All posts by Prepostero

Greetings Colleagues!

The time has come to begin our preparations for our Spring 2018 flex week from January 12-19.

Flex week has tremendous potential to energize our shared commitment to MiraCosta’s students, but it can only achieve that goal when we all step up to create, share, and engage. Let’s share some of the amazing work we are doing with each other; let’s learn from each other’s ideas and experiences; let’s bring what we have learned from the reading we have done, research we have explored, and conferences we have attended to our campus community for our colleagues to think about too.

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Joyful Tidings #30: The Return of the Mailbag

November 5, 2017Active Learning, Classroom Teaching, Designing and Facilitating Discussions, Fipped Classrooms, Joyful TidingsPrepostero

image of open mail bag

The last few editions of Joyful Tidings have generated some interesting and illuminating responses . I am struck by the different cool ways people share. Some folks offer long reflections, some short. Some send me an email and some post to the blog. But everyone always contributes something interesting, something worth reflecting on, something that advances the conversation.

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Joyful Tidings #29 Active Learning and the Flipped Classroom

November 1, 2017Classroom Teaching, Designing and Facilitating Discussions, Joyful TidingsPrepostero

Marti Using Active Learning

In this message, I offer an extended look at the work one of our colleagues has been doing with active learning in her classrooms. I hope some of you will share your experiences with similar types of approaches (either as a teacher or a student) by responding to this email or visiting our Joyful Teaching blog (by the way, because it has so many images and is rather long, this message may well be easier to read on the blog).

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Joyful Tidings #27 Return of Discussions: Zoom Conversation and Jill Malone

October 21, 2017Classroom Teaching, Conversation Starters, Designing and Facilitating Discussions, Joyful TidingsPrepostero

I have two resources to share with you: 1) a video of our first Zoom Conversation: Discussing Discussions and 2) an amazing email about discussions I received from our wonderful colleague Jill Malone. If you have time for nothing else in this email today, please watch the video Jill included in her email — I am reasonably confident it will make you happy.

Conversation #1: Discussing Discussions

https://youtu.be/vYL_anCQd9I

We videotaped our first live Zoom Conversation about discussion strategies. You can view it here (and count your time for flex) or you can visit this resource in Canvas (on’t forget to enroll in our PDP canvas site on your way). Curry Mitchell and Lisa Lane have some very creative and effective insights into discussions to share with you; I hope you will visit with them when you have time.

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Joyful Tidings #26: Discussing Discussions

October 10, 2017Classroom Teaching, Designing and Facilitating Discussions, Joyful Tidings, Online TeachingPrepostero

Greetings Friends:

I come to you today in yet another pathetically transparent attempt to encourage us all to chat a bit about teaching and learning at our college.

I know, I know, it is week eight! What is wrong with me!

But week eight is just the right time for some rejuvenation — just the right time to bring that pulse of energy back into our onsite or online classes with a new discussion technique for your bag of tricks.

You may even find yourself injecting discussion leadership strategies into some of your meetings (they worked for me when I was on jury duty).

And every one of us — staff and faculty — has experienced discussions both enthralling and stultifying. We all have opinions, ideas, and tips to share.

Not surprisingly, we are not alone in our interest in this topic. And during this week-long celebration of discussion (wait…what?!), I will be sharing web sites, and books, and other tools we can use to sharpen, expand, reinvent, renew, restore, recalibrate and otherwise transform our discussion skill set.

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Joyful Tidings #25

October 5, 2017Classroom Teaching, Conversation Starters, Joyful TidingsPrepostero

Our new Canvas PDP site offers all sorts of wonderful opportunities for exploration, especially via our Project Joy link which highlights faculty led teaching and learning related initiatives at MiraCosta.

Today, I would like to focus on our Integrative Learning page, which pulls together resources gathered by faculty working in our learning communities and health start programs, all of which focus “fostering students’ abilities to integrate learning—across courses, over time, and between campus and community life” (“A Statement on Integrative Learning”).

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Joyful Tidings #24: Two Highlights from the Mailbag

October 3, 2017Classroom Teaching, Conversation Starters, Equity, Joyful Tidings, MusingsPrepostero

image of open mail bag

So while we wait for the thousands of responses to Joyful Tidings #23 to roll in, I thought I would take a moment to highlight two wonderful follow ups to previous conversations from Maria Figueroa and Sunny Cooke:

From Maria Figueroa in response to our conversation about empathy…

So I’ve been reading your emails..well, most of them and I always come back to the Mayan philosophy of InLakEch. InLakEch roughly translates to “tu eres mi otro yo, you are my other self,” following is a poem:

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Joyful Tidings #23: Teaching Students to Learn – An Invitation to a Conversation

October 2, 2017Classroom Teaching, Joyful Tidings, Student SuccessPrepostero

book cover

Last week I served on a jury in Temecula (I know…I know…scary huh?)

Reading on the Sly

While I spent most of my days frantically trying to keep up with my classes and PDP work during the hours I was not in court, I also used my downtime during the trial — waiting in hallways and jury rooms — to start reading Saundra Yancey McGuire’s Teach Students to Learn: Strategies You Can Incorporate Into Any Course to Improve Student Metacognition, Study Skills, and Motivation.

Springboard to Our Conversation?

I will not burden you here with all of Yancey McGuire’s cool strategies (which she summarizes neatly in some very helpful jury-trial-lunch-break-friendly appendices).

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Joyful Tidings #22 “Love Over Fear” More on Empathy and Real World Learning

October 2, 2017Cultural Competency, Joyful Tidings, Student SuccessPrepostero

heads speaking to each other

Greetings Colleagues:

Last Monday’s email about the connections I was discovering between the ideas I had heard recently from colleagues about empathy and “real world” learning resulted in some wonderful further reflections by colleagues.

I share those ideas here. I hope you will spend some time exploring the smart, creative, and inspiring thoughts of your colleagues.

Alicia Lopez (Sociology and Chicano Studies)

I am happy to know how Darder has inspired you and the role that I played in helping that happen.

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Joyful Tidings #21: It’s Here, It’s Here, The New PDP Website Is Here!

September 16, 2017Flex Planner, Joyful TidingsPrepostero

Greetings Colleagues:

PDP has combined and moved its previous two websites into one simply spectacular Canvas site. You can now find us here: Cool, Shiny, New PDP Canvas Site.

But don’t worry, if you forget about this momentous change in the history of the college — nay, the history of higher education itself — you will find a redirect link at our old site: Old, Abandoned, and Shamelessly Discarded Site.