Written Communication

Need:  Streamline 1st 4 weeks of Differential Equations.  Create clearer expectations, journal instructions, MATLAB directions, problem sets, and activities.  Alleviate student confusion.  

Writing lab reports is something all students, even strong writers, struggle with.  It is a different style and format to all most other writing that they have experienced before.

I incorporated "One Minute Paper" classroom assessment technique by K. Patricia Cross (1993) into ENG091 classroom learning during the entire semester of Fall 2017.  By far, this class had the most diverse student population that was comprised of: Junior ACE (high school dual students), traditional first year underprepared students, Adult Re-entry students, and students with disability.

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

A learning objective for Com 230HC is for students “identify, read, synthesize, and discuss information from a current scholarly, peer reviewed journal article.” Three topics being in Communication, and one topic of choice, in their area of interest.

There were some incidents on campus last semester where students were not comfortable taking care of their personal space. We have found that students do not feel empowered to make decisions and share their thoughts. In order to be successful in life, students need the tools to be able to express themselves confidently, even if they are uncomfortable due to pressure and concerns of rejection. At times, social categories impact how much personal power we have and how we use it. This includes, gender, race, ethnicity, sexuality, age, religion, etc.

After completing midterm evaluations, students expressed a desire to have less lecture and more activities. Therefore, I designed and implemented a CATS to assess different approaches to learning in my COM 100 courses (5 sections) over a two-week experimental period. I compared a traditional lecture based approach (control group – 1 section), balanced lecture and interactive learning approach (experimental group 2 sections), and completely interactive learning approach with no lecture (experimental group 2 sections).

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.

I had nine students who were disengaged in group discussions. They had not actively participated in our class discussions by: being active, speaking up, volunteering for activities, or asking or answering questions.
To help, I used nine small candy bars, and taped them to the bottom of these student's desk. Students discussed nine key points in small groups. This way every student was actively involved in the learning of the material. After, students had to reach under their desk, and if they had a chocolate bar they were the chosen ones to share.
I discovered:

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

For both students and instructors, major writing research projects are problematic:  they're especially difficult for students who lack strong writing skills, and they difficult for instructors in the time it takes to grade the projects.  After several semesters grading a major APA-style career research 5-7 page paper for CPD 150, I was disappointed in student scores (especially in grammar), and I never looked forward to the amount of time I knew it would take me to grade all of the papers.  It was time to "build a better mousetrap"!

In Fall 2016 SAAC conducted its assessment in Communication, one of 7 general education abilities at EMCC. Data was collected from 57 sections with 1303 students in 2016, compared to 32 sections and 512 students in 2013. The areas assessed in Comm were Physical Delivery (Eye Contact, Facial Expressions, Gestures, Posture, Movement, Audio/Visuals and Preparation) and Vocal Delivery (Language, Pace, Pitch, Articulation, and Pronounciation). See attached Ppt.  Results showed the strongest area to be Vocal Delivery, with an average score of 3.16 out of 4.

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.