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Professional Development

Faculty Experiential Learning Institute

Posted on by teaching-and-learning

Hello,

The Basic Skills Initiative committee would like to invite you to a unique professional development opportunity at Berkeley City College, The Faculty Experiential Learning Institute (FELI).

Dates:
Monday, June 7th – Friday, June 11th, 9 am – 5 pm. Food provided.

Location:
Berkeley City College, Teaching and Learning Center

Compensation: $350 (qualifying participants include select BCC faculty and staff)

Who:
BCC faculty and staff who work with basic skills students, especially in key “gateway” classes.

If you are interested, please apply by Friday, May 7th, 5 pm by clicking on this link:

http://forms.my-ace.org/bcc

Questions: Please contact Chris Lebo-Planas at aleboplanas@peralta.edu

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Why we feel this is important:
At BCC, the Basic Skills Initiative committee has taken the lead in identifying best practices for our educationally disadvantaged students – those assessing below college readiness in English and Math. We have found that students who come in at basic skills level need to learn or relearn the life skills necessary to access knowledge in the college culture. For the past two years, BCC has been using curriculum from the Academy of College Excellence (ACE, formerly the Digital Bridge Academy). Students who have experienced this curriculum have:
· shown multi-semester persistence;
· completed transfer-level classes sooner than their peers;
· become diligent, focused agents of their own change;
· taken charge of their own educational goals.

At BCC, PERSIST (Personal Initiative to Social Transformation) closely models the ACE curriculum, and the philosophy that positive social change can only happen with true access to higher education.

What Is It?
The FELI is a five-day workshop that condenses the two-week Foundations course that students in the Academy for College Excellence (ACE) experience at the beginning of each college bridge semester. Teachers, counselors and administrators experience an essential component of the program as an educationally disadvantaged student does.

In this transformative workshop we will identify and explore:
· Leadership and Learning Styles of self and others
· Positive Team Building
· Listening techniques toward effective communication
· Reflection toward self-management of behaviors
· Faculty-specific discussion about teaching and learning in the evolving classroom

For more on ACE’s proven effectiveness, go to this link:
http://academyforcollegeexcellence.org/why-ace

Who else believes in this curriculum for teachers and students?
The Columbia University Community College Research Center has recently found that students using the ACE informed cohort model perform significantly better than those that do not. To this end, the Gates Foundation and the Hewlett Foundation has funded ACE for a total of $3.5 million to expand its model nationwide while exploring the potential for acceleration at the
basic skills level. For more information about ACE and its approach, click on the link below

http://academyforcollegeexcellence.org/

Our hope is that if we’re able to create a strong cohort of BCC faculty and staff who have attended this training, we can begin to build a strong foundation for improving the success of our students who enter college without the basic skills needed to succeed. For this summer’s workshop, we are targeting people who have either demonstrated a commitment to basic skills students and/or who teach in important “gateway” classes.

Sincerely,

Chris Lebo-Planas
PERSIST/English Dept.

Scott Hoshida
Teaching and Learning Center/English Dept.

What is Inquiry

Posted on by teaching-and-learning

Inquiry is a method of professional development that gives faculty and staff the flexibility to research issues that they’ve seen or experienced in their work. Rather than prescribe particular best practices or research what other people are doing first, inquiry puts students, the subjects of our study, first.

Funding by the Basic Skills Initiative and the Title III grant, the Teaching and Learning Center is using an inquiry process to:

  • Create a culture of collaboration;
  • Strengthen teaching through inquiry and research;
  • Improve staff and faculty understanding of student learning;
  • Document the findings to plan future workshops, projects, and plans.

Spring 2010 Faculty/Staff Inquiry Groups at BCC:

In Spring 2010, seven teams of staff and faculty worked together on the Teaching and Learning Center’s pilot of inquiry. This is the first video made of the ESL team, which focused on what students thought they needed in ESL classes to be successful in transfer-level composition class. Follow these links:  ESL Spring 2010 Inquiry Group and the Physical Science Inquiry Group.

Faculty Inquiry Network: BCC Grant

In January 2009, BCC English teachers, Scott Hoshida, Chris Lebo-Planas, and Cleavon Smith received a small grant from Chabot College’s Faculty Inquiry Network to conduct a two-year inquiry on a thorny issue in basic skills classes. After witnessing students succeed in their own classes and then fail in subsequent English classes, they wanted to know what it would take for students to move from one level to the next. They wanted to know what they could teach in one class that would stick with students as they moved through the rest of their community college experiences. The Academy for College Excellence (then called the Digital Bridge Academy) had developed a curriculum around Joseph Campbell’s idea of the hero’s journey that appears in a number of myths and tales from around the world. Starting with those ideas, each teacher developed his own personal narrative assignment to help students look critically at their own struggles, develop a narrative to make sense of it, and to start articulating goals and aspirations for their lives. In this student-edited video, students from Cleavon Smith’s basic skills English class discuss how the books this process helped their learning and contributed to their experience in his class:  Personal Narrative Writing in a Basic Skills English Class.

Other Resources: