ways: as archives of teaching and research materials; as hands-on resources for teachers who can download materials and study their implementation in an actual classroom; and as tools for professional development. A number of faculty presented their sites at the annual Strengthening Student Success conference held in San Jose, California in October, among other venues, and have used their sites to forge connections with community college instructors across the country doing similar research and exploring similar formats for making their work visible. An especially nice feature of these sites is that they preserve the trace of both teaching and inquiry, so that the complicated process of properly identifying a problem of learning; designing an intervention to address it; and evaluating the success of the intervention becomes clear.

Through this kind of documentation and exchange questions about teaching that once might have lead merely to migraines—or to a growing sense of isolation and disillusionment—lead to discussion, research, experimentation, data collection and further inquiry. All of these are processes that can be recorded and shared, and it is this act of recording, of making teaching visible, that creates a crucial difference between the sort of teaching that Carnegie President Lee Shulman has described as “evaporating at room temperature” and a more durable alternative. The more visible teaching becomes, and the more durable its best practices, the better for students.

And the better, certainly, for that new hire tackling the risks and rewards of teaching basic skills for the first time.

Students approach the math textbook as little more than an (extremely expensive) problem set, expecting to get all of the information they need to prepare for tests simply by attending lecture. A typical college math course requires a great deal of homework, and students are expected to spend many hours outside of class studying. When students lack the ability to use their textbook as a learning tool, the results — low test scores and poor retention and success rates — can be frustrating for students and teachers alike.

In an effort to turn back this wave of despair, a trio of math professors at College of the Desert has incorporated the idea of outlining math textbooks into their courses. By getting students in the habit of really using their textbooks, outlining helps them gain a deeper knowledge of the material that, in turn, enables them to make their own connections between ideas. From passive listeners, students become independent and active learners.

[Read about their classroom approach]

One of the ways the explored and then captured evidence of the effectiveness of the approach was through student interviews. As part of the faculty case study on the Windows on Learning site, students talk about the effectiveness of the “outlinging mathematics” approach. Video capture of student interviews can be a powerful way to gather information and to make a certain kind of evidence visible to colleagues.

[View the video clips of student interviews]

Adapted from Laura Graff, Dustin Culhan, and Felix Marhuenda-Donate, “Outlining Mathematics: Transforming Student Groaning into Student Learning”

From Windows on Learning: Laura Graff, Dustin Culhan, and Felix Marhuenda-Donate, “Outlining Mathematics: Transforming Student Groaning into Student Learning”

I have always thought a large problem in math and science education is reading. Students are never taught how to read technical textbooks. I knew that somewhere along the way I had mastered this skill, but still could not identify precisely what the skill was. I attended [a workshop on reading offered through the Strategic Learning Initiative (WestEd)]….

During the week I learned that I am an “expert reader” in mathematics. This means I have the knowledge and history that allows me to read math. I was taught to participate in meta-cognitive exercises, exercises that forced me to think about my thinking while I read. I became supersaturated with tools and ideas. I was also cynical, for while all the ideas were great, I could not see incorporating them into my already full curriculum.

How would I incorporate the ideas from Reading Apprenticeship without compromising my class and homework time? I decided to assign the outlines to “at risk” students – those with scores below 75 percent.

I was at first amazed that the idea of outlines was considered innovative. However, as we used inquiry and analyzed student outcomes, we were amazed at the positive results. When we videotaped students this summer talking about the effect the outlines had on them, it was one of those huge “paydays,” where you realize you have made a difference in students’ lives and learning.

Adapted from Laura Graff, Dustin Culhan, and Felix Marhuenda-Donate, “Outlining Mathematics: Transforming Student Groaning into Student Learning”

Jose thinks aloud: Click here to view this video of a student working through a math problem Pasadena City College.

Think alouds are ways of getting a transparent glimpse of what students are thinking when they are trying to learn. Think-alouds prompt students to verbalize their thoughts as they solve a problem, case study, or interpret an important text. The focus in the think-aloud is to gain access to student processes when working on an important topic of the course, central to the discipline, not necessarily whether or not they successfully complete the task.

This think aloud from Jose comes from a case study conducted at Pasadena City College, called “How Jay Got His Groove Back.” In this project, Professor Jay Cho and his colleagues conducted think aloud with their students that provided them valuable insight into where student thinking stalls in working a math problem. An especially interesting insight was how Jose’s problems in working the problem were not just a matter of math operations (totaling two negative numbers) but also of attitude and habit of mind (how to respond to being wrong and having a method for checking each step.)

Read more about Jay Cho and his colleagues work with think alouds in their Windows on Learning case study.

REFLECTION PROMPT: Whether or not this particular think aloud seems relevant to your setting, can you imagine a way that you might make use of think alouds?

Once you have gathered evidence and data, it is sometimes a challenge to make sense of what you are seeing. Often, student learning evidence can add to complexity or confusion by giving you too much data; or it can be difficult to interpret in part because the reasons for student confusion might be opaque or contradictory.

In some cases, faculty look at evidence of student learning and try to make sense of separate elements or difficulties. In this example, Jay Cho, of Pasadena Community College, uses a voice over track on video a student think aloud to reveal his response to each dimension of student difficulty, ranging from procedural (helping students with how to add negative numbers) to attitudinal (helping students learn to work backwards from wrong answers and not lose confidence).

Sometimes the initial evidence you gather is not sufficient to make enough sense to take a next step. For example, after an initial analysis of her student performance data, Katie Hearn (Chabot College) felt the need to conduct student interviews in order to make the transition from her gradebook data–which revealed that 51% of her students who did not complete the course had received at least a passing grade on a major assignment–to a better understanding of the reasons and causes. This then enabled her to take a further step from descriptive cases to a more fully developed framework for understanding the problem.

REFLECTION PROMPT: If you have gathered evidence as part of an inquiry project, share your own strategies for making sense of the evidence? What puzzled you? What worked well? Did you share with colleagues? Devise additional ways to contextualize or flesh out the evidence you had?

Think-alouds prompt students to verbalize their thoughts as they solve a problem, case study, or interpret an important text. The focus in the think-aloud is to gain access to student processes when working on an important topic of the course, central to the discipline, not necessarily whether or not they successfully complete the task. Several case studies in the SPECC project make use of think alouds. For example:

Pasadena City College (Math)

“Jay wanted to learn more about how his students learn, so he chose 3 of his students to participate in a think aloud. Then, Jay asked 5 of his colleagues to complete a survey, view and respond to the video-taped think alouds, and complete another survey.”

Glendale Community College (English)

“In watching our students think through exercise sets, we can ‘map’ or ‘make visible’ their learning processes, which can then help us refine our instructional practices to address specific needs.”

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Following the path of the student as they work through a problem yields insight into the types of questions he or she asks, the train of thought, an ability to make connections to other course concepts, difficulties or challenges he or she encounters, and his or her use of prior knowledge.

Throughout this Toolkit there are numerous pointers to resources and case studies related to using Think Alouds and student learning. Use the categories or tags to navigate.

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An excellent tutorial on the use of think alouds to make student thinking visible (as part of the development of faculty inquiry reseach plan) is available here, from the University of Wisconsin, La Crosse.