Faculty Inquiry Group Outcomes

Making Waves Project - http://www.sbcc.edu/makewaves/

The project focuses on sharing ISLOs campus-wide in various mediums in order to include all members of the college community. The primary modalities are through student-produced videos, faculty-led professional development workshops, and through posters and other visual media that will build a unified culture around the college’s six ISLOs. ISLOs are central to student success, underscoring Strategic Direction 1. In addition, the project integrates efforts by faculty, staff, students, and administrators, a core team-building effort which supports effective planning and governing.

The Make Waves campaign initially launched in January 2015 with a collegial effort of faculty, staff, and administrators planning ways to make ISLO VI visible throughout the college. This campaign was the fruition of a faculty inquiry group (FIG) funded in fall 2014 to implement methods of making SBCC’s ISLOs a stronger part of the college consciousness in order to better support student success. The Make Waves project addresses two primary Strategic Directions - SD 1: Foster student success through exceptional programs and services and SD 4: Involve the college community in effective planning and governing.

Using the original name, “Make It Visible,” the group’s vision was to:

  1. Build a sense of community.
  2. Support student success.
  3. Make educational outcomes visible.

Student Learning Outcomes Project

Purpose: The Spring 2016 SLO FIG was initiated to determine if the original SLO values of dialog, shared standards, and collaborative exploration of learning could be re-instilled in an SLO process that has lost its glow over the last 6 years. We explored the effect of assignment making designed to support the learning and skills development promised in each course SLO. We reintroduced rubric use to support assignment completion and together developed manageable methods for providing formative feedback and “outcomes” follow-up for students. We tested these practices to see if they were sustainable and of sufficient value to justify their further implementation. We wanted to see if zeroing in on individualized instruction produced gains in learning, SLO achievement, and increases in persistence sufficient to justify the effort needed to engage students more directly. We tested the current research in Learning Science and Cultural Studies that asserts such effort is justified and found, in this group, that such work was valuable.

See the SLO support documents below. They have been combined together in a single zip file which you can download and expand/extract so you can see all the files

Core Learning Skills Pilot Project

The Core Learning Skills Pilot Project in 2015 was developed by the Committee on Teaching and Learning (CTL) and the Academic Senate to support faculty in their related efforts to identify, assess, and evaluate strategies aimed to increase student motivation and engagement, to address under preparedness, and to make the college’s core learning expectations clear to students. A major objective of the initiative is to help us teach students to master the core skills set out in the GEs/ISLOs, skills needed for academic success, for career achievement, and for livelong learning. Another objective is to show faculty that ISLOs are not just an accreditation requirement and a meaningless burden, but could actually be used to involve students in their own learning. The Core Learning Skill Pilot Project has selected 6 classes to explore student participation in their own learning through initial self-assessing surveys, validating/invalidating assignments, and classrooms discussions of the issues involved. For more detailed information on this project....