Region II Report, October 2008
By Catherine Eagan, posted 19 February 2009
Region II ECCTYC Report, October 2008
Chabot College (Hayward)
Chabot’s English department was recently awarded a Hewlett Grant to fund an initiative called “The Faculty Inquiry Network,” which “seeks community college faculty to create a ‘community of practice’ united around a set of shared values for strengthening basic skills education.
Chabot is also doing innovative things with its learning support services. TLC—“The Learning Connection,” is currently housed in multiple places due to facilities constraints, but offers all kinds of help to students, whether through language labs, the WRAC Center, individual appointments with faculty for students who are taking English 115 alongside another English course, and computer labs. For more information, consult http://www.chabotcollege.edu/LearningConnection/. Plans are under development for a Center for Teaching and Learning that will be more cross-disciplinary and provide a common meeting place for teachers and students committed to furthering their learning. Not only the previous components of TLC, but also the math lab, Faculty Inquiry Groups (FIGs) running pilots, and PATH (peer academic tutoring) will be in the Center. Unfortunately, the Center has been put off to 2016, but it is an exciting initiative. For more information, consult http://www.chabotcollege.edu/learningconnection/ctl/
Diablo Valley College (Pleasant Hill)
The English Division at DVC continues to confront several issues. Most prominent are the following:
Class cuts and concerns about our productivity formula: DVC has experienced dropping enrollment over the past few years, but this year there has been a surge in enrollment. Students had difficulty find sections. This has led to discussions with our district about revising our productivity formula so it more accurately reflects our college and district.
BSI: The Basic Skills Initiative funding (BSI Force) has actively explored ways to better serve our rapidly growing basic skills and developmental student population. Several projects have been funded through BSI including: consultations for our developmental IRW pilot, a published student anthology and integrated writing-art project for our EOPS/Summer Institute (ENGL 90) bridge learning community, presentations by reading experts and professionals for our department and the entire college. Some are exploring the possibility of a hybrid developmental composition course through the BSI, although this is still the discussion stage.
Integrated reading-writing (IRW) pilot: After several years of discussion but no action, our English department has integrated three sections of developmental reading and writing (ENGL 116-118). This semester we are offering three sections of the integrated reading-writing courses (IRW) and four in spring ‘09. The IRW Committee plans to collect data on student retention and skills, and compare it to our stand-alone reading and writing courses. We hope to gradually integrate ENGL 116-118; we estimate that this could happen piecemeal in the next ten years. We are also looking at the possibility of integrating our basic skills courses (ENGL 96-98) and there is talk of offering a similar pilot for those courses. Questions about load, possible lab offerings, the length of the course (currently 6 units; 5 seems more appropriate) continue to arise; we will need to address those in the future.
Re-writing our freshman literature offering (ENGL 123) to meet critical thinking requirements: A few years ago our ENGL 123: Freshman Literature sections began dying; students were not enrolling in them because it did not meet the critical thinking requirement the way our ENGL 126 did. Therefore, after much discussion by the Composition Committee, it was decided to re-write the course outline to meet the critical thinking requirement and see if student enrollment would increase. Counseling encouraged us to make this change with the hope more students would enroll and give them more transfer options. This is the first semester we have taught the “new and improved” critical thinking ENGL 123.
On-line offerings: Our department is discussing how many on-line literature courses we should offer. Only recently have some literature courses been offered on-line. While they have been successful concerns still need to be addressed. Some of concerns include: should all of our literature courses be offered on-line, are we offering literature courses on line just to “save” these courses because they do not fill on land, should a full-time department member be allowed to teach only online and not on land, etc.
Las Positas College (Livermore)
LPC is in the midst of making major changes to its basic skills program. Our two introductory developmental courses and our “accelerated” version of those courses, technically a pre-collegiate course, are both housed in an English Center that combines classrooms with a computer lab with a “TBA” lab that currently focuses on grammar. There is also instructional assistant help for each class, and the instructional assistants teach the “TBA” lab. This program has been successful, but its high cost, coupled with facilities constraints, means that we cannot grow much more, and there are many students who cannot get into our courses each semester. What changes, then, are we considering? We remain committed to an integrated reading and writing model and do not have plans to add elementary reading and writing courses. What we may do is take the pre-collegiate course out of the English Center and make it a stand-alone course. This would free up space to add developmental courses and make those courses more like learning communities, perhaps bringing in a counselor component. Our College Foundation Semester, a learning community for at-risk students with a small cohort of students, is in its third semester, and we may import some of the successful aspects of that community into the developmental courses. We also got retention money to develop modules for our developmental courses that are based on the CSU Expository Reading and Writing curriculum. We hope that this will increase the time we devote to reading in our courses and ensure consistency of approach among our developmental and pre-collegiate instructors, only 50% of which are full time.
Our English 1A course is still making use of a “TBA” lab that is beginning its fourth year. Students come into an Integrated Learning Center, staffed by faculty in programs who also have a “TBA” lab, to do lab assignments and work with English 1A faculty. Having common lab assignments and introducing new instructor-designed lab assignments as they develop has been a wonderful way to improve faculty collaboration on this vital course. We are struggling, however, to make sure that students come into the lab at a time when an English instructor is present. Otherwise, students feel that they might as well do the assignments at home, and they lose their investment in the lab. But the “TBA” lab model only pays for one hour of instructor-staffed lab time per course, so we only have around 30 hours per week staffed by English instructors.
We are curious to hear more about how other colleges are spending their basic skills money. Our college developed a list of criteria for evaluating what basic skills projects should be funded with the new BSI monies; the effort has been lead by administrators who have made final decisions about how the money should be spent. We put some money towards developing an excellent “Reading and Writing” website for the use of the whole campus community, teachers and students. We also sent an adjunct instructor to the Basic Skills Institute this summer, and will have Vincent Tinto come to campus to lead a workshop at the end of the month. But we are struggling to access this money in ways that will make a real difference in teacher training and instruction.
We are also curious to hear how other colleges are doing with the SLO process and how they are integrating their adjunct faculty into that process. We have evaluated all sections of 1A, 100B (2nd semester developmental course), and 104 (pre-collegiate course) at least once, but have not really figured out how to “close the loop” and assess the data we are collecting. Our assessment tool is eLumen.
Something we’re working on for spring is a meeting with English teachers from our local high schools. We are sending them a questionnaire to find out what they most want to speak to community college English instructors about and using that and our own concerns to structure a session on how we can better prepare students to be successful readers and writers in college. The college will pay for substitute teachers for the time they miss at their high schools.
Los Medanos College (Pittsburg)
Like LPC, Los Medanos also has an integrated reading and writing curriculum. Their English 60 focuses on foundational skills; English 70 introduces students to college resources and educational planning and ensures that every English 70 student sees a counselor to develop an educational plan; English 90 introduces students to college-level critical reading and writing, and English 100 is the transfer-level reading, writing, and critical thinking course. The department provides binders to the whole department, FT and adjuncts, containing the Student Learning Outcomes for each course, sample syllabi, and sample assignments.
Ohlone College (Fremont)
Ohlone first wanted to share new initiatives. They have a Basic Skills coordination team that is working on the Basic Skills plan for the college.
• Two reading faculty in the department were trained in a Reading Apprenticeship over the summer. They will use this technique in their classes in the fall and hold workshops for other faculty in the spring.
• The department and the college has implemented a requirement that students who place below college-level reading on the Accuplacer Assessment test must take the appropriate developmental reading class before moving on to transfer-level classes. (In the past,
developmental reading classes were optional and few students took them. Now the demand for these classes has significantly increased.) It would be interesting to investigate whether students come to English 101A better prepared as a result of this new requirement.
Ohlone then shared news of ongoing projects:
• The college has been on a 16-week calendar for two years now, and it seems to be working well.
• The department offers all three of the transfer-level writing classes (101A, 101B, 101C) online, as well as quite a few of the literature electives
• The English department has had an AA degree for three or four years now; each year a few more students graduate from Ohlone as English majors (but the numbers are low—about 4 or 5 per year).
Lastly, Ohlone shared their concerns about the following:
• Developmental reading and writing classes, plus the freshman composition course, have a lab component. Some faculty have developed their own curriculum for their students for the lab, while others (mostly part-time writing instructors) rely on standardized reading and writing prompts. There seems to be inconsistency with the quality
and completion of lab work from one class to the next.
• Some students (it’s not clear how many) succeed in Ohlone’s developmental classes but arrive unprepared in the transfer-level class. The department has surveyed faculty and students in the various levels of English classes asking if they (students and faculty) feel students are properly placed into their classes. (These surveys are necessary to validate the assessment tool, Accuplacer, and to help the department adjust cut off scores). The department has found that the students who, according to faculty, are not properly placed into English 101A (placed too high) are not misplaced because of the assessment test, but rather because they have passed the prerequisite class. The English department needs to determine why some students pass the developmental classes but arrive unprepared to do college-level reading and writing tasks in the transfer-level classes. They also need to determine how many students fall into this category.
Skyline College (San Bruno)
Skyline College is on the verge of approving release time for three BSI coordinators—two faculty and one counseling faculty, consisting of Karen Wong (English instructor); Jacquie Escobar (counselor); and Soodi Zamani (math instructor). All stepped forward for the position. For Fall 2008, each will receive 20% reassigned time to do preliminary meeting as a coordinating team. In Spring 2009, the counselor will receive 20% release time to take the lead in Student Services components; the math instructor will receive 20% to take the lead in coordinating learning communities; and the English instructor, Karen Wong, will receive 60% to be the overall coordinator. To find out more about Skyline’s BSI, access their website at http://www.skylinecollege.edu/collegesuccess/.
Karen is also the SLOAC coordinator. The English program is doing an assessment of their SLO assessment process—asking the questions of whether the SLOs are working correctly. They feel that it’s difficult to find a good assessment tool. Faculty at the college expressed the sentiment that they are doing good work on these major initiatives, but wish the English department had more full-time instructors, and see that as the number one obstacle to managing all the work there is to do.
The English department is also undergoing a review of its reading program and considering adding a reading and writing connections course at the developmental level (i.e. a more integrated approach). English is also about to reevaluate its use of the “TBA” lab hour to support its basic skills courses. Because of funding, they were encouraged to make the lab a 1/2 unit, which unfortunately has resulted in a decline in attendance in the lab. The other negative to the 1/2 unit of credit now attached to the course is that students how can’t get credit towards their 16 hours of “by arrangement” work by using the tutoring support on campus.
The department is excited about their participation in CalPASS, a program that seeks to understand the gap between high school and college achievement. Schools in San Francisco and on the Peninsula are trying to figure out where the gaps in students’ readiness occur, especially if the high school and community college curriculum is very similar. Skyline is working to compare high school and community college English textbooks and they have already compared Skyline’s English course outcomes with high school English outcomes in an effort to discover where high school and college curricula are similar and where they might differ.
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