Graduation & the Stories Behind the Smiles

Our spring graduation event this year was particularly special for me. Following my first year at MVCC, which began and ended in the "blink of an eye", I've since been able to find more time to spend with students the past couple years. I found that I knew a fair number of then walking across the stage this past Friday afternoon. Their stories amplify the significance of our work.

The comments of commencement speaker Liz Murray illustrated her story, from being the homeless child of drug-addicted parents to graduating from Harvard University. The fact is that many MVCC students graduating this past weekend have experienced similar stories overcoming adversity.

I handed diplomas to such a broad range of individuals - spanning the full spectrum of the human condition. Young, old, differently-abled, honor students, international students who completed our ESL sequence before completing their academic program, and those who've overcome their own set of unique circumstances smiled as they shook my hand and walked across the stage. One woman accepted her diploma, marking an important milestone in a challenging journey that started with her release from prison and subsequent entry into a drug rehabilitation program at Johnson Park. Her journey, which now includes successful completion of her first college degree, continues this fall at a four-year university.

One of the brightest faces to walk across the stage was a young man who came to my office two years ago at the recommendation of one of his mentors. I asked him what he wanted to talk about and he said, "I just try to surround myself with positive people. I left high school early to get away from some bad influences and completed my GED. I came to MVCC to just find as much positivity in my life as possible." Here he was Friday evening popping up on stage to accept his diploma, smiling the biggest smile - graduating on time.

These two stories are part of the larger tapestry that defined our graduation ceremony this past weekend. They blend with the Phi Theta Kappa honor students walking across the stage, our Chancellor's Award for Student Excellence winners, Tatyana Gurina, Alyssa Strife and April Vroman, and Kyle Richardson, the National Scholar Athlete of the Year in Community College Sports, who is transferring to St. John's University on a scholarship as a junior majoring in Pre-Med. The diversity, the smiles, and the stories behind the smiles were all amplified by cheering families and supportive friends, providing a remarkable exclamation point to an incredible year.

If you have any comments on this post, please contact me directly at presblog@mvcc.edu.

Making Sense of it All

At the end of each academic year, May is crazy with a calendar of events, celebrations and activities that culminate with Commencement. I want to share some of my experience over the past few weeks. The MVCC Mission, to promote STUDENT SUCCESS and COMMUNITY INVOLVEMENT through a commitment to EXCELLENCE and a spirit of SERVICE, provides focus and clarity, so I’ve used it to organize my thoughts here.

Student Success

The caliber of students choosing to attend MVCC speaks to the quality of education we provide. Two examples of remarkable achievement are Kyle Richardson and Ahsan Ali. Kyle chose MVCC after graduating from Rome Free Academy. He graduates this Friday with a 3.98 g.p.a. after an outstanding two-year career, leading the Hawks baseball team to consecutive post-season tournament play. He’ll attend St. John’s University on a scholarship and major in pre-med. By the way, Kyle was named the National Scholar Athlete of the Year by the national coaches association representing more than 700 community colleges nationwide across all three scholarship and non-scholarship divisions. This is a tremendous accomplishment for Kyle that reflects well on MVCC. Interestingly enough, MV has been home to the National Scholar Athlete of the Year in five of the last six years. No other community college has had more than two in the last 20 years! We celebrated Kyle’s many achievements at the MVCC Hawks Athletic Banquet recently.

Ahsan Ali is another student who recently received national recognition. For the second consecutive year, MVCC has had a National Coca-Cola Scholar (a competitive award that goes to 300 students…out of the 6 million community college students nationwide). In addition, Ahsan was named to the 1st team all New York Academic Team. A product of our Science and Technology Entry Program (STEP) with Utica City School District, he has his sights set on medical school upon completing his studies at MVCC.

Community Involvement

We talk a lot about breaking barriers and creating opportunity for education here. Much of the time our community connections help make that happen. Last week, at the annual MVCC Foundation Scholarship dinner, more than 70 scholarship winners were honored. Each of them had the chance to eat dinner with the donors that funded their scholarships. This was a record-breaking year for our Foundation as our fundraising efforts resulted in nearly $300,000 in scholarships.

Commitment to Excellence

While I could highlight a number of areas of excellence from the past year (program accreditations and faculty and staff awards), the MVCC Hawks Athletic banquet last week was nothing short of incredible. All 22 of our intercollegiate athletic teams were highlighted, and having seven new coaches, the overall winning percentage for the entire athletic program was more than 70 percent! The individual and team achievements recognized that night only serve to reinforce MVCC’s long-standing commitment to excellence, regardless of venue.

Spirit of Service

I experienced the ever-growing MVCC spirit of service first-hand as I joined a number of other staff members (including Khahn, our visiting professor from Vietnam) serving “midnight breakfast” - an all-you-can-eat breakfast buffet - to hundreds of residence hall students loading up for their final exam study sessions. The spirit of service here continued to come to life in the work of the amazing efforts of Team MVCC (which is certainly worthy of a separate future blog post). In addition, we should all be extremely proud of our Phi Theta Kappa student honor society. With an amazing student leadership team and chapter advisors, they earned a national ranking of 4 out of 5 stars (based on the number and quality of their service activities) and were recently recognized for their tremendous efforts in the inter-generational community cleanup last month.

All the banquets and recognitions are, however, just a prelude to the grand finale this Friday, when hundreds of students walk across the stage to accept their diplomas.

“Homeless to Harvard’s” Liz Murray is joining us as our commencement speaker to share her inspiring story, putting an exclamation mark on what it means to break barriers and overcome obstacles. It will be a fantastic ceremony that helps make sense of the crazy schedules we keep and hard work we do helping bring MVCC’s mission of success, involvement, excellence, and service to life every day.

If you have any thoughts on this post, please contact me at presblog@mvcc.edu.

More Than Just a Visit

As we ready our first cohort of graduates to complete the Diversity and Global View requirement, I've been thinking about DGV initiatives at the College and the positive influence of having a visiting professor from Vietnam with us this semester. I asked Dr. Sandy Engel, Director of International Education, if I could post the following as a "guest blog" and she agreed. My thanks to Dr. Engel and the many faculty and staff who have made Ms. Khahn's visit such a success. And my thanks to Ms. Khanh for her grace and humor in making all of us better for knowing her.

So Good So Far

A guest blog by Dr. Sandy Engel

It’s easier to say “When in Rome, do as the Romans do,” than it is to do so, but we manage when we travel, and once we get home we know how right Dorothy was:

 “There’s no place like home.” These days our home is a destination, a temporary home, for Ms. Nguyen Thi Phuong Khanh, a visiting professor from MVCC’s partner school, Kien Giang Community College in Vietnam’s Mekong Delta. She is here for nine weeks, teaching Vietnamese, helping in ESL classes, and giving presentations to peace studies, health, business, education and culinary classes, among others.

She is bright and she is absolutely charming. What an ambassador.

She’s here to teach and she’s here to learn. She keeps a list of questions and it’s interesting to see our world through her eyes. In Vietnam, classrooms are filled with students with black hair and brown eyes, very different from the local diversity where nobody looks like anybody. She comes from a place where students stand up when the teacher enters the room, a place where student legs are covered even on the hottest days and where there is certainly no classroom cleavage. On one hot sunny day, she said to me, “The students can dress like that?” The students were more undressed than dressed, but yes, I said. When she sees an older person with a limp come into a room, her impulse is to get up and help, even if he is a stranger. She sees none of us even notice him. She took photos of dog obedience classes in Petsmart, and she has decided that the drugstore I go to is similar to a supermarket but without vegetables. Fair enough. She has done the math and has figured out that an $80 dress here takes a smaller proportion of our salary than a similar dress would in Vietnam. Her vocabulary grows hourly and now includes “girly”, “oops”, and—this is Utica—“fish fry”.

She arrived with three coats, two pairs of gloves, and new suits that are heavier than she would ever wear in the sweltering Mekong Delta. And she is still not always warm.

She’s our second multi-week visitor from KGCC. Last year Mr. Nguyen Duy Khang, the English Department Head, visited. When she and I drove into the MV parking lot for the first time, she said, “I saw the photos and Mr. Khang told me everything, but I could never have imagined this.” I have told her more than once that we are not a rich school or a rich area but that we are in many ways a representative American place and that people are friendly.

She agrees with the friendly part. One thing she wanted to do was learn to sing some American songs, and so some of us are teaching her although we may be hopeless with the Vietnamese song she is trying to teach us. She is learning “Somewhere over the Rainbow,” and someone suggested we show her The Wizard of Oz. I wonder what she might make of the munchkins and the witches. Flying monkeys? In order to develop the relationship between the two schools, she has left her husband, 10 year old daughter and twenty-month-old son for nine weeks. “There’s no place like home”? I’m sure she’d agree. Despite her success, though, phone calls home cannot be easy. Still, she tells me she’s smiling and laughing so much that she’s afraid her face will look different when she goes home.

At the suggestion of Mr. Khang, she brought ao dai, traditional Vietnamese dresses, for several of the faculty and staff. The dress features a tight bodice and loose skirt over long, flowing pants and which the recipients wore to a college wide reception for her. Every celebration in Vietnam features singing, and so we sang, as a group, “New York, New York”, and as we did so, an impromptu, in-the-spirit-of-the-moment chorus line formed around her. Later, fearless at the microphone, she sang a solo.

I have been at MV for more years than I would like to admit, and, aside from the annual student musical, I cannot remember the last time any faculty and staff sang—much less danced.

Her visit is a daily reminder that we are all dots in the matrix, that we have even more in common than we realize we do, and often the unplanned moments are the best. Someone once told me that the more ways you have to look at things, the better off you are. He was right.

If you have any comments on this post, please contact me at presblog@mvcc.edu.

Faculty for Today and Tomorrow

We are building the future of MVCC today. Between now and next fall we will have completed more than 20 national searches for tenure-track full-time faculty – roughly 15% of our full-time faculty ranks. The efforts of the screening committee members are greatly appreciated – for their thoughtfulness, energy and just plain hard work of identifying the very best candidates to join us.

The momentum of advancing important initiatives through our Strategic Plan and experiencing ten consecutive semesters of enrollment growth have brought focus to the type of qualified candidates we are looking to attract in these searches. While not all were specifically defined in the advertisements, the following characteristics come to mind as I think about what our students and College need for today and for tomorrow - faculty who have:

• Solid knowledge/credentials in the discipline
• Enthusiasm and understanding of our mission and vision
• Eagerness to learn and grow
• Passion to teach
• Belief in truly supporting student learning with a deep understanding of the fundamental differences between teaching in a two-year and a four-year academic environment
• Idealism and belief in our ability to change the world one student at a time
• Understanding that we CAN keep standards high—AND work with our students to successfully achieve their academic and career goals – it doesn’t have to be one or the other
• Vibrancy and energy for teaching and learning to help us continue building a vibrant organizational culture
• An unwavering commitment to respect and civility – for both our colleagues as well as our students who are acting on their individual courage to pursue their educational dreams
• A commitment to diversity and a global view and therefore, bring an interest in living in a global society and advancing our international education initiatives as well as those that personally add to the diversity of our faculty
• An ability to work creatively and collaboratively with their colleagues and can help us advance our academic learning communities priorities
• Interest and talent to appropriately use technology and enhance the student learning experience through active learning strategies.

To be sure, this is quite a list of characteristics. However, we know faculty with these characteristics exist –they’re already here teaching in our own classes at MVCC. The challenge is to find more candidates with these characteristics. If we make these characteristics the primary filters, age (young, old or in between) doesn’t matter. In addition, every one of us had a first job—many of us started here with no previous teaching experience. With the mentorship available here, we shouldn’t be afraid to hire on other sterling qualities. We have a wonderful New Faculty Institute, amazing senior faculty, and an institutional commitment to professional development and personal enrichment. With any search, it’s important to remember that we should never settle. If we find these characteristics illusive in a search, we can always re-open or extend the search – never settle. One of the smartest moves we can make is to hire smarter and brighter than we are. In fact, the smarter we hire, the smarter we look.

That’s my checklist, what’s yours? Let me know at presblog@mvcc.edu.

DGV Revisited

For the past two months, MVCC has hosted Khanh Nguyen, a visiting professor from our partner in Vietnam, Kien Giang Community College in the Mekong Delta. She has charmed us all and given everyone with the good fortune to spend any time with her the first-hand experience of living in a global society. This happens when the globe seems smaller and more complex than ever. The financial markets around the world are increasingly interconnected; our country is engaged in two wars, nearly a decade long now; much of the world has 24/7 information access; the Middle East remains as complex as ever; and natural disasters seem to be the new way we learn geography anymore. Locally, refugees and immigrants from around the world relocating to our area continue to diversify and bring a richness to our community.

As John Zogby states in his book, The Way We’ll Be, young adults are more apt to hold a passport, travel internationally, and plan to live in a foreign capitol city at some point in their lives than any other age group. In this new and ever-changing reality, exposure to people, cultures, and ideas that are different than our own and what we come across in our daily routines are essential to the 21st century college experience. MVCC has taken bold steps to ensure that our graduates are prepared to thrive in this emerging global society by, after more than two years of discussion, initiating a Diversity and Global View (DGV) requirement.

At graduation on May 21, the first cohort of MV graduates will have successfully completed the DGV requirement, a purposeful combination of coursework, online tutorials, and attendance at DGV-designated events in the greatly-expanded Cultural Series. Many faculty and staff have worked on various components of DGV and they should take pride in their results, and the College as a whole can certainly be proud of this unique and bold curricular endeavor. Recently, DGV was recognized with an Excellence in Education award from the Genesis Group; I wouldn't be surprised if regional and/or national awards follow.

As the DGV curriculum is further developed and strengthened, the challenge to our organization now is to infuse our commitment to Diversity and Global View to other parts of our operation. For example, our disability services for students continue to serve an increasing and ever-diversifying student population. In addition, the twenty tenure-track faculty positions currently advertised is a significant and timely opportunity for MVCC to further diversify our faculty ranks and further enact our commitment to DGV: the ad for the positions notes that experience in or willingness to work on international projects is a plus--so that MVCC will continue into the future to prepare our students for the ever-changing global marketplace. If you have any thoughts on this, please contact me at presblog@mvcc.edu.

SUNY Visions Revisited

Last September I did a post on the transformation that is underway in The State University of New York. The SUNY system has been around for more than 60 years. It has grown so large with its 64 campuses, that its power has fallen short of the potential inherent in such a large system. With the launch of a new Strategic Plan for the SUNY system last week, that potential moves much closer to being realized, and it creates some exciting connections for MVCC.

Our new Chancellor, Dr. Nancy Zimpher, has provided necessary and visionary leadership at a critical time. Over the last few months she has facilitated a group of 200 individuals, including our own John Bullis, through productive meetings around the state to understand the various needs faced by society and the manner in which SUNY can best address those needs. The result is a compelling Strategic Plan.

http://www.suny.edu/powerOfSuny/

The Plan has six guiding points—“Big Ideas”—by which to frame system initiatives:

• SUNY and the entrepreneurial century

• SUNY and the seamless educational pipeline

• SUNY and a healthier New York

• SUNY and an energy smart New York

• SUNY and the vibrant community

• SUNY and the world

As a famed French author once remarked, “A goal without a plan is just a wish.” The six pillars of SUNY’s plan are themselves useful tools for 64 campuses plans to align local initiatives for maximum return on effort. Guided by the direction set forth in this new compelling plan for SUNY, we can leverage the work we do every day here in the Mohawk Valley to help accelerate the collective work to advance SUNY’s overall local, regional, and global goals.

With all 64 campuses focusing their energies in the same direction, with the intent to address significant issues, we will all see a greater return on investment. Each college and university, the system as a whole, and students across the state and right here in the Mohawk Valley will reap the benefits of amplifying a system-wide vision by applying it locally.

Like other SUNY colleges in the Mohawk Valley, we at MVCC are very well positioned to leverage our location, our community’s support, and the initiatives we already have underway. We are committed to doing so in ways that match up with the big ideas of SUNY’s Strategic Plan. In other words, we’re already starting to connect our local dreams and plans with SUNY’s vision for the state system as a whole and this plan serves as a catalyst for that important work.

If we work together, we can adapt and implement SUNY’s plan in creative and bold new ways. We can harbor big dreams and solid plans for our college, our community, and our state. Most of all, we can turn those dreams and plans into local action to the benefit of those we serve. If you have any thoughts on this post, please contact me at presblog@mvcc.edu.

Assessment - Qualitative Gems

Assessment can be a daunting task, but sometimes the value in assessing outcomes can come from the most unexpected places. MVCC hosted an assessment workshop this week with Linda Suskie, Vice President from the Middle States accrediting association, spending two days facilitating workshops for administrators and faculty. The first day was focused on administration and the second day was focused on teaching and the assessment of student learning. I had the opportunity to provide a welcome to the group and I shared three themes related to assessment that I’ve come to value during my career. 1. Whether it’s assessing institutional performance and outcomes or assessing student performance and learning outcomes, good assessment is just good practice and good practice is good assessment. It’s all about measuring performance; using it appropriately; and making adjustments to improve. 2. Good assessment comes from sharing good practice. The wheel has already been invented, so use what’s already been created and make it your own. 3. Don’t have too many measurements – measure what matters and do it well. The general feedback I heard from participants was that the time in the workshop was well spent and hopefully, we’ll continue to improve our assessment practices for teaching and learning as well as our overall institutional performance.

While the workshops focused more on the technical aspects of assessment and more frequent quantitative approaches, I had a chance to do some qualitative assessments this past week as well. I had a meeting in Rome that got out early, so I dropped by a local business run by an MVCC alumnus. We had talked on the phone before, and he was gracious enough to welcome me on this unplanned and unexpected visit. We talked about our backgrounds and got to know one another some. As he shared his MVCC experience with me, I asked him how he got started in his business. He said that his memory always takes him back to an MVCC instructor who told him that he was a good presenter and had strong business skills. It was one of the first encouraging comments he’d ever received outside his family. That was 25 years ago and he remembers it like it was yesterday. How do you assess an outcome like this?

Similarly, I attended an MVCC alumni reunion event Friday night with nearly 120 alums from the past fifty years. Making my way around the room for a couple of hours allowed me to hear beautiful and interesting variations on a theme – “I loved my time at MV”; “MV gave me my start”; “I turned my life around at MV”; “Without MV, I wouldn’t be where I am today”; “My teachers were great – the smaller classes at MV made me learn more than the big lecture halls when I transferred to the university”; “We both got internships and walked right into a job when we graduated – couldn’t have asked for anything better!” - Talk about outcomes!

Assessment is certainly critical to inform our thinking and help us improve, but sometimes collecting the qualitative assessments and feedback to affirm what makes a difference can inform our processes as well. Sometimes it’s the individual positive reinforcement we give students that makes a difference in their lives and sometimes it’s the overall “MV experience” that stays with them for years beyond their time with us. If you have any thoughts on this post, please contact me at presblog@mvcc.edu.

Debt. Poverty. Then What?

At a recent Rotary presentation we heard from the Consumer Credit Counseling Service (CCCS) talking about debt. For me, the presentation was one of those moments where something of which I've been generally aware was suddenly magnified. Periodically, we see news reports about the mind-numbing level of personal debt in this country. The Utica branch of the CCCS sees it every day. It has about 350 people seeking counsel every month. A while ago, it used to see people walking in with an average debt of $30,000 (mostly credit card) and could help about forty five percent, in terms of getting fees reduced and debt restructured. For the past two years or so, its clients now come in with between $50,000 and $100,000 of debt piled up. CCCS says that these levels are so deep they can only help about twenty percent of the cases reduce and restructure their debt. Bankruptcy cases, on the other hand, represent fifty percent of the CCCS load.

In some cases, people try to hold on to material-based lifestyles long after debt or job loss have transformed personal economies. An increasingly large portion of CCCS's client base finds itself at the other end of this spectrum. Having never seen affluence, they are bottoming out in their own chapter of generational poverty. But much of this landscape is changing. John Zogby, in his book “The Way We’ll Be”, cites survey research that indicates people are increasingly looking to escape many of the trappings of affluence and leave more balanced, meaningful lives. In my opinion, a return to fiscal sanity - both personal and institutional - can't come soon enough.

David Mathis (MVCC Trustee and MVCC Alumnus of Merit) discussed a related view recently, in an O-D guest editorial, about the recent New York State Poverty Report. Federal guidelines define poverty based on household size (e.g., less than $22,050 for a household of four, etc.). Almost fifteen percent of Oneida County residents live in poverty; slightly more than twelve percent cite the high school diploma as their highest level of education; and less than four percent have earned a bachelor’s degree. Twenty percent of households in the cities of Utica and Rome are headed by single parents. In Oneida County, of families in poverty, a majority (56%) are headed by single parents. Almost one of every three Oneida County residents living in poverty is currently employed. Overall, more than 31,000 of the 231,000 people in Oneida County are living in poverty. A quarter of all Oneida County children are poor by definition. When we know generational poverty is a difficult cycle to break and we know one in four children in our community is being raised in poverty, intentional action is needed to secure a better future for our community.

The burdens and barriers faced by so many poor in our community are significant. Apart from the fact that the overwhelming body of research tells us so, we know intuitively that education is the single best way out of poverty. We, at MVCC, can pride ourselves on the rich history of providing access to opportunity. But, I think, access is defined too often by many as "keeping tuition as low as possible." And, frankly, that definition is simply too narrow. The time has come for us to think beyond the "traditional" concept of access. We must think more broadly. We need to think in terms of "delivery"....and (dare I say it again?) "serving" those most in need. For example:
• How do our current class offerings fit for the single parent looking for a way out of poverty?
• How do our current hours of operation fit for the nearly one in three individuals living in poverty who are currently working and wondering when they’ll ever fit in going to college?
• While we regularly enroll thirty percent of recent Oneida County high school graduates, we know there are significant sectors of our community that can’t find their way to college fairs and open houses. How do we reach them?

Addressing these issues and breaking these barriers will take creativity and attention. If we, as a community college aspiring to excellence, are to remain proud of the role we play in this region, what must we do to address these issues - and others - to insure that the MVCC mission is as relevant to tomorrow's students as it has been for those who have come to us in the past?
MVCC will be hosting the second annual Poverty Symposium this June in partnership with Mohawk Valley Community Action and the Resource Center for Independent Living. That, in and of itself, is a good thing. But I believe there’s more to do. Let's join together to make sure MVCC is doing ALL it can do to help create a bright future today....tomorrow....and all the days after that, for every member of this wonderful region.

If you have any thoughts on this, please contact me directly at presblog@mvcc.edu.

Good Administration

Through the wonder of Facebook, I recently had the good fortune of reading a poem that did what good poetry does – it moved me. It was written by Lew Kahler, Dean of Arts and Humanities, here at MVCC. It describes the supreme challenges associated with good teaching and succinctly captures the essence of the magic when learning happens. I connected with the poem from my own teaching experience, and my experience as an administrator focused on organizational learning. That phrase, “those who can’t do, teach” has always cut me the wrong way, especially with the corresponding addition, “and those who can’t teach administer.” We so often hear about the importance of good leadership and rarely talk about the manner in which leadership manifests itself in good administration or good management. While good teaching changes student lives at the micro level, good administration changes student lives at the macro level. It’s what keeps me going every day, helping the College learn, develop, and do a little better every day for our students and our community. The last nine lines of the poem culminating in, ”as a thought sets in and changes the course of a life" puts that poetic blanket around our organizational vision of transforming lives...one day, one conversation, one thought at at time. As National Poetry Month kicks off this week on April 1st, it’s my pleasure to share this poem with you. If you have any thoughts here, please contact me at presblog@mvcc.edu.


Poem # 75 - “Good Teaching”

He espoused, the old cliché,
“Those who can’t do, teach.”
I wanted to reach
across the table
and choke him.
but violence
rarely proves a point,
so I sat and waited.
He was jaded,
had made good money
at a job he hated
with a wife he no longer loved
and a house that had become a burden
of affluence.
“You were a teacher,” he said,
sipping his drink
as I suppressed a feeling of dread.
“How would you define good teaching?”
“It’s reaching,” I said “beyond any thought you can grasp.
It’s hoping that through it all
a light will shine
inside a mind
that will release someone
from the bonds of their own limitations.
It is struggling each day
to stay above water
as the tides
of ignorance rise.
It is slashing at windmills
climbing the hills of bullshit
that are piled on the young
by an uneducated,
high-strung, self-important society.
It is quiet hours of despair.
It is the shatteringly self-aware doubt
that nothing you say matters.
It is that moment,
when what you say,
that idea phrased in a certain way-
that moment of delay,
as a thought sets in
and changes the course of a life."

The Future "Ain't" What it Used to Be

After nearly three years of living in upstate New York, I'm getting better at finding the value of a well placed Yogi Berra quote - hence the title here. This Yogism comes to mind of late, having completed a tour of Oneida County school districts, meeting with Superintendents and asking for a tour of one of their schools - whether it be an elementary, middle or high school. I saw smartboards (the 21st Century chalkboard) in classrooms at every level; in some districts, I witnessed insightful curriculum linkages between grade levels ; and was encouraged by so many districts, both large and small, that have struck effective balances between emphasizing science and technology while simultaneously celebrating the arts. Coupled with Curriculum Night at our daughter's elementary school, I've been exposed to what's going on in the primary and secondary grade classrooms.

One of the most interesting updates is Bloom's new taxonomy. More than 50 years ago, Benjamin Bloom and his colleagues developed a framework that captured the various levels of learning. A few years ago, the taxonomy was updated to reflect relevance to 21st century work. The result is a powerful reflection of the shifting sands moving through education and the challenges we face that lends relevance to the YouTube video ("Shift Happens"). The video posits that things are changing so fast we are "preparing students for jobs that don't currently exist; using technologies that haven't yet been invented; in order to solve problems we don't even know are problems yet." I found it most interesting that the updated taxonomy changes the nouns of the old framework to action verbs in the new one - symbolically addressing the need for learning to be an "engaging activity" and not a thing in the context of these changing times.

I have been extremely encouraged by conversations I've had with students at my monthly luncheons regarding their experiences with engaging teachers at MVCC. I know it's happening here, but I can't help believing that we must continue to bring active learning to scale in every discipline and in every class through every delivery format (online or on campus). The early success of our Fall and Spring Institutes combined with the impressive willingness of faculty to share their best practices with one another (e.g., CATS with Katz) and new opportunities for Academic Affairs and Student Services to work together like the Pathway to Academic Recovery mid-year intervention program have us pointed in the right direction to achieve great success in this important endeavor.

If you have any thoughts on this post, please contact me directly at presblog@mvcc.edu.