Student Engagement

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.

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.

Students kept an Excavation Journal through the five weeks of ENH251: Mythology. They were advised to use their journal to record: observations, notes, questions, ideas, images, sketches, maps and artifacts in addition to the answers to the various Dig Sheets. Each Dig Sheet focuses on a particular area of world mythology, engaging the student in reflective thinking about assigned readings while also encouraging their use of creativity.

In my Ethics course I assigned students a criminal justice current events assignment. This was a written report in which students were given the choice of choosing an incident of unethical conduct. I found that about half of the students did not have a clear comprehension of what was involved and why it was a problem. Many students were not able to answer basic questions. Three semesters ago I changed the assignment to include an oral presentation in class.

Is there really a need to kill another tree if CANVAS provides a medium for quizzes? In a quasi-experimental design, introductory stats students across two semesters (SP and FA ‘16) with two different instructors self-reported the number of hours spent studying for a common cumulative quiz. One group used e-quizzes, the second used paper quizzes. Results are as follows:

I have required my introductory statistics students to meet with tutors in the student success center as part of course requirements for the past three academic years.  However, without accountability, very few attend.  To this end, I designed a passport for students that needed to be signed by the tutor with time logged as well as weekly comments that reflected their experience with course content.  Students were required to spend at least 6 hours in tutoring during the semester with at least two hours completed during each third of the semester to avoid students using the 6

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.

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.

Classrooms are filled with students that show up but never participate, and that is distressing.  Educators know the real world does not operate in a singularity.  Contextually, singularity means success in achieved through collaborative efforts working in teams.  Your team may be geographically diverse, or sitting next to you.  Proximity is not important, sharing ideas and the ability to express thereof is important.

Need: While EDU students all do Field Experiences anywhere from 10 – 30 hours, sometimes their experiences don’t directly correlate to the competencies of the course they are taking.

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Need: Students who make use of class/campus resources perform better academically. However, many rarely use their syllabi. As a result, students frequently ask instructors for things like due dates, class policies, or the # of assignments/points in a class. I've attached two docs: Syllabus Questions & a syllabus.

During the week of Oct. 17-21, 2016 The I Will Graduate Committee hosted a “College Success Week” offering a multitude of activities for students to attend. These activities focused on providing students opportunities to learn about programs, strategies, and information from instructors as well as current and former EMCC students to assist them in developing strategies to be successful college students.

The Communication Abilities Rubric assesses areas of physical and vocal delivery.  Instructors and students have not fully understood the categories in the rubric. As an innovative approach, my Com230H section did a media project breaking down each element of the rubric into video. I allowed for flexibility with strict guidelines to ensure all disciplines and communication research was covered. Next, 18 students assessed themselves 3x for 3 group presentations.

The Outreach Team facilitated a Service Learning project which included students participating in EMCC's ACE Program. The project utilized materials from I Am Human: Campaign to End Derogatory Language. 100 students watched the I Am Human Video, completed assessments, exhibited critical thinking through group dicussions, and coalesed the event by using kind words to create tokens of gratitude. Please see attachments for assemsent results and detailed report of the Service Learning event.