Teaching in a Community College

Teaching in a community college is one of the many rewarding services that we can offer to our community. You have to have a passion for people to be happy with your job as a community college teacher. The quality of teaching is not based on the degree that you have but it is based on the commitment for the quality of teaching. You have to have an open mind and an open heart  to help, which is the only way that you can decipher how you can offer the best learning experience for the “people” who are your students.

With the open door policy of community colleges we are inviting people to come to us to help them achieve their dreams. Our students are coming from diverse backgrounds, age, requirements, culture and learning ability. They have jobs, they have other commitments and they have taken the very important decision of educating themselves, to either change or advance in  their career or complete a degree and do something for themselves.

Comparing a “two year college” or more commonly called “community college” to a four year college, we have to determine our roles as instructors and what is required from us to do the best job? We cannot assume the role of “instructors as dictators”, we cannot assume that all students have the ability to take responsibility to excel and we cannot adhere to our traditional format of teaching or being teachers.

The mainstream student body is to attain a degree or skill to entitle them to get into the workforce. Teaching should be the emphasis of a college that claims itself to be a community college.

I would like to quote – “ Although instructors often view themselves as the ultimate authority on the subject matter, it is still up to the learners to determine whether the ideas presented in the session should be incorporated into their work or personal lives. Despite the primary role of the learner, instruction is not a passive, laid-back, go-with-the-flow process for the instructor. As the facilitator and catalyst for participants’ learning, the instructor makes it possible for learning to happen by designing and performing all the activities that the learning process requires. Sullivan, Wircenski, Arnold and Sarkees (1990) assert that the establishment of a positive learning climate hinges on understanding the characteristics of adult learners who will be participating in the instructional process.”

Students who come to our classes are adults. Adults have different attitude towards learning – they have experience; they have a mental model of the topic or the class that they are taking; they have expectations; they tend to decide what they need to learn and they have the need to validate the information and above all they have self respect.

Taking into account all of these premonitions, the teacher/instructor has to think differently.

I have prioritized the requirements as I think will help to be effective.

1. To create professional, caring, welcome atmosphere in the classroom.
2. The teacher has to place himself/herself to the students as a facilitator and guide.
3. As we, the instructors, value student’s knowledge and capacity to learn, the mode of instruction will not be the traditional way of dissemination and assimilation of information.
4. Emphasis has to be on active participation. Instructor has to set a dialogue that instruction will be through interaction.
5. Getting to know the students is essential. This allows to break the barrier between instructor and student, it is respectful and provides for self-esteem.
6. To know their expectations. Asking questions as “What is my (student’s) role in the class and what is the role of the instructor?”
7. To assess their knowledge at the beginning of each teaching unit. A common way of doing that is to have a pre-lecture quiz on the topic or raise a discussion topic.
8. Based on the input from the class, the instructor has to design the mode of delivery of information to make it most effective.
9. To provide students with supplemental material to keep them engaged and connected to the material, when not in class and to create their curiosity or desire to learn more on the topic from relevant research work and web links.
10. Assessing whether their learning has met our expectations. The instructor has to have a variety of assessment techniques to evaluate student learning.

---Samita

1. To create professional, caring, welcome atmosphere in the classroom.
2. The teacher has to place himself/herself to the students as a facilitator and guide.
3. As we, the instructors, value student’s knowledge and capacity to learn, the mode of instruction will not be the traditional way of dissemination and assimilation of information.
4. Emphasis has to be on active participation. Instructor has to set a dialogue that instruction will be through interaction.
5. Getting to know the students is essential. This allows to break the barrier between instructor and student, it is respectful and provides for self-esteem.
6. To know their expectations. Asking questions as “What is my (student’s) role in the class and what is the role of the instructor?”
7. To assess their knowledge at the beginning of each teaching unit. A common way of doing that is to have a pre-lecture quiz on the topic or raise a discussion topic.
8. Based on the input from the class, the instructor has to design the mode of delivery of information to make it most effective.
9. To provide students with supplemental material to keep them engaged and connected to the material, when not in class and to create their curiosity or desire to learn more on the topic from relevant research work and web links.
10. Assessing whether their learning has met our expectations. The instructor has to have a variety of assessment techniques to evaluate student learning.

Comments

[Monica Trujillo]

samita, i started reading and before i could see your name i knew it was you! it made me happy to be able to "recognize" your ideas....
i agree with your comments. i would add that we need to have support programs in place to help our students to be able to learn. we have learned by experience how much students benefit from workshops for key courses that help them to "be aware" of the requirements and strategies to pass a particular course.
it is true we have adult students but we also have young kids that have just graduated from bad high schools. these young students come to us completely unprepared for the challenges of our classes. i believe, and i can be wrong, that some of these students have a good chance of suceeding if they are helped and coached since the very first day or even before the class starts.
i wonder if our school could have a much better graduating rate if we could offer a group of professors willing to work together to cover the essential disciplines and syllabus for any student in higher education. what if instead of repeating some concepts over and over in different disciplines we could create an innovative and creative curriculum were we focused on giving the essential knowledge to be able to develop critical thinking to our students?
we have to agree that we are teaching to a different population than the one that goes to ivy league school but we still use the same approach (or even worst) that those schools.

[Megan Elias]

Monica, I love your idea of offering a course taught by a bunch of people--it's been a dream of mine for a long time. I've been wondering if we might set up a practice of intervisitation of each other's classes. It would be so wonderful, for example, to have a mathematician come to my class and share connections between math and history and it would be such an exciting challenge to reciprocate. Opening up the classroom space to the rest of the world would help students and professors connect to learning, I think.
I also see some useful connections between Samita's comment on helping students to express their expectations and Pete's interest in how his students are doing IN GENERAL. Many students have not had educational experiences that addressed the question of what they expect and what they need and how they're doing. Thus the experience of college is fractured, not fluid. I'm often tempted to ask a class to draw me a picture of college at the beginning of the semester and at the end, to see how they appear or disappear in their own picture. Certainly on a practical note I think that portfolios are a good step in making the student as particpant visible to herself. But there are a lot of little things we can do along the way, too, that bring the power of students' imagination into the process.
--Megan