New Rosources within/for the BSI Network

The Bay Area Learning Network is one of the inaugural networks created to support professional learning in the 110 California community colleges. In 2009 building on its previous successes, the BSI now plans to integrate what has already been accomplished with a new pilot, growing into a self-sustaining, statewide, professional learning Network intended to promote overall systemic change. This will allow faculty, staff, and administrators to share and build upon existing knowledge while at the same time creating opportunities for transformation. Foundational to this Network are evidence-based knowledge building, inquiry, capacity building, direct training, and resource development. To build the pilot Network, coordinators have been assigned to four specific locations (Bay Area, Los Angeles, Sacramento/Central Valley, and San Diego). These coordinators will facilitate efforts in the local regions, while at the same time providing connections with the greater statewide network.

Along the same lines, the Professional Development Consortium at Solano College is in the process of creating a centralized archive of professional development and focused inquiry resources. A temporary archive of interesting things to read can be found here. Please pass along anything else you come across that you think others will benefit from reading or looking at!

Other sites of interest:
https://www.innovativeeducators.org/
http://oncourseworkshop.com/
http://www.weeklyinnovations.org/

Proposals for 2009-2010

In an effort to be proactive and ahead of state-wide timelines for Action Plans and Expenditure Planning, the Basic Skills Committee decided to accept proposals for 2009-2010 in Spring 2009 so that when we come back in August, we are prepared to implement immedately. All documents relating to the proposals can be found here.

The Proposal Deliberation Timeline is in that wiki folder, too.

The rubric for deliberating proposals specifies the necessity for analytics, as well as connections to both the Educational Master Plan and the Student Equity Plan.

On-going Activites proposals for 2009-2010:

• Campus-wide Professional Development
• Humanities Professional Development
• Information Competency Online LR10 LC augment
• Noncredit Success Workshops
• Pathways to Success Program
  
• Student-Athlete Study Skills Center
  
• Supplemental Instruction
• Textbooks
  
• Umoja Program Scholars (UPS) and College Success Institute II

New Activities proposals for 2009-2010:

• Math ALEKS
• Math Online Evening MAC
• Math Self-Assessment Videos
• Speech-to-Text Initiative

Assessment Data

Fall 2008 Assessment Data for English, Reading, Math -- Elementary Algebra, and Math -- Arithmetic.

Under the leadership of Corrine Kirkbride, the Math department is working on a Math Self-Assessment Website for our students so that they will be able to accurately self-assess themselves into the appropriate math course.

English Department Discussion Forum

We've had a Boardster.com forum up for a couple of years for the department to conduct asynchronous discussions of various teaching, course, and program issues. Given how high our teaching loads and service commitments are, it's been a good way to keep us in touch with each other.

Student-Athlete Study Skills Center

The Solano College Student-Athlete Study Skills Center opened in the 400 Building in the Spring of 2009. Currently students using the Center are enrolled in Tutoring 500, which is a no-fee, no-credit class. Students will be tracked based on their enrollment in this class. The staffing is made up of a supplemental instructor who is also an assistant coach. The Center is open M-TH 12-3 and 4:30-6 and Fridays 12-2:00.

Students can use the Center for quiet directed study or can use the supplemental instructor to get a referral to specific tutoring at our Tutoring Center, our Math Success Center, or our Math Activities Center. The Center has ten laptop computers which students can use while there. We are hopeful that the S-ASSC will begin offering special sessions in conjunction with the Success Center on selected study skills topics, such as note-taking, test-taking, math anxiety, etc. in the near future.

After the Spring 2009 semester grades are available, the Tutoring 500 grades will be analyzed to see what the success rate was of each student, along with any trends detectable in their GPA or units completed. Other statistics may be used with the assistance of our Institutional Researcher, Rob Simas.

Success Workshops -- Spring 2009

Plans have begun to create a "one-stop" Success Center to support students outside of the classroom. The Success Center would house peer tutoring, supplemental instruction, English activity and drop-in labs, and a space for workshops on a variety of topics, including MLA citations, financial aid, textbook reading strategies, time management, preparation for the Composition Mastery Exam, and Learning Resources 10. The Success Center is seen as one of two really key components in our overall re-design, the other being the Pathways to Success First and Second Semester Experience Program. Here is a link to the overall structure of our re-design.

Here is a link to the Spring 2009 schedule of LR10 workshops, which are open to anyone working on research, not just the students enrolled in the English 1/LR 10 sections.

Here is a link to a survey about what workshops faculty, staff, and managers would like to see offered, and here is a link to the preliminary analysis from that survey.

A Non Credit Working Group has been created to address a number of issues to help make these workshops a reality and allow for the collection of Non Credit and Non Credit Enhanced funding for them. Here is where information about this group's activities can be found.

Professional Development & Resources

Basic Skills Handbook

Carnegie Foundation resources for professional development

Links to other groups working on student success

Searchable state-wide BSI effective practices database

State-wide BSI resources for professional development

State-wide BSI publications

The College Success Institute: Summer Bridge to Success

Here are files pertaining to CSI Cohort II for Summer 2009 and an analysis of the FTES generated by Cohort I.

The first iteration of the our summer bridge program, called The College Success Institute, was run at the Vallejo Center in June and July 2008. Counselor/Instructor Brenda Tucker, Counselor/Instructor Jocelyn Mouton, and English Instructor Patrick Vogelpohl made this a tremendous success. CSI started with 25 students, and it finished with 24. 19 of those 24 went on to enroll at an institution of higher education, 17 of them at Solano College--adding up to a total of 16+ FTES. What makes these numbers truly remarkable is that the students selected for CSI are those who had very little if any belief in or the opportunity to attend college.

Here is Pat's introduction to the program:


Here is a link to essays which the students wrote.

Below are video interviews with the participants. I think you will find their stories inspring, giving a look into the transformative power of summer bridge and higher education:

Learning Communities

SCC's BSI Committee helped to send a team to The Evergreen State College's Washington Center for Improving the Quality of Undergraduate Education's Learning Communities National Summer Institute in June of 2008. We came away from our week of intense learning, discussion, and planning with a desire to revitalize learning communites at Solano and to create a developmental learning communities program: the Pathways to Success first- and second-semester experiences.

While we were there, our team was asked to host the 2009 2nd Annual California Learning Communites Consortium Planning Retreat, which will be hosted by Solano from April 2-4, 2009. More information about the retreat can be found here and here.

At our March 2nd, 2009 BSI Committee meeting, the committee voted to create several scholarship retreat enrollments for SCC faculty who have not previously been invovled with learning communities. The recipients have to be nominated by a peer to be considered for the retreat scholarship, and the deadline for consideration is Monday, March 23rd, 2009. Nominees' names should be emailed to joshua.stein@solano.edu.

The recipients of the CLLC BSI scholarships are Howard "Tim" Boerner from Reading, Tonmar Johnson from Sociology, Melissa Reeve from ESL/English, and Lisa Romero from Nursing.

Supplemental Instruction

Supplemental Instruction was created at the University of Missouri-Kansas City. The goal of S.I. is to target "at-risk" courses--those with historically high levels of drops, Ws, Ds, and Fs--and create a learning support network to enable student success. An overview from UMKC can be found here and here.

Coordinator of Supplemental Instruction Diane White's analysis of the first two semesters of S.I. at Solano, in Spring and Fall 2008, is available here. It's of interest to note that even in its preliminary implementation, retention went up, and success rates also rose, or in the case of English 1, were kept from falling.

Pathways to Success: First & Second Semester Experiences

The BSI Committee feels the time has come at Solano College for “paradigm shifts in the thinking of campus administrators, faculty, and staff” (Basic Skills 7). Data collected, analyzed, and distributed by Institutional Researcher Rob Simas makes the current lack of student success at our college quite clear. In the Fall 2007 cohort, 79.1% of new high school graduates admitted to Solano were assessed into developmental English courses; 82.1% of the same cohort were assessed into developmental Math. 85% were assessed into developmental Reading. The impact of these student needs show in the more than 5000 Ws issued in Spring 2008—and that number does not reflect the true hidden metric: the many more thousands of drops taking place in all areas of our campus. This data is revealing not just for English, Math, and Reading courses, for there are a number of others that the Basic Skills Committee has identified as the most “at-risk” on our campus, based on SCC intranet grade distribution reports from 2005 onwards: Anthropology 1; Business 5; Business 181; CIS 1; Criminal Justice 1; Economics 1; English 370, 1, 2; ESL 330; Geography 1, Human? Education 2,3; History 17, 18; Math 304, 102, 104, 107; Nutrition 10, Political Science 1; Psychology 1; Sociology 1. These curricular “trouble spots” (Malnarich 55) are where the Basic Skills Committee is proposing the campus as a whole place a large degree of re-design effort, and in doing so the primary strategy is a broad implementation of Pathways to Success as a new model of how Solano College goes about its job of providing universal access to education.

Here is the Pathways to Success Proposal, written by Josh Stein, Coordinator of Basic Skills; Brad Paschal, Coordinator of Learning Communities; and Erin Vines, Dean of Counseling. The Pathways proposal is going to the Enrollment Management/Retention Taskforce for vetting at the end of April 2009.

Student Success Center

The Student Success Center will encompass many different kinds of support mechanisms.

One of the components will be the various Reading and English skills and activity labs.

Here's an introductory video the Basic Skills Committee created about the English 370 Activity Lab:


We'd like to videotape the various workshops we run, as well, so that students can have both synchronous and asynchronous support available to them 24/7. Here is a link to a number of videos we have already created. Our gratitude to Patrick Vogelpohl and Jay Field for making these videos happen.

LR10: an Information Competency Augment for English 1

English 1/LR 10: Introduction to Library Research and Information Competency

This class is about knowing where to find information (Google is a start but there is more...), how to access information (it isn't all for free), and how to tell if the information you are using is good, bad, or ugly (now where does Wikipedia fall?).

Writing a research paper is a required assignment in English 1. As our access to information grows, strong information competency skills become more critical. At one time, information competency skills were about knowing how get information out of a few sources physically at hand. Today, these skills are about finding valid and relevant information sources in the flood of electronic information available. It is our belief (the librarians and English faculty) that the pairing of these two courses will improve your rates of success, help you to complete your courses, and teach you skills that will apply to your college career and your life.

LR10 Information Page

Spring 2009 Handouts

Spring 2009 Workshop Schedule

Here are notes and a powerpoint presentation given by Ruth Fuller, the Coordinator of Information Competency, at the Second Annual California Learning Communities Consortium Conference and Retreat on April 2nd, 2009.

Data:
2008
Fall 2008 Survey #1 (given at beginning of the semester)
Fall 2008 Survey #2 (given at half-way point)
Fall 2008 Survey #3 (given at the final)

2009
Spring 2009 Survey #1 (given at beginning of the semester)

Focused Inquiry Groups

We are working on a variety of professional development activities. One of the most promising has been what's called a "Focused Inquiry Group" (FIG for short). FIGs work by following a research process, collecting baseline metrics and then working on changes which are then tracked. The end goal is to produce increased, measurable student success and new curriculum and pedagogy which can be disseminated to both new and continuing instructors. For those who are familiar with Student Learning Outcomes, that's what's meant by "closing the loop." Here's a good overview of the FIG process: FIGs. Here is a document with suggestions and links to aid in FIG design and implementation.

Here is a summary of Humanities FIG work for Spring 2009 (written at the end of April).

English 350/355 FIG:
Here is some of what the English 350/355 FIG has worked on: 350/355 Classroom Work and 350/355 Activity Labs Work. This FIG over the last three years has produced an increase of 30% success in English 350/355, meaning we went from 45% of students successfully completing the course to 75% in the span of six semesters--you can find that data here: 350/355 Analysis. Here is a link to a forum discussion that began over email.

English 370 FIG:
For the Spring 2009 semester, the English 370 FIG will address issues of student success and retention. We are examining the role of the Writing Lab in student success, with revisions being made to the 370 Writing Lab project. In addition, based on data showing that the CME is the greatest obstacle to students passing the course, we are looking at potential revisions to the CME. Here are notes of what the English 370 FIG is working on: 370 FIG.

English 305 FIG:
This is out lowest course in the developmental writing sequence, and it has historically been taught almost totally by adjunct faculty, which doesn't mean that the instruction has been poor, but it does mean that continuity of effort hasn't been there. This FIG is working how to increase the success metrics in conjunction with DSP. We're hoping that the work this inquiry group does will serve as a model for other cross-program FIGs at Solano College. Here is what they're working on.

English Assessment FIG:
Here is what the Assessment FIG is working on.

Reading FIG:
Here is what the Reading FIG is working on.

Math 310 FIG:
Here is what the math 310 FIG is working on.

Math Discussion FIG:
Here is what the Math Discussion FIG is working on.

An English 1 FIG and a Vocational FIG are planned for Spring 2009 but have not yet met.

Mathematics & BSI

The Math Success Center, an activity lab for developmental math coursework, was designed in Spring and Summer 2008 and implemented adjacent to the Math Activity Center in Fall 2008.

Math assessment and placement are currently being worked on by the Math faculty. Here is the Student Success in Math Proposal currently being vetted by the Shared Governance Committee.

BSI Outline

In Spring of 2007, the ad hoc Basic Skills Committee was created to begin to address recommendations from the statewide Basic Skills Initiative. The documents that formed the nexus of that work were The Rules of the Game and Basic Skills as a Foundation for Student Success in the California Community Colleges. These two documents plus an extensive independent literature review conducted by several of the BSI coordinators helped us begin to think through our BSI response for SCC.

As a result, that Spring, thirteen iterations of the Basic Skills Outline were created. It lists out the governing philosophy of our re-design efforts, as well as questions, inspiration, and effective practices. The last iteration of it can be found here: BSI Outline.

Agendas & Minutes

Currently found on the SCC Internet site, available here.

BSI Plans & Reports

As the Basic Skills Initiative is state-funded and state-mandated, we have reporting requirements in terms of what we are planning to spend, what we have actually spent, and what the plans are that we are spending on.

2005-2006:
The 2005-2006 Expenditure Report

2006-2007:

The 2006-2007 Expenditure Report

2007-2008:
The 2007-2008 Expenditure Report

2008-2009:

The 2008-2009 Mid-Year Expenditure Report
The 2008-2009 Action Plan Narrative
The 2008-2009 Action Plan Matrix