Thanks to the facilitating skill of Maria Figueroa, Edward Pohlert, and Denise Stephenson our campus-wide journey with Laura Rendon’s Sentipensante (feeling / thinking) Pedagogy began last Friday on the final day of flex week. As lively and engaging as that discussion was, it was still only a first step — a warm up. Here are three other ways to continue the journey:
The students return today and that means it is time for another First Day of Class Edition of Joyful Tidings!
On the Web
The web has a vast array of first day advice for college teachers. The most comprehensive I have found is Carnegie Mellon’s site: First Day of Class. Vanderbilt’s teaching and learning center also offers a comprehensive but slightly more condensed take on the first day of class.
Marilyn Weimer offers some specific activity suggestions in a faculty focus article about the first day. If you like a grab bag approach from which you can pick out one or two ideas among a hundred or so, the University of Nebraska’s 101 Things You Can Do In the First Three Weeks of Class might be useful.
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).
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.
Last week, I sent out a friendly email celebrating the arrival of our new students and calling on colleagues to share their ideas about first day strategies that work.
Six of them very kindly did so: dara, Rick Cassoni, Lisa Fast, Louisa Moon, Chad Tsuyuki, and Marti Klein. Thank you so much to each of you. I have included everything they shared below in this email, but in case you lose this inspiring email, you can always find it forever archived on our joyful teaching blog.
Greetings Colleagues:
In this post, I ask both faculty and staff colleagues to share ideas about the first day of class — how they experienced it as a student and how they think about it as an educator. I begin by sharing a “conversation starter” idea from a book devoted to how we begin classes.
In this post, I offer an invitation to faculty colleagues who wish to explore equity gaps in their own classes and a list of student success and equity offerings during our coming flex week.
Equity in the Classroom: An Invitation to Fellow Explorers
The Situation
Over the past few years, I have been unhappily monitoring an equity gap for Latina/o students in the Humanities 250/251 (American Studies) sequence I teach. I find this gap particularly disappointing because like most community college professors, I came to MiraCosta to work on addressing inequities, not perpetuating them.
In the coming year, Miracosta will invest significant energy and resources in implementing Guided Pathways. Those who wish to learn more about this important initiative have three good options — all of which meet flex obligations.
A Conversation Starter
In What the Best College Students Do — a book with a title that unfortunately raises more hackles than interest — Ken Bain offers an intriguing summary of the big questions he believes faculty should consider when they think about their teaching:
“…the best educators thought of teaching as anything they might do to help and encourage students to learn. Teaching is engaging students, engineering an environment in which they learn. Equally important, they thought of the creation of that successful teaching and learning environment as an important and serious intellectual (or artistic) act, perhaps even as a kind of scholarship, that required the attention of the best minds in academia. For our subjects, that scholarship centered around four fundamental inquires: