Cohort 3 Leadership Extension

The whole team from El Paso Community College participated in the extension of Cohort 3 that focused in helping Change Agents improve their leadership skills.

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Leadership Accomplishments and Lessons Learned

Tina Carrick

• Increased awareness of personal Bolman and Deal leadership frames and expanded frames beyond personal frame preference
• Assuming leadership role in the fall as the discipline coordinator
• Understand the need to work with others who may have different opinions to offer

Adriana Perez

• Engage with broad sets of stakeholders to make sure change is inclusive and others are invested in the initiative
• Leverage teamwork and collaboration to accomplish more
• Build a network of allies and partners that may change based on the initiative's goals

Miguel Vasquez

• Co-PI on a new grant to help more Early College High School students engage in hands-on and online research in areas such as bioinformatics and data science
• Learned strategies from the program to effectively work with resisters to change and expand buy-in 

Use of pre-planning based on data and resources to promote change

Activity Report

Activity Plan

With a strong interest in student success and a positive experience from previous SAGE 2YC book clubs, our group decided upon a book group for our team activity.

• The book - Teach Students How To Learn by Saundra Yancy McGuire.
• Platform - virtual meetings using Zoom
• Two meetings were hosted: March 25th and April 22nd - 90 minutes in length.
• The book group was limited to 10 STEM faculty.
• Books were purchased from available grant funds and sent to each participant two weeks before the initial meeting
• An announcement was sent detailing the event: a brief description of the book, strategies for the meetings, and hopeful outcomes.

The first meeting required participants to read chapters 1 - 5.  In addition, they were to respond to and be ready to discuss the following two questions:

• What have you tried in your teaching that you have not done before that was inspired by the reading?
• What are you planning to try in your teaching, that you have not done before and that was inspired by the reading?

During the meeting time participants were sent to break-out rooms to discuss their responses to the above questions.  The breakout rooms had 3 participants and were 20 minutes in length.  After 20 minutes the participants returned to the main room and each group reported back which started great conversations.

Our second meeting required the participants to read chapters 6 - 11 and respond to the previous two questions once again.  As above, the same format of break-out rooms for smaller discussions, reporting back to the entire group, and then the entire group engaging in conversation. 

Results

The book group brought together 12 STEM faculty with the focus of increasing student success.  Our activity brought awareness to our participants on how simple it may be to include a few strategies to improve student success.  After reading, many of the participants were surprised they were already implementing some of the suggested strategies.

Feedback was very positive:

• "I feel so good after reading this book because I have applied most of the listed 33 strategies on pages 171-173. I pick few of them to share here. Many of us did not take any education classes.I think that it is important to do some research on metacognition, Bloom's Taxonomy (strategies #3 & 10). To me, it is important to keep the Bloom's taxonomy in my mind, not spend most of valuable class time in the bottom part of the triangle (memorization) but the upper triangle (apply, evaluate, and create). "
• "This book is a great resource to improve student learning"
• "This is an excellent book so far, and I am enjoying the readings."
• Suggestion made to have more book group meetings

Lessons Learned

Advice:

We wanted the participants to earn Faculty Development Credit.  We learned, at our institution, book clubs are not considered faculty credit.  Because of this we had to re-title the activity but were eventually able to offer faculty credit for attending the meeting. There seems to be interest in doing these types of activities that are somewhat more informal and that elicit conversation. We think, especially during COVID, faculty were open to new ideas and eager to speak with each other to discuss what is working in the classroom, especially the virtual classroom.

Books were delivered directly to participants fairly quickly but you do need to take that additional time into consideration as you plan these types of workshops.

Having a specific space or site, such as Google Documents, available for participants to jot down ideas and questions is very helpful in starting conversations before, during, and after the planned meetings.