Welcome to AY 19/20. As we begin the new semester, I would like to first look back on what we have done together as a team in Spring 2019. (You may want to check them against the objectives I set for Spring 2019.) We have:
For Fall 2019, I would like to focus on the following: (1) Agendas our school would like to prioritize. I will be hosting a discussion at our first meeting on 8/22, and I shall follow up with action plans. (2) Continuing the discussion on good teaching. Let's keep discussing teaching ideas and sharing good practices. (3) Developing more transfer agreements and transfer guides. (4) Providing great service to the college. None of our degree programs (MATH, BIOL or CHEM) graduated 2-digit-numbers of students in 2019. Our courses are in high demand mainly because they are needed by many other disciplines. It only makes sense that we calibrate these "service courses" and make them more relevant to students in all disciplines in the college. In Fall 2019, our school will initiate a curriculum conversation by BIOL, CHEM and NURSING. (5) Learning more about your concerns. I will be hosting biweekly coffee hours at the Dunn Bros Coffee. Please join me and let's chat! (6) Creating new programs. AS in Environmental Science is in the works, so are some other exciting opportunities.
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Dear Colleagues,
How are you? I hope you had a fantastic summer vacation. The new academic year is upon us, and I know you are as excited as I am, if not more! As we prepare for the grand opening, I would like to remind you of the following: 1. The faculty duty days (AAD) are 8/21 and 8/22. I will glue myself to the greeting table this year, so that I won't miss the opportunity to say hi after the long summer. Please plan to attend: there will be a lot of important information for you, as well as fun activities like Dean's Contest on the new faculty handbook, game-show style. (I am playing against John Ford and Traci Krause; wish me luck.) 2. The School of SciMath meeting is 3--4:30pm on 8/22. I will lead a brainstorming activity. Please view this video and complete the worksheet before the meeting. Thank you for your time and I look forward to seeing you on 8/21 and 8/22! For the Spring of 2019, I would like to pursue the following:
(1) Any great ideas and progressive agenda from you. Our school will be at its best when important agendas are faculty-driven. Let me be a great supporter of your great ideas, not the annoying manager who tries to drag the entire school in his own direction. (2) KPI-related initiatives. Our school's KPI's are: (a) increasing the number of awards, and (b) eliminating achievement gaps and improving course learning outcomes. (3) Transfer agreements and course equivalencies. With the help from discipline faculty, I will be reaching out to our frequent transfer partners (UMN, Augsburg, Metro, etc.) and working on optimizing the transfer pathways for our students. This would allow us to better serve our students and improve our degree programs. (4) Planning new programs. The College supports our school to develop a new degree in Environmental Science and to study the opportunity of a pre-engineering or a broad field engineering degree. (5) Promoting opportunities on improving teaching. Cheryl will continue to lead us in this important exploration, and I'll continue to advocate and support everyone in our school to find better ways to deliver excellent teaching to our student population. (6) Visiting at least one 4-year transfer destination. Is there anything our school should also pursue? Please let me know. Welcome back to Spring 2019! I am thrilled to begin my second semester as the leader of our school. I am also excited about what we will accomplish this semester and what we will plan for AY 20 and beyond! But first, a few thoughts and info to share.
(1) Feel free to say "Let me talk/check with my dean". I stand by the promise that I would be the only administrator you have to deal with. So, no matter what you need, please reach out to me before losing your cool. I may not always get you what you desire, but I do try my best. For example, let me help you when... - You made a request but have not heard back for quite a while. - You are not happy with something going on at the College. - Your interaction with someone at another unit doesn't go as well as expected. - etc. (2) All of us should strive to better teach students of color. This semester, 1,335 students of color are enrolled in math and science classes at our college. If we can raise the course success by 10%, 134 additional students will benefit. (3) Twenty courses of opportunity. The Academic Affairs (AA) and the Office of Equity and Inclusions (E&I) have identified 20 courses for closing the achievement gaps. These courses do not necessarily have the biggest gaps, but they affect the largest numbers of students because they have a lot of students enrolled. Our school has a few courses on this list, and improving them will be our chance to do greater good to the College. I will follow up on this soon (4) Student Success Day. This spring's SSD is on Tuesday 2/26. Our school will need both great ideas and additional help to execute them. Maire and I will be calling for actions in the next several weeks. I am interested in adding the following to our existing programs: - Faculty potluck gathering - Student poster or presentation session - Any student interactive activity - etc. (5) North Star STEM Alliance. This is an opportunity to encourage students to enter bachelor programs in the STEM fields: everyone is welcome to the activities, and there is even stipend for particular categories of students of color. Please refer prospective students to Haile Haile, the site coordinator. Specific info and marketing brochures will be coming your way soon. When I was a brand new professor... Before an exam. Students: Can you tell us what to study? Me: Everything from Chapter 1 to 6. Plus all the stuff covered in the last 5 weeks. Plus all the wisdom coming out of my mouth. Anyway you should figure it out on your own. After the exam. Me: Grrrrrrrrrr. I can't believe everyone bombed the problem on the exponential decay of Carbon-14! A colleague: Did you tell them it's important? Me: Well, they should have known!!! It's in Chapter 6 and we covered all of Chapter 6. Colleague: No you didn't. I visited Nicole Watson's Human Biology class before fall semester ended. It was a fantastic class! Nicole is such an effective communicator, and it has a lot to do with her many verbal cues: - This is very important... - That is a tricky question... - You should know that... - etc. By constantly communicating goals and expectations, Nicole does more than presenting information: she guides students and actively engages them. As a result, the class is focused, productive and clearly enjoying the experience. Not all teachers make efforts in telling students about goals and expectations, or about what is important and what to study. (Putting them in a 25-page syllabus and never emphasizing them in class is hardly an effort.) But why not? Some instructors think that if we tell the students what topics to study, they will only study those topics and ignore the rest. (Wouldn't it be great if students would actually study exactly what we ask of them?) If the students are so good at taking such directions, it makes even more sense that we give them a great deal of specific directions, instead of vague ones like studying all of Chapter 9. Some instructors believe that learning how to learn is part of the learning process. (Sorry for the tongue twister.) In that case, let's guide the students through this learning process. Don't just hope that they would figure it out on their own before failing a few classes along the way. For example, a 5-minute class discussion on what was important from last week, Family Feud style, might serve the purpose. In the end, students need to know about the goals and expectations. They need to know what to study. Not all of our students have the best preparation for college. They might have weaker academic background or studying skills, and they also take on responsibilities with jobs and family. However they try hard and study as much as they can. They would have a good chance to succeed, as long as we articulate the goals, specify what they should work on and help them work on those things. Back to my first-year teaching experience. If I could do it all over again, would I tell the students that the Carbon-14 problem would be on the test? If that makes them study and figure out the problem, then absolutely yes! In ancient China, a doctor prescribed for the Emperor a rare medicine containing rhino horn powder. Since rhino horns were hard to find, the Emperor had to use bison horns which are slightly less potent. So why prescribe the rhino horns? First of all, they are best for this prescription, according to the doctor. Secondly, since the Emperor couldn't really get rhino horns, the doctor would have something to blame for if the Emperor does not get better. If we assign an amount of assignments that is unrealistic for most students to do, we are no different from the Chinese doctor in the story. Of course the more students study the more they learn, but what if most of them can't complete the assignments anyway? And when/if they fail, do we blame it on not finishing the assignments?
I began my career at Ramapo College of NJ, a liberal arts college and New Jersey's equivalent of U of M Morris. A rookie math professor, I would go over the exercises in the books and assign over 100 problems a week. I graded 4 or 5 of them, and left the rest unattended. When I moved to Metro State University, I focused only on essential topics and I assigned no more than 40 exercises a week. But with carefully designed assignments, my students at Metro State learned just as much even though they were less prepared and had less studying time than my students at the 4-year elite institution, A few general thoughts on creating assignments: (1) Have a clear agenda and set the priorities. What do we want to accomplish in an assignment? Is it about memorizing particular formulas? Drilling certain techniques? Understanding concepts? Making applications? Manipulating tricky skills? Modeling and problem solving? (2) Be efficient and effective. Keep control on the amount of work in each assignment. When an assignment gets too big, cut it to size according to your agenda and priorities in (1). (3) Integrate the assignments into teaching. Follow up on the agenda and the priorities: Have the students accomplished them? How do the assignments help them learn the content and prepare for tests? Community college students often juggle with jobs, personal and family life, and a challenging course load. Let's design effective assignments that would help them use their studying time efficiently and maximize their success. Dear Colleagues of SciMath and ITEC:
Happy December! As we march into the grand finale of the semester, I want to thank you for a successful Fall 2018. A lot of exciting things happened because of your great effort and stellar work, such as - The awesome Student Success Day and ITEC Career Fair (SciMath and ITEC) - Advisory board meeting (ITEC) - Visiting Augburg University to explore opportunities for our students (SciMath) - Multiple projects to promote student success in dev and college math (Math) - Many more. I have yet to know everyone well enough, but many of you surprise me on a daily basis: your wealth in knowledge, your passion for teaching, your commitment to student success, to name a few. SciMath and ITEC are blessed to have strong members in you. It feels like yesterday, but I have been your dean at SciMath and ITEC for more than 3 months! (Does that disqualify me from being the shortest-lived dean on this position?) I have much to learn, and I ask that you keep advising, helping and pushing me to be a worthy leader of yours. I cannot thank my coordinators enough. I wouldn't be able to manage all the things going on within our schools without the great leadership and fantastic work by Maire and Andy. As usual, many end-of-semester emails and information will be coming your way. Please at least pay attention to (a) grading deadlines, (b) other deadline-related stuff, and (c) messages from your coordinator or your dean. (Especially (c), in my humble opinion.) I wish you a wonderful December! Sincerely, Ben When in doubt, check with ARC (Accessibility Resources Center). Sometimes it makes little/no sense to accommodate students in situations like missing homework without an excuse or skipping a class to take care hairball (sorry cat lovers.) However, there is one situation when we shall NOT deny accommodation: when a student has a legally protected status that grants him/her accommodation at no fault, such as documented accessibility needs, pregnancy, etc.
(1) No rule by instructors, labs or departments shall be used to deny student's right to accommodation. For example, none of the following can be used to deny accommodation: - The syllabus says to drop the lowest of the 5 exams. - The instructor says no late homework is accepted. - The department says no makeup for lab-related exams. If an assignment or test has little or no impact on the grade, the instructor may try to persuade the student to ignore it, but the student still has the right to make it up if he/she so chooses. (2) The College works with the instructor on providing accommodations. Generally ARC tells faculty to either (a) do it for all students or (b) only exactly what is approved by the ARC. In the case of (b), ARC will coordinate the effort for the student to receive the accommodation, and the instructor should not turn the student down unilaterally. (3) How do I know when a student MUST be accommodated for having a legally protected status? Refer the case to ARC for assistance and cooperate with ARC. When in doubt, check with ARC. I went to high school in Taiwan in the late 1980s. Math lessons there included - Using logarithmic tables to estimate big numbers like 385,120,089*99,751,287. - Using trigonometric tables to evaluate functions like sin(31.58 degrees). My teacher said these skills are important for college. They might have been in his time, but by the time I went to college, I used computers for these calculations. For all the time I spent on perfecting the skills of using these tables, it was a lot of stress and little/no contribution to my higher learning. I was a math professor in the 2010s. Following a national trend of de-emphasizing the integral techniques in Calculus, I revised my Precalculus course by cutting topics such as partial fraction decomposition, a challenging skill whose only use is in a special integral technique. The positive impact was almost immediate. Students no longer stressed out about or lost points on these topics, and I was able to spend more time on other important topics. There are many ways to get directions on curriculum updates, such as - Advisory board on industry needs and trends (ITEC) - The curriculum of transfer destination 4-year universities (SciMath and ITEC), or - The recommendation by national associations (SciMath and ITEC) As we update curriculum to meet current standards and expectations, we also get an opportunities to remove certain cumbersome or out-of-date materials, and replace them with new and student-friendly ones. In many cases it might be an easy win for student success when we stop teaching, testing and punishing students on some less useful but really difficult stuff. Do you update your curriculum regularly? Imagine having a student who understands only 50% of the course content. When you approach the student and tell the student that he/she needs to do better, the student responds: "Are you saying that I should cheat?" That is definitely NOT the case. There are many things the student can do. For example, the student should try to improve on studying skills, work with tutors and peers, go to the professor's office hours, study longer or harder, etc. Improving courses success is a sensitive topic in higher education. Some instructors equate it to giving up academic rigor and inflating the grades to pass their students. They tend to suspect that their administrators want them to cheat.
That is also not the case. It's true that instructors are not solely responsible for student failures. And yes, there would always be students who lack preparation, who skip classes, who miss homework, and who don't appear to care at all. But as educators, we need to continue searching for ways to help students learn better. It is our commitment to the profession; it is our mission. This post is the first of a series of posts on the topic of improving course success. I do not claim to be an expert, and I welcome all questions and suggestions. The goal is for our school to keep thinking, discussing and taking actions on this important topic. Please join me on this conversation. |
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