LACCD Student Success Initiative

Professional Development Taskforce

Minutes for February 27, 2009

1st Floor Conference Room

811 Wilshire Blvd.

1:00 p.m. - 3:00 p.m.

Members: Deborah L Harrington (Dean) and Gerald Napoles (Intern), (District); Mickey J. Hong (City); David C. Jordan (Mission); Lloyd Thomas (West); Reza Azarmsa (Trade); Bradley Vaden (Trade); Linda Whitney (East); Evelyn Escatiola (East); Deborah Kaye (Valley); Kathy Oborn (Pierce); Pauline Itoh (Southwest)

We went around the table and introduced ourselves.

Review of minutes of the December 19, 2007 PDSSI Meeting: I.E. Review of statewide Basic Skills Resource Network summary. Deborah gave an oral summary: Last time we were together we gave Deborah input on the proposed Basic Skills Research Center—now Network. She handed out (and sent by email) the results of a statewide survey about this. They plan on having a summer institute in 2009 — to be attended by campus “change agents.” She asked for feedback from the members to share with the state subcommittee.

Review and Discussion of the “Flex. Calendar Guidelines,” “Basic Skills Staff Development Resource Center Survey,” and “Professional Development and Student Success: What the Research Says” (see attached)

Deborah distributed a copy of the “Flex Calendar Guidelines” which had been previously emailed to us. We looked at page 21 detailing what a faculty Flex Plan should include. A faculty committee should review this. Five days are designated for student and staff instructional development.

First, we went around the table and gave a definition of what most faculty thought Professional Development was at their respective campus—basically, just collecting flex forms, refunds for conferences, offering technology training, granting money for travel, and providing food for certain meetings.

Then, we gave definitions of what we thought Professional Development really ought to be: workshops, teaching and learning, learning pedagogy, peer review of learning, support, mentoring, technology and teaching training, self-assessment, developing and assessing SLOs, Great Teachers Workshops, ISW—Instructional Skills Workshops (BOPPPS)—a lessonplanning technique, teaching strategies, sharing best practices.

Several members mentioned that the Staff Dev chair needs to be almost two people: someone to  handle the technical stuff like collecting and keeping track of flex and then someone to actually design and lead workshops.

Education is a means to help students achieve success, “the good life,” in open access community colleges, everybody wants to go to college, but who is going to do the best job of preparing students for accessing success — will we do it, or will the University of Phoenix? Since 85% of our students need one or more remedial classes, how to we help teachers meet this pressure for success from under-prepared students? Our teachers may be content rich, but may need help in teaching techniques. How do we improve teaching practices? How to we help students truly achieve those SLOs? We could design professional development courses for real units. Students don’t know how to be “students.” Faculty may just want to “cover” their subject areas, without feeling the need to help basic skills-type students in their classes. How do you help students to create learning networks inside and outside of class? The committee should explore how to use money from Basic Skills to support professional development.

Organize groups of faculty who support each other while the engage in this type of institutional change. Here are the expectations that we have—a coherent, sustained professional development program. Create something that the next Staff Development chair can inherit and which will help them — so they don’t have to start from scratch. There was lots of discussion about how to do this. Define some guiding principles for building a program. Here is our understanding of what faculty development should be about. Build ways teachers can seek confidential assistance if they want it. Design faculty institutes — on more than one level, key issue — with follow-up. Deborah Harrington is working on Carnegie Foundation grant related to teaching. Staff Development chair should be on the Student Success Committee which should report to the Academic Senate. This committee is a subcommittee of Student Success Initiative which reports to the Academic Senate. Develop rubrics of effective teaching—list of responsibilities. How do you organize your staff development program to achieve the “best practices”? Start a process for sharing these good ideas. The committees should support actions and ideas that promote student success with research. It would be great if the members worked together because more things can be accomplished when people are resources are pooled together.

·       Action Item: Begin developing a district-wide “Framework for Faculty Development” Do this on a Friday retreat! Send ideas to Deborah and Mickey!

Student Success Network:

·       Action Item: Specific suggestions for implementation plus recruitment of volunteers for the project. Ask our campus faculty to post a key lesson plan on the Network. Give them Flex credit for this. Faculty to faculty peer-tutoring—help each other create websites, etc.

·       Action Item: Professional Development Credit for participation. Up to a day or 6.5 hours for contributing to the Network.

·       Mickey Hong was confirmed as faculty co-chair of the Professional Development Task Force.

Future Meeting Dates & PDSSI Activities

·       Next meeting will be on Monday, March 17, from 11-2 PM at City College in the Faculty Development Center next to Da Vinci Hall.

·       Student Success Spring Meetings with Academic Senates and local student success committees?

·       April 11th (Diego Navarro “Digital Bridge” and Web 2.0 Seminar at West)

·       May 9th (More information for event scheduled on this date will be announced later)

·       May 25- 28th (NISOD Conference in Austin, TX)