In 2019, the ITEC Team and I made a plan to improve our KPIs (Key Performance Indicators). My summary of the ITEC 2019 KPI plan can be found HERE.
For 2020, I would like to propose the following initiatives. I am also inviting the team to propose additional initiatives that we should work on. Increasing Awards
Closing Achievement Gaps
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In 2019, the SciMath Team and I made a plan to improve our KPIs (Key Performance Indicators). My summary of the SciMath 2019 KPI plan can be found HERE.
For 2020, I would like to propose the following initiatives. I am also inviting the team to propose additional initiatives that we should work on. Increasing Awards
Closing Achievement Gaps
Colleagues:
I want to thank you for another great start of the semester. For the spring of 2020, I would like to propose a few times besides regular meeting time for us to get together. End-of-year picnic. Let's celebrate the end of the school year with a picnic! I'll rent a park building in Roseville: there will be indoor gathering space and outdoor recreation area, including playgrounds for kids. It would be on a Friday or Saturday during 4--8p, but you and you family and friends are free to pop in and out anytime. If you are interested, please help me by filing out this Doodle. I will plan it accordingly. Ben's coffee hours. Let's meet at Dunn Bro's. I'll buy the first 2 drinks. The times are:
Dear Colleagues,
I want to thank you for working so hard all year, and in particular this semester! I am especially grateful for the following. We got a new chemistry CLA! Please join me in welcoming Alyssa McCaskey, who started on 11/4. I thank Kirk Boraas and Chris Kulhanek for their great work in the search process. I also thank the entire chemistry faculty for helping out in the lab during the transition. We made a seamless CLA transition on the third floor biology lab. Thanks to the referral from Maire Sustacek, we were able to hire an excellent alumnus, Colleen Hutchison. Colleen started on 11/12, the day Anna Lytle officially departed. Please join me in welcoming Colleen. I also thank Chris Kulhanek for helping Colleen get acquainted with the lab and the responsibilities. We are thriving on the new partnership with US Bank. The ITEC Team has been progressive and proactive from the start, and continues to interact with US Bank with enthusiasm and creativity. The outcomes are fantastic for our students and programs: the hackathon, the named scholarship, the monthly guest lectures, the upcoming equipment contribution, the internship opportunities, and much more. I thank the ITEC team for their work. We continue to promote student research related initiatives. Many of your proposals in SciMath have been selected to create student research projects, materials or courses by a grant Renu Kumar won from the System Office. This will inject extra energy to our classes and our students. I appreciate your effort to elevate our college from a place to pick up transferring credits to a higher learning institution that encourages scientific inquiry and nurtures student research. I cannot thank Renu enough for her tireless work on this grant. And the list goes on. Whether you are celebrating Thanksgiving or not, below is a Taiwanese magic spell for your holiday feast. It says "Eat-at-will-and-gain-no-weight". Happy Thanksgiving! Dear Colleagues of SciMath and ITEC:
I am writing to you to sound a rally call. Minn State is launching a campaign called Equity 2030, which aims at eliminating the achievement gap at Minnesota State Colleges and Universities by 2030. This is no easy task. For example, suppose there is a course with a passing rate of 80% for the white students and 60% for the student of color. Using an exponential growth model, to bring the 60% passing rate up to 80% in 10 years, the students of color need to perform 3% better than the previous year for 10 straight years, assuming that the passing rate is fixed at 80% for the white students. On the other hand, Minnesota has had little/no success at closing the gap: the State has worked on it for the last two and half decades only to see the gap grow to one of the largest in the nation. Let's face it: despite all the great effort, Minnesota educators are not very good at teaching students of color, or the underprepared students in general. I am no exception: I have much to learn in the area, as a teacher and as an administrator. Here are what I think we should do as individuals and as a team. Keep searching for ways to teach underprepared students. Emergency room doctors don't refuse to treat smokers or alcohol/drug abusers, who are the most vulnerable and who need help most. As educators we also cannot abandon our weakest students. When students and their challenges evolve, so should we the educators. Let's continue to ask:
Continue to innovate. Let's look into new ideas as well as older but good ones that were not given a chance in the past. Let's try out good practices you learn from colleagues elsewhere or from professional associations. I will reach out not just to the Minn State System but also to successful inner-city colleges and HBCU around the nation for their best practices in educating students of color. Take on the challenge and seize the opportunity. In the Chinese language, crises are called risky opportunities "危機". The achievement gap is a risky opportunity for our school. It is a risk because of its severe negative impact on an important portion of our students, but we also have an opportunity to turn things around. With a systemwide initiative, we might be able to get additional support or help. And if some of our peers in the College or the System choose to act passively or not at all, we would also seize the opportunity to take the lead in doing something great for our students. Everyone in SciMath and ITEC has a great deal of professional and intellectual excellence, and we did not come this far in our careers just to be an ordinary college that can't handle students of color. The Minneapolis College is Minnesota's most diverse higher education institution, and we fulfill a unique role in serving a unique student body. Please join me in this important initiative for our students and for our college. Dear Colleagues of ITEC and the College Foundation:
I want to thank you for the fantastic 2019 US Bank Hackathon at Minneapolis College. Thank you to Penny and the Foundation Team for connecting us to the corporate sponsors US Bank and Microsoft, for organizing this event, and for creating great opportunities for our students. Thank you to the ITEC Team for educating our students, preparing them for lifelong pursuit of career and learning, and for getting them ready for the hackathon. I also want to applaud everyone for your perseverence and dedication: there were some challenges and unexpected situations before the hackathon, but you overcame them and the outcome was absolutely amazing! I hope you will be basking in the excitement of the moment in the next a few days: you more than deserve it. Please enjoy it and share with our students. As for me, I am getting back to my drawing board to work on our next opportunity to collaborate with our new friends at US Bank and Microsoft. There are so many awesome things we can do for our students, and making them happen is a unique responsibility and privilege that I enjoy. And I know you will be there when our students need you! Dear Colleagues:
September 28 is Confucius' birthday, and Taiwan's National Teacher's Day. A philosopher, a political activist and an academic leader of 3000+ followers, Confucius himself was most proud of being a scholar and an educator (學而不厭,誨人不倦). Though not a religious figure, Confucius had the greatest and the most dominant influence on the entire Chinese culture and society as well as most of east and southeast Asia. Happy Teacher's Day, esteemed colleagues! Thank you for being great educators for our students, as instructors, advisors and CLA's. May your work continue to enlighten our world and our time, like Confucius' work did to his. Lectured classes have many stressors, from a cohort of under-prepared students to a few snowed-out classes. Sometimes even one student asking too many basic questions and delaying the progress of lessons can be frustrating. An instructor can lecture the same way every time, but there are many other factors to make or break a good class.
Ultimately, a lecturing instructor has a bad class because (A) there is not enough time to lecture on all the scheduled topics, or (B) after the lecture, the students still don't understand the material. In the flipped classroom, both concerns can be resolved. (A) would hardly happen because students watch video lessons and take notes at home before class. (B) can be addressed in the classroom using group discussion, problem-solving exercises and extra coaching. Every time I flip-teach a class, I almost always do better than the previous time. In flipped teaching, all the resources are cumulative. Over time, the collection of video lessons, notes and test bank gets larger and better, the learning activities perfected, and the instructor more experienced. The more one teaches the course the better the class gets. And after teaching the same class two or three times, an instructor would have created nearly all the class material, and preparing the class gets even easier. More time to focus on students or further innovate. Next: (10) The Open-Book Exams Some instructors say students don't visit them and ask course-related questions during office hours. Here is the story about my office hours.
In my last years at Metro State, I was also the department chair. Full-time faculty are required by the contract to post 10 office hours per week. With a schedule fragmented by teaching, meetings and chair duty, some of my office hours landed in nearly impossible times like early Monday mornings or late Friday afternoons. Without surprise, students hardly visited me. In fact, there was a semester when only one student visited me the whole semester, and he wasn't even there to talk about mathematics. However, those were also the semesters when my course evaluations soared to career high and students responded in them saying I was always available for help. Why? Because in flipped teaching, the entire 4 hours of weekly classroom time is about helping students learn, making them practice and resolving their questions. Flipped teaching transforms all of the class meeting time into office hours. And how would I spend my actual office hours, besides prepping or grading? I advise. I talk to students about surviving a challenging schedule, about career and grad school, about how to become a mathematician, and about anything my limited wits apply. Next: (9) A Good Class, Guaranteed According to a Spring 2019 survey of students at Minneapolis College, about half of them have been late for class 2+ times in the last year due to transportation issues. This means having late or absent students is almost an inevitable reality and it doesn't happen just because they don't care. For the SciMath School Meeting on 9/19, I would like each one of us to think about 3 ways to run the first 15 minutes of class that are 1) meaningful or accountable for students who come to class on time, and 2) recoverable or less harmful for students who are late for 15 minutes. We will hold a 15-minute discussion using a Family Feud Board. Prizes are pineapple short cakes and other yummy snacks from Taiwan. See you there! |
AuthorDr. Ben Weng Archives
September 2021
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