Team Teaching – Learning Communities

The ET (embedded tutoring) program was not sustained after the 22-23 academic school year.  Student surveys from Spring 22 report 62% of respondents say having an embedded tutor helped them feel comfortable asking for help; 60% of respondents report having an embedded tutor deepened their understanding of course topics and concepts; 49% of respondents report the embedded tutor improved their critical thinking skills.

In conjunction with the 4DX campus initiative and the EMCC Super Goal #1, the math division developed the following WIG:  To contribute to closing the equity gap and improving a student’s sense of belonging, the Mathematics Division will increase the student’s response average on the twenty questions of the Classroom Community Survey (Rovai, 2002) from a 2.2 to 2.5 by December 2021.  Residential faculty reported what types of activities/practices were implemented in their classes to increase a student's sense of belonging.  Students reported an average

As evidenced in multiple CATS written about journaling in STEM, faculty from chemistry, physics, calculus, and biology utilize journals to improve students' deeper level of learning.  Critical thinking skills and written communication skills (EMCC ILOs) are important in STEM. I want to ensure my students leave my own course ready and prepared for the other STEM courses.  Also, these journals are used to asses physics' classroom learning outcomes.  Please see attached documents for sample survey results and journal entries. 

In fall 2010, I wrote a workbook to replace the $250 textbook.  Please note:  I do not receive royalties from this workbook.  The workbook (wb) was used in the calculus/physics learning community as well as traditional calculus classes by me only.  Over the years, I have made modification to the wb.

College Success Week events aim to connect students with members of the College Community to build connections vital to their success. Roary’s Amazing Race was developed this year as a way to re-envision how information about campus resources is provided to students more effectively for campus resource staff and more engaging for students. As students traveled the pathway to earning their free t-shirt, they were given information by each pit stop on upcoming campus events that may interest them (i.e. upcoming shows at the PAC).

Not all faculty have the time or nor want to teach in the calculus/physics learning community.  So, how do we help faculty who teach stand alone calculus courses?  Also, stand alone calculus courses do not have another instructor present to help emphasize concepts.  So, Becky is teaching a stand alone calculus course in Fall 18 to see if she can cut down on some competencies, incorporate labs, and she will compare her course to other instructors who teach non-learning community calculus courses.  Did Becky's class perform the same, worse or better on the common final?

The purpose of this CATS is to document a qualitative review on my experience in the 2nd semester calculus/physics learning community (MAT231/PHY131).   Second semester physics covers charges, electric and magnetic fields, circuits, current (etc), and these concepts have been quite difficult for me to grasp and tie into calculus without Dwain’s help.  The attached narrative provides my previous experiences, current experience, and plan for the future .   

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.

Since Fall 2014 , the calculus instructors have been working on creating common questions to have on the final exam for calculus I.  Faculty (both full and part time) meet to discuss pedagogy, common questions and creation of a pre-post test.  The common questions are the first half of our final exam with the 2nd half written by each individual faculty member.  Each semester, the questions are looked over and kept or modified.  The purpose of the common questions is to make sure all calculus faculty are covering "core" topics in MAT22X.

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.

For only the second time EMCC offered PHY131/MAT231 LC this fall. While N was small (12 and 15) some interesting results were found. On CSEM post test both classes scored above national average of 47% and no real difference in classes. The LC improved dramatically from first exam to last (pre-final) where the other remained flat. It is encouraging that the LC even though the students started at least 1 MAT class behind performed as well and improved up to traditional class scores as semester progressed.

Instructors are tasked with having to prepare EMT students for work in pre-hospital, in-hospital and now more recently, mobile integrated healthcare settings.  The use of simulation in the classroom helps prepare students for the workplace by exposing them to a broad variety of situations they may encounter by allowing them to apply knowledge and skills without endangering a live patient.  During the simulation the students are placed in an environment set to a standardized patient scenario with a variety of sensory distractors such as props, smells, patient actors with moulage (m

Students will be able to analyze recent research relating brain-based learning and healthy lifestyle choices in order to optimize student learning and academic performance.  WITC is a system of linking engagement in healthy habits to assignments in academic classes to encourage engagement in healthy habits.  Students are assigned articles to read followed by class discussion on setting SMART goals in one of five areas; exercise, nutrition, sleep, resiliency, or substance abuse.  Students then set goals and track completion over a period of weeks.  K

As stated in a previous CATS (Conceputual Understanding in PHY121), the focus of this assessments is on the conceptual understanding of the Learning Community compared with the traditional Phy 121 course.   Current data continue to show that the overall learning of the learning community student is equivalent those of the traditional student.

Learning Community (LC) faculty have been saying for 6 years that the main focus on the LC is to help students in future STEM courses.  Majoring in a STEM field is difficult; math is a barrier for most students.  Approximately 20% of community college students start as a STEM major with 69% of them changing it to non-STEM.  The LC course is designed to help students be successful STEM students and truly understand how math and physics are intertwined.  So, student grades were analyzed from fall 2010 - spring 2016.  Students that went through the LC vs.