8-13-08

 

Hello everybody,

 

 

Well Mike Climo and I completed the 4 days of the Basic Skills Summer Institute in Newport Beach and it was terrific. So many things to do and consider.  I include the below, not in order any order or priority.  Mike also has a whole set of notes and ideas for consideration.

 

BSI Summary

Things to consider

 

1. Look into Career Advancement Academies - see http://careerladdersproject.org

 

2. Summer Bridge Program for High School Students - we have done this program in the past

 

3. Set up some pilot projects where you have pre-instruction (i.e. prep students for the class), delivery of the class, post class review, tutoring, educational interviews to help student with life problems, etc.

 

4. To develop Basic Skills have a broad outreach to the community, address basic skills, have transition programs, and focus on high demand/high wage, cohort based, provide resources for support (i.e. child care, counseling, financial aid, etc.)

 

5. Do Radio Ads to promote these new certificate programs. Promote new certificates through churches.

 

6.  Because 65% of our students are hispanic and bilingual,  we should focus on bilingual type of certificates. eg. bilingual interpreter, bilingual caregiving, bilingual allied health, bilingual accounting assistant, bilingual office assistant, bilingual social services technician, bilingual case aid, etc.

 

7.  Develop new workshop on Neuroscience and How People Learn. check out the “Art of Changing the Brain” by Zull, “How People Learn”- National Research Council, and “Scientific Teaching” by Jo Handelsman, see Chp 5 BSI Institute handbook. (BSIH)

 

8.  Deep Learning requires organizing and linking knowledge for later retrieval. Create patterning and acronyms. Deep Learning occurs when we are motivated, immersed (inclusive activities) and emotional content.  see chp. 5 BSIH - include visual, reading, activity and kinesthetic activities.

 

see Self Regulated Learning - Chp. 6 BSIH - learners identity,  page 42 chp. 5, misconcenptions, preconceptions, metacognition, and learning styles. check out “A Private Universe Video”  5 minutes at  http://www.learner.org/resources/series28.html?pop=yes&pid=9

 

9.   check out BSI resources website at http://www.cccbsi.org/resources

 

10.  develop rubrics which are student friendly in math and english to help students learn

 

11.  Problems in getting BSI implemented: costs $, clash of egos, lack of experienced of faculty, lack of organizational skills, lack of coordination between departments, past history, red tape, lack of time. Read Section A pages 14-22 of the “Poppy Copy” to help with these problems:

 

1. develop BSI as a priority, 2. make it clear as a mission of the college under college goals 3. BSI works best when it is centralized and highly coordinated, 4. aim for early completion of basic skills classes, 5. provide integrated support, 6 have knowledgeable faculty, and 7. the college needs to manage faculty and student expectations.  Only 20% of full time faculty have received any BSI training - and thus lack of pedagogy.

 

12. have middle of the semester Flex activites on BSI.

 

13. look at the Puente Program

 

14. Check Pasadena Teaching and Learning Center - Lynn Wright - see http://pcc.edu/tlc

 

15. provide a photo of all staff at Mission on the portal system. also organize staff by what they do so students and faculty can easily located counselors, financial aid, etc.

 

16.  get the ‘Late Paper” exercise for English instructors - developed by Skip Downing and do a workshop for English faculty on this.

 

17.  Develop Learning Communities - Mike Climo and David Jordan sat down for an hour and roughed out a Learning Community with ESL, BSi students and they would take Business I - Intro to Business, Business Law 1 (Bus. 5), and CAOT 32 - Business Communicaitons, and a Counseling class, Intro to College, see Santa Monica College Class - Counseling 20. Write the new curriculum and start this pilot program in Fall 2009

 

18. Develop a BSI budget proposal process - see http://cos.edu for their budget proposal. Encourage adjuncts to submit budget proposals for grants or projects they propose. Put these through the BSI Budget Process (develop this if it does not exist)

 

17.  have BSi faculty and tutors read the applicable sections of the Poppy Copy.

 

18. Set up ARCC benchmarks to be able to measure the progress of BSI.

 

19. Provide an orientation to all faculty on BSI skills

 

20. have faculty get together at the start, during and at the end of the semester to share BSI assignments and experiences and debrief to improve pedagogy.

 

21. on Flex Day have faculty sign up for Brown Bag Teaching Pedagogy lunch sessions for the Fall semester.

 

22. check out the program “OnCourse.com” and see if we should have a workshop using this teaching pedagogy.

 

23. order the Kelly Gallagher books on “How to Teach High School Teachers How to Teach English”

 

24. Get the Journal of Thought article, Fall 2005, page 25.

 

25. Develop a BSI website, and resources list. Include speakers and presenters throughout LACCD district who are experts in their areas of BSI.

 

26. Start a District Task Force amongst Staff Developers and BSi dedicated just to flex training of BSi faculty.

 

27. check on the use of an entirely online Ed Plan software program. check this out with Santa Monica counseling depart who uses it.

 

28. develop a Basic Skills Teaching Academy which has at its completion a capstone, and encourage the faculty graduates to act as mentors to train other faculty in BSI skills and pedagogy.

 

29. Add students to the BSi committee and project. LAVC has a successful STARS program which includes students. Check into this program.

 

30. Try to extent Student Services until at least 7 pm, or some reduced student services until 9 p for evening students.

 

31. set up a One Stop Registration program (Valley, and other schools do this) - put all of the services together in one place during the first week of class to assist with registration of students.

 

32. Train the tutors and counselors in BSI.

 

33. SLOs- we should check our Basic Skills classes, ESL, Dev Comm, etc. and see if the exit skills for those classes match up with our regular college classes.

 

 34. On Assessment scores of students we need to improve the "diagnostics" to determine why the score is low. It could be social, economic, physical,  enivronmental, motivational, etc.

 

35. implement an exit survey for students who either formally drop the course or simply stop attending class.

 

36. Supplemental Instruction - in addition to tutoring we need to develop supplemental instruction materials including web content for our Basic Skills students

 

37  Early Alert System - good Basic Skills includes an Early Alert system. We need to get more faculty using the “referral system”  under the faculty portal system. We need to provide workshops and some incentives or motivation to faculty to participate in an Early Alert System.

 

Coordination of Efforts - We need to do the following:

 

  a. set up a BSI/SSI Committee

 

  b. select a full time faculty BSI Coordinator and provide them with clerical and student worker support and .3 release time

 

  c. have discussions with Educational Planning Committee, BSI Committee, Staff Development, Institutional Researcher, SLO Coordinator,  Curriculum Chair, etc. and plan the implementation of a Basic Skills Action Plan integrating the Student Equity Plan, Educational Master Plan, College goals and Strategic Plan, Program Review, Curriculum Review, and ARCC statistics

 

  d. we need to determine the baseline and benchmark ARCC we want to aim for with our efforts so that we can measure our success.

 

  e. each planned action with Basic Skills Action plan needs to include the effective practices and strategy we will employ, determine if it is a new activity or an expansion of existing programs, prioritize and then develop and tie it to the budget process of Basic Skills

. good Basic Skills includes coordination of efforts of

 

              1. tutoring   2. flex and staff development  3. counseling

 

 g. integrate and engage our part time faculty. They have great ideas, and enthusiasm, and teach a lot of our Basic Skills students.

 

That is it for now.

 

David (rather tired at this point)

-- 
David Jordan, Esq. - Attorney at Law -  Director Los Angeles Mission College Paralegal Studies Program
13356 Eldridge Ave, Sylmar, Ca 91342-3200
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