The mountain top is the place where students can apply what they have learned and create meaning to their own life. They find value in what they can learned to what they can do. The mountain top is where students publicly demonstrate their knowledge and understanding. This is a ‘peak experience,’ where they demonstrate mastery and teach others in the community and beyond. It places the information, the conversations, the concepts into life contexts.
For learning to have meaning for students, the Research and Planning Group for California Community Colleges (RP Group) asked students from different California Community Colleges what supports their learning. The study paid special attention to the factors African Americans and Latinos cite as important to their achievement. The goal was to understand how community colleges can feasibly deliver support both inside and outside the classroom to improve learning for all students.
This research project sparked a movement across our system, with institutions using the findings to facilitate dialog among people, programs, and divisions; engage in strategic and equity planning; and pursue actions designed to meaningfully strengthen student success and attainment.
The research indicates that student support must be (1) integrated into students’ daily experience, and (2) included in the overall curriculum.
The “success factor framework” is listed below in the order of importance according to students participating in the study:
Directed: Students have a goal and know how to achieve it through guidance
Focused: Students stay on track—keeping their eyes on the prize and feeling accomplished when tasks are met
Nurtured: Students feel somebody wants and helps them to succeed
Engaged: Students actively participate in class and extracurricular activities
Connected: Students feel like they are part of the college community
Valued: Students’ skills, talents, abilities and experiences are recognized; they have opportunities to contribute on campus and feel their contributions are appreciated
When a well designed course connects their unique history, cultures and traditions to a civic action, service or solution, it leverages their sense of meaning and purpose. Civic engagement pedagogies, often called “service learning,” are ones that combine learning goals and community service in ways that can enhance both student growth and the common good.
The following stages explain how our students process information in 3 stages: input, elaborate and application. Culturally responsive teaching offers a way to reintegrate information processing into everyday instruction. According to Zaretta Hammond, the brain filters, blends and applies information into usable information. Yet the brain must recognize 3 stages. Use this document to examine your design and determine if your students will develop cognitive skills.
The brain has the ability to zero in on what it recognizes as important information worth paying attention to. It is vital to embed relevancy, curiosity, something that stimulate a strong emotional response. It’s key to know some information about who your students are. Design for them.
Once the brain decides to let in the information it will want to understand what it means. Elaboration makes information memorable. In this stage, you can introduce culturally responsive processing tools: repetition, story, or metaphors. When we effectively elaborate information with a culturally responsive approach, it is like mental kneading, massaging, and braiding together material in an effort to make sense of it and connect it to what the brain already knows.
After elaboration, the brain moves to application. Real life application/connection allows the brain the opportunity to process the new understood knowledge. Information can be retained if students background knowledge or conceptional understanding is activated in the learning process of a lesson.
An inspirational framework enabling us to direct students toward becoming independent thinkers is called Challenge Based Learning (CBL). An extremely resourceful and practical toolkit for CBL is presented by Digital Promise a nonprofit organization dedicated to research, planning and service in education technology focused on improving opportunities to learn. Their web page provides an efficient and effective framework and toolkit for learning while solving real-world challenges by identifying big ideas, asking good questions to gain deep subject area knowledge, developing 21st century skills, and sharing their experience with the world. In short, it engages students in the learning environment and beyond. To learn how Challenged Based Learning looks like, watch the following video.
An excellent source to inspire the incorporation of civic engagement, while providing definitions, guidelines and ideas in incorporating civic engagment is Vanderbilt University Center for Teaching: What is Service Learning or Community Engagement?