Thanks for your interest in our video and project!

The survey asks current CC faculty about the pathways to their profession -- what inspired them to teach in the CC system? what types of professional development did they get along the way?  what do they wish they knew before teaching in CC?  etc.

We would like to design some CIRTL training materials that would better prepare graduate students interested in CC careers. We also are very interested in creating programs (or collaborating with existing programs) that provide an authentic teaching experience (i.e., internship opportunities or job shadowing) to those students serious about a CC career.

Regarding measuring impact, we are actively working through the project metrics with our other two regional collaborative

Thanks, Erin. What an inspiring endeavor your project is! Most graduate students are aggressively socialized to pursue positions in 4-year research institutions. It's great that your project will develop experiences and tools to provide graduate students with a meaningful, alternative career option of teaching in the CC system.

Thanks so much for your interest!  Metrics have not been a trivial issue for us to settle on.  As we're looking at this pathways issue in three different regions, we are the only urban center and seem to have issues unique to our region (e.g., the large adjunct pool all competing for full time CC jobs). Other regions have concerns about recruiting a large and diverse pool of candidates.  This complicates the idea of finding common metrics across regions.  But that in and of itself is informative and will help shape the types of interventions conceived.  

 

In addition to the community colleges, we also have engaged a number of 4-year college partners in this project.  And so another direction we're tracking is graduate student interest in CC careers.  Here is one example of a metric we have discussed tracking success -- increasing the number of graduate students expressing interest in or those who successfully acquire a full-time CC position within our region.   

 

Any suggestions or ideas would be most welcome!

 

Best wishes,

Erin

Thanks for the feedback, Jeanne.  Your ideas are solid and will more than likely be incorporated into the common metrics across the RCs. We anticipate that certain themes will emerge in the results of our CC faculty survey so what we ultimately focus on is informed by our pilot project assessment.

Best wishes,

Erin

Hi Kimberly,

We have not yet administered the CC faculty survey (our IRB approval process has taken far longer than we ever expected).  But we do seem to be on track for the launch of the survey in the next month.  The survey requests demographic data from all participants and does cover all STEM faculty (Engineers included!).  It sounds like our efforts to support the CC faculty-bound community of graduate students dovetails nicely.  Let's get in touch and talk specifics! 

Best wishes,

Erin

We have a group focused on math specifically.  Four questions we are trying to address specifically are as follows: 

1)      To what extent should we introduce future CC faculty to promising curricula, e.g. integrated math, or to promising pedagogies, e.g. team-based learning, or a blend of both?

2)      How do we prepare mathematical science future CC faculty for CC math teaching?

3)      How do we prepare STEM future CC faculty to help their students that are simultaneously struggling with math skills?

4)      How do we most effectively partner with national math organizations, e.g. AMATYC, ASEE, etc.

I wish we had the answers to your questions but I do believe the CC faculty survey being administered will shed light on this issue and help us frame interventions addressing the above questions optimally as a multi-region alliance.

Thanks for the feedback!

Two internship programs I could point you to now that we are looking at as models or partners in developing interventions are Project Match (associated with LACCD) and the Future Instructors Training Program through College of the Canyons. More to come though for sure! 

As you've probably gathered, the three strategic goals are completely connected and interlinked.  I don't think we'll be creating separate training materials but instead will use our alliance partners to inform the development of training materials to serve all three goals.