Institutional Development

Suffolk County Community College is a multi-campus institution. Although this allows us to attract students from diverse regions of Long Island, programmatic and administrative structures make it difficult to effect much change across the college campuses. Further complicating this is the fact that geoscience programs are housed at the central Ammerman campus and the other campuses simply offer one or two introductory course sections. However, as our program grows we have been able to provide more teaching opportunities to adjunct faculty who would typically teach at the other campuses, thereby exposing them to the work being done on my campus and its positive impact on our program.

Over the last three years we have also attracted a diverse group of educators to our fall workshop. This group includes faculty from our chemistry, physics, astronomy, and math programs as well as faculty from the english program and counseling areas. The diversity of this group has allowed faculty to workshop new activities that integrate geoscience concepts into other required science course activities and has also provided science faculty with new activities to improve student writing and mathematical ability. Additionally, through their attendance at the workshop college counselors are more knowledgeable about the work being done in the sciences and are better able to advise potential science students.

Lastly, as a result of the favorable reviews of past workshops I have been asked to provide a presentation to the college community about the use of metacognitive strategies to enhance student learning and success.