Building Relationships/Community

The EMCC “Ask Me” Team was created to help students with aspects of the enrollment cycle during the first week of classes.The first iteration of the Ask Me Model entailed long trainings for employees in order to master the concepts of different student affairs departments. The “Ask Me” Coordinating Team chose to take a different approach to welcoming students in order to quickly and efficiently give them “just in time answers”. First, the long training sessions were eliminated and volunteers were asked to become Ask Me Guides, not subject matter experts.

College Success Week, held during the fall, is designed to expose students to the many resources available to help them complete their educational goals. EMCC students* indicate they are either unaware or do not take advantage until it’s too late to maximize them as a resource. In an effort to expose students early, one of the activities offered during CSW was the College Success Pyramid Game. The game was designed to increase awareness of resources in a fun, engaging and meaningful way. It was structured similar to the $100,000 Pyramid Game.

After several years of teaching writing, it is clear that revision is the most important and most difficult part of the writing process.  I have stopped the traditional process of partnering student up, trading papers, and having them make random corrections.  Now, we correct papers as a class, we have substantive discussions about decisions in writing, and my students are actually learning how to be better writers.  I have used this in my ENG101 and ENG102 courses at EMCC, but this can easily be used in any course that incorporates writing.  I think this would be extrem

EMCC's Honors Department designed the first Exposition Fair to allow all students to showcase their work in different formats including roundtables for students to discuss their work in progress, poster displays, oral presentations and interactive displays.  David Weaver was our keynote speaker and responses from participant surveys evaluating the Exposition Fair were overwhelmingly positive!  Almost two-thirds of survey participants (N=90) reported that they did not know about the Makerspace and strongly agreed that they liked the interactive nature of the fair as well as the var

Statistics elicit overall student angst, which affects grades, attitude, attrition and learning. Although students attended tutoring, were allowed to re-do homework and engaged in interactive classroom experiences, PSY 230 course retention rate remained at 25%. I used a different pedagogical technique this semester - Mastery Learning - which was used successfully in K-12 grades. Rather than a traditional letter grade or percentage on assignments, students received "not yet" grades and instructor feedback. Resubmissions were accepted as many times as necessary to reach mastery.

Contributor: Vickie Weeks 

While working in classroom, I found that students gravitated towards friends to create their team or learning community.  This behavior created "clicky" groups in the classroom and I noticed silos of learning taking place.  What I decided to implement in my classroom was randomizing the groups with Popsicle sticks.  Each time we had a learning activity I used these sticks (that had a student name per stick) to randomly place the students into groups.

Every semester, students perfrom poorly on the final exam for calculus I (MAT22X); the average is typically a D/F.  Students are given an indepth review guide of all topics in the course along with the answer key that includes detailed steps on how to do each problem.  I often make changes to my pedagogy, handouts, activities, exams, homework, and other assessments every semester. In Spring 17, two main things changed in my MAT221 course.  

We specifically investigated how we can integrate creativity more effectively in the classroom for the benefit of both students and faculty. Our investigation included: reading Creative Confidence, learning more about Design Thinking challenges, locating and sharing creativity resources, using creativity to personally address one teaching challenge, and implementing at least one actitivty/lesson/strategy that we deveop using creativity to at least one class this semester.

Coming soon.

 

During the Spring 2017 semester, our Counseling Division held a retreat with all our residential and adjunct faculty.  At our retreat, we provided a catered lunch and shared best practices from our CPD 150 courses.  We discussed our OER Canvas curriculum for our CPD 150 classes.  We have five modules in Canvas for our CPD 150 courses:  College Resources, Time and Planning, Personal Development, Study Skills, and College and Careers.  We divided our division faculty into five groups, and assigned each group a module from Canvas.  Each group evaluated their modul

Student Life (Herschel Jackson) created the Summer Success Institute (SSI) and collaborated with Student Success Programs/NSO (Daniel Meador & MElinda Sanchez) to provide intense workshops to prepare first semester students for Fall 2016.  The SSI provided first year students with a jumpstart to their college success through the energizing and dynamic experiences. Students learned how to navigate successfully the college environment. The institute consisted of four 3- hour workshops during the month of July.

Abstract:  Research has demonstrated that a significant proportion of community college students will not persist to degree completion. Online students may be particularly at-risk. Self-efficacy, perceived value of the curriculum, and certain demographic variables have been identified as important in both retention and persistence. We will measure these variables four times during a semester in a series of online college classes.

The Feminist Club's focus for Women's History Month has been Intersectionality and Feminism. Club members tabled outside with posters on intersectionality in order to educate employees and students on its importance.  95% of those who attended the table did not know about intersectionality. After club members discussed the topic with attendees and shared their informational posters, attendees were encouraged to create a poster on intersectionality. The posters were placed on a clothesline for sharing.

In our first run of the PHY131/MAT231 learning community (LC) in Fall 16, we tried a format of seting up a physics problem on an exam, and then use the resulting integral to be solved on the math portion of the exam. We would like to do this for each of the 5 exams in Fall 17. This would allow/require us to focus on intgrals from day one and reorder material in both classes. Some reordering was done in Fall 16, but after our first time around, we realize that more needs to be changed.