The Promise of Faculty Inquiry for Teaching and Learning Basic Skills. Strengthening Pre-collegiate Education in Community Colleges

The Promise of Faculty Inquiry for Teaching and Learning Basic Skills. Strengthening Pre-collegiate Education in Community Colleges
Author: Mary Taylor Huber
Publisher:
Total Pages: 52
Release: 2008
Genre:
ISBN:

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The author discusses how faculty inquiry can inform and support classroom teaching and learning, as well as allow for better designed courses and programs. "Faculty inquiry" is a term that encompasses a range of practices that engage teachers in looking closely and critically at student learning for the purpose of improving their own courses and programs. As part of the larger scholarship of teaching and learning movement, it also involves going public with insights, experiences and results that other educators can evaluate and build on. The essay looks at how faculty inquiry has been mobilized to improve the teaching and learning of basic skills at a cluster of California community colleges participating in the Carnegie Foundation initiative on Strengthening Pre-collegiate Education in Community Colleges (SPECC). Appended is "Survey of Participants in Faculty Inquiry Groups" by Cheryl R. Richardson. (Contains 22 notes and 6 tables.).

The Scholarship of Teaching and Learning

The Scholarship of Teaching and Learning
Author: Jacqueline Dewar
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 230
Release: 2018-04-26
Genre: Science
ISBN: 0192554441

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The Scholarship of Teaching and Learning: A Guide for Scientists, Engineers, and Mathematicians shows college and university faculty members how to draw on their disciplinary knowledge and teaching experience to investigate questions about student learning. It takes readers all the way through the inquiry process beginning with framing a research question and selecting a research design, moving on to gathering and analyzing evidence, and finally to making the results public. Numerous examples are provided at each stage, many from published studies of teaching and learning in science, engineering, or mathematics. At strategic points, short sets of questions prompt readers to pause and reflect, plan, or act. These questions are derived from the authors' experience leading many workshops in the United States and Canada on how to do the scholarship of teaching and learning (SoTL). The taxonomy of SoTL questions-What works? What is? What could be?-that emerged from the SoTL studies undertaken by scholars in the Carnegie Academic for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning serves as a framework at many stages of the inquiry process. The book addresses the issue of evaluating and valuing this work, including implications for junior faculty who wish to engage in SoTL. The authors explain why SoTL should be of interest to STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) faculty at all types of higher education institutions, including faculty members active in traditional STEM research. They also give their perspective on the benefits of SoTL to faculty, to their institutions, to the academy, and to students.

Faculty Inquiry in Action

Faculty Inquiry in Action
Author: Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching
Publisher:
Total Pages: 8
Release: 2008
Genre:
ISBN:

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This report offers suggestions for starting and supporting faculty inquiry groups on individual campuses. Topics include: (1) The Power of Inquiry; Challenging Questions and Powerful Evidence; (2) The Power of Community: Inquiry as a Collaborative Process of Improvement; (3) Suggestions for Starting and Supporting a Faculty Inquiry Group; and (4) The Outcomes of Inquiry.

Completing College

Completing College
Author: Vincent Tinto
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 240
Release: 2012-03-01
Genre: Education
ISBN: 0226804542

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Even as the number of students attending college has more than doubled in the past forty years, it is still the case that nearly half of all college students in the United States will not complete their degree within six years. It is clear that much remains to be done toward improving student success. For more than twenty years, Vincent Tinto’s pathbreaking book Leaving College has been recognized as the definitive resource on student retention in higher education. Now, with Completing College, Tinto offers administrators a coherent framework with which to develop and implement programs to promote completion. Deftly distilling an enormous amount of research, Tinto identifies the essential conditions enabling students to succeed and continue on within institutions. Especially during the early years, he shows that students thrive in settings that pair high expectations for success with structured academic, social, and financial support, provide frequent feedback and assessments of their performance, and promote their active involvement with other students and faculty. And while these conditions may be worked on and met at different institutional levels, Tinto points to the classroom as the center of student education and life, and therefore the primary target for institutional action. Improving retention rates continues to be among the most widely studied fields in higher education, and Completing College carefully synthesizes the latest research and, most importantly, translates it into practical steps that administrators can take to enhance student success.

Basic Skills for Complex Lives

Basic Skills for Complex Lives
Author: Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching
Publisher:
Total Pages: 68
Release: 2008
Genre:
ISBN:

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This report details five principles for creating powerful classrooms and offers a new vision for professional development: (1) High Structure; (2) High Challenge; (3) Intensity; (4) Intentionality and Learning How to Learn; and (5) Inquiry and Making Learning Visible. Included are recommendations drawn from the work of the 11 community college campuses that participated in Strengthening Pre-Collegiate Education in Community Colleges (SPECC): (1) The success of underprepared students must be an institution-wide, core responsibility; (2) Professional development should be reinvented as an intellectually engaging, integral element of work in an educational institution; (3) Institutional research must be expanded to focus more directly on core issues of teaching and learning; (4) Community colleges should lead the way in developing richer, more revealing measures of student learning; and (5) Ongoing, larger-scale improvement requires a lively, open "teaching commons" that values the knowledge of practice.

Learning to Improve

Learning to Improve
Author: Anthony S. Bryk
Publisher: Harvard Education Press
Total Pages: 309
Release: 2015-03-01
Genre: Education
ISBN: 161250793X

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As a field, education has largely failed to learn from experience. Time after time, promising education reforms fall short of their goals and are abandoned as other promising ideas take their place. In Learning to Improve, the authors argue for a new approach. Rather than “implementing fast and learning slow,” they believe educators should adopt a more rigorous approach to improvement that allows the field to “learn fast to implement well.” Using ideas borrowed from improvement science, the authors show how a process of disciplined inquiry can be combined with the use of networks to identify, adapt, and successfully scale up promising interventions in education. Organized around six core principles, the book shows how “networked improvement communities” can bring together researchers and practitioners to accelerate learning in key areas of education. Examples include efforts to address the high rates of failure among students in community college remedial math courses and strategies for improving feedback to novice teachers. Learning to Improve offers a new paradigm for research and development in education that promises to be a powerful driver of improvement for the nation’s schools and colleges.

Routledge Handbook of the Sociology of Higher Education

Routledge Handbook of the Sociology of Higher Education
Author: James E. Côté
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 479
Release: 2016-06-03
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1317677773

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This is the first handbook to cover the sociological approaches to higher education. It is timely because of global expansions of mass higher educational systems, especially as these systems come under scrutiny by a variety of stakeholders. Questions are being raised about the value of traditional pedagogies along with calls for efficiency, accountability and cost-reduction, but above all job training. Within this neoliberal context, each chapter examines different sociological aspects of, and debates about, educational institutions as status-conferring organizations, with myriad positional characteristics, experiences, and outcomes. Many current debates concern the legitimacy of the statuses conferred, including the continuing debate regarding the role of universities in legitimating social class reproduction as well as more recent concerns about standards in mass systems. This handbook puts these issues and debates in focus in ways that will be of interest to a variety of stakeholders, within academia as well as in policy circles.

College Learning for the New Global Century

College Learning for the New Global Century
Author: Association of American Colleges and Universities
Publisher:
Total Pages: 78
Release: 2007
Genre: Education
ISBN:

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"College Learning for the New Global Century, published through the LEAP (Liberal Education and America's Promise) initiative, spells out the essential aims, learning outcomes, and guiding principles for a 21st century college education. It reports on the promises American society needs to make - and keep - to all who seek a college education and to the society that will depend on graduates' future leadership and capabilities." -- Foreword (p. vii).