This page is about strategies for increasing student retention (the percentage of students who do not drop), especially during the first three weeks of class.

Community Building Activities

Please post ideas!!

Group work!

• Have students present their solutions either on the board, or with transparencies or with posters
• Gives a chance to see really good student work (but make sure it's not always the same people)

Metacognitive skills cards

• Some one needs to make cards wuch as "Can you be more specific" etc
• Pass out a few cards to each students
• Students must "play" all of their cards

Group Formation

• Have groups at most 4 in a group (3 is better), but not in a line
• Form different groups each day
• When having a class discussion, have students pair up so individuals don't drift off
• To avoid one person running a group, have role assignments or form different groups halfway through
• If one group is amazing, sew them into other groups

SLANT

First Week “How do you sit when you take notes?” Then say, “This ties into respect, for sitting up and leaning forward is also a sign that you respect the person talking, be it myself or a classmate while in group work”. There’s a great acronym for this that we’ll use in this class. It will also help when you are about to fall asleep in an important work meeting. It combines effective learning with respect.

• S = Sit up straight.
• L = Lean forward.
• A = Activate your thinking.
• N = Note important points.
• T = Track the talker.

If a side conversation occurs, say “Let’s track the talker”

Assessment of Character: First Week HW assignment. Print out results and write 1 paragraph on it. http://college.hmco.com/downing_assessment/ Choose “before this course”

Flight Plan: Second Week and half way through the semester. Write-up for HW. http://www.oncourseworkshop.com/Management007.htm

Buddy, do you have my notes? http://www.oncourseworkshop.com/Interdependence021.htm

Why I missed class, Victims and Creators: Second week, group discussion. Write-up for HW. http://www.oncourseworkshop.com/Getting%20On%20Course009.htm This also needs me to copy stuff from “On Course” in the section titled Victims and Creators.

Promise Teams: Half way through the semester. Each group makes 5 promises and tracks them http://www.oncourseworkshop.com/Awareness014.htm

Surviving Math!

Go to the LMC Math Department web site. Click on Survive Math! Read through the strategies and find 3 that you would like to focus on this semester. Type a 1-3 page paper, double-spaced, that discusses them.

• Why did you select them?
• How will each one help you to improve math performance?
• What are the specific goals for each strategy?
• How will you evaluate these strategies at the end of the semester?
• What specific ways will you measure your success?

At the end of the semester, you will be given another assignment to write about your success in using these strategies.

Who Are We?

Find a person that you don’t already know who fits into each category. Write that person’s name in the space provided. You may use each person’s name no more than twice. This game is only for students; not the instructor!

• Vacationed this summer (name place)
• Can be found on MySpace or Facebook
• Likes Math
• Likes the same music as you (name it)
• Has traveled to a foreign country
• Is a continuing LMC student Is a new LMC student
• Has attended another college (name it)
• Has children (number)
• Doesn’t have children
• Who has a favorite TV show (name it)
• Doesn’t watch TV Is an athlete (name sport)

Classroom Management

One strategy is to develop class consensus on ground rules for classroom management.

Honor Thy Student

99.9% of our students have struggled greatly to make it to our classes. Let's acknowledge this!

Lighter Analogy

Turn off the lights. "Everyone in this class has the ability to reach inside and turn on one small light. One small light can make all of the difference in a dark room." Light a lighter in class. Turn on the lights. "How is light made?" Eventually, from friction. "What friction go you here?"

$20

Bring out a perfect twenty dollar bill. "What crap has happened to you?" Crumple it up. Continue to inquire of other's struggles. Poor fake soda on it, stomp on it, ridicule it. Then uncrumple it. "What's this worth?" Twenty dollars. "Exactly. It doesn't mater what's happened, everyone here has value."

Geneology

Help!

Autobiography

Help!

 

Suggested Reading

Mistakes Were Made (but not by me) by Carol Tavris and Elliot Aronson

Leading with Soul by Lee G. Bolman and Terrence E. Deal

 

Documents

    Awareness Survey

    When considering your past course work, how often:

    Covenant

    Beginning Evaluation

Quickies

You are a mathematician, and I will address you as such ("Mathematician Joe" "Mathematician Veronica")

Buy students a $1 binder for the first day

Mandatory voluntary office visits

Make a two-column table for Value and Time and see if your values parallel what you spend the most time doing.

How the Brain Works

Brain_PowerPoint_Oct_2007.pdf

Brain_PowerPoint_Oct_2007.ppt

Math Anxiety

Math Anxiety.pdf

I was given this very interesting article on math anxiety at the “First Year Experience” conference. In a gist, it attempts to disprove that math anxiety leads to low competence learning, which creates poor performance on standardized tests. It does this by attempting to prove that math anxiety “takes up” working memory, which hinders other processes that take up working memory (namely multi-problem math steps, such as borrowing in subtraction). This leads to longer reaction times and errors which create poor performance on standardized tests.

Or put another way, it’s not that people who suck at math never learned it and never will. In fact, many have learned math, but math anxiety reduces working memory so they can’t keep longer steps in mind, which means they suffer on multi-step math problems. Ever have students who get the individual steps but can’t piece it together??

The author’s summary is a little more than one sentence and begins on page 235. It does not require any statistics knowledge to read this summary.

However, there are some really cool statistical experiments/analysis that might be fun to dissect through email…

Have at it!

Happiness

This is a great article, I believe from Oprah, about current findings relating to happiness. There's a little on making positive changes with respect to study habits, but mostly it's life-related. This is arguably more important because, afterall, aren't we all about helping people create better lives for themselves? Take a look!

Happiness.doc

Great Website

This website has two great things, "Homework Guidelines" and a "Study Skills Self-Survey". The former has another name, "How to suck up to your teacher" and is fun way to introduce good homework techniques. Then have students grade their study skills and write a self-reflection piece.

http://www.purplemath.com/

Phone Calls

One the best things an individual professor can do for their students is to get student phone numbers on the first day of class, have strict attendence requirements, make at least weekly emails reminding them why they need to come to class, and call them when don't come. This last step is usually a negative one and doesn't sit well with usually optimistic, positive teachers. Here's a great solution from Jim Donohue of AVID Center. For every negative phone call, make two positive phone calls immediately thereafter. Simple, yet highly effective both for students and you as a teacher!

Review Before a Test

This is a great opportunity for community building. Students should all have some idea of the test material. Instead of lecturing through the review, have students do it! For example, start with the first part of the first question (define variables, etc). Ask for a volunteer or randomly choose one if people are shy. Once someone responds, ask another student, "Did that make sense? Do you have any questions?" If they say no, then ask this new student the second part of the question (find the slope, etc). If they get stuck, ask the class to help him/her out.

The idea is to facilitate a discussion. This can only be done if students have the tools to answer questions, which is why the review before a test is a perfect opportunity. When in doubt, say these three ideas

1. Break each problem into at least 3 sub-steps. Ask a different student each sub-step.
2. After one sub-step, ask a different student if the answer given makes sense or if they have questions. Then ask that student to do the next substep
3. If a student is stuck, ask the class to help them out. (This is where community building begins)

EC for Office Hours

Give students an extra credit point for coming to office hours! Why not!!

Weekly Plans

Have students make a weekly plan over the weekend for how they will accomplish everything they need to accomplish. Then have them reflect next weekend on how they did. Also, have them write a weekly plan for the next week. This is wonderful stuff. With little work on your part, you have increased temporal awareness, accountability and hopefully study habits!

Career Center

Many students either don't really know why they're going to college, are easily swayed, or have a firm but superficial goal (I want a BA). Students in these categories are at high risk for flight when the going gets tough. The career center has many career assessment tests to help start students reason throught their choice to attend college. It also has follow-up sessions, resume workshops, and may even have job placement/shadowing opportunitites. Give students an extra credit point to go there and take a test!

Journals

Julie experimented with having students answer weekly closure questions in their journals. It not only gave her good insight, but students really loved it. They would remind her to collect their journals or give them a question to write about. If students are thinking about math over the weekend, I think it's a good chance they will think to come to class during the week!

Visit their Work

One instructor finds out where her students work and then makes it a point to visit them at their work. What a cool idea and maybe you'll learn about your community to boot!

On Course

Check out this website for some great ideas!

http://oncourseworkshop.com/Student%20Success%20Strategies.htm

Case Study

I have had great success with simply calling students who are not attending with the premise of “What can I do to help?” Save for one student, whom I did not reach in time, I have 25 of my initial 26 students in Math 25. Save for one student who is leaving for the military in April, I have 34 of 35 students in Math 34. I have 10 of 10 students in my AVID Math 25 class. I am convinced it is not magic. This is my reasoning on why we lose students.

• 1. Students experience awful events that truly necessitate their not coming to class
  • a. Every time I think a student is flaking on a class, I find out they’ve had a 103 temperature for a week (their mother told me so), or their mother needs a third of her lung removed (driving, medication, babysitting ensues), or their boyfriend has been shot and killed (counseling, babysitting, finances), or they have been victims of essentially racist law enforcement officers (court, lawyers, finances), or their father has kicked them out of the house because he’s angry with his divorce (homelessness, finances)…
• 2. Instructors do not incessantly call their students to show their support, to find out how they can help, and to find out what is going on in their students’ lives that prevent them from coming to class.
  • a. I have found it takes no more than 2 hours/week to make phone calls and work with students after class. It is not a time issue.
• 3. When the crisis is over, because there was no contact made:
  • a. The student drops because they are too afraid/embarrassed to make contact
  • b. The student comes back and the instructor doesn’t realize that they were gone, so the instructor doesn’t work with the student on catching up and the student eventually drops/fails
  • c. The student comes back and the instructor takes personal offense and basically drives the student away
  • d. The student comes back, makes a monumental effort to finish the class, barely passes, then doesn’t sign-up next semester because they’re burnt out from doing it all alone
• 4. Retention goes down

There are many solutions for students dropping, but this one seems to work. Simply put:

UNTIL YOU REACH THEM, call students to support them and to find out how you can help them (not to berate them for not being there!). Spend a small amount of time figuring out a catch-up plan. If you find that a student has missed “too many” days of class, call/email me. I’ve worked through a couple of cases and can offer some advice. That’s it!

Honestly, these supportive, optimistic, (sometimes heart-wrenching) phone calls have become the most fulfilling aspect of my teaching experience. These students go through unbelievable odds to come here and hearing their story first-hand gives me more than I could ever give them.

I encourage you guys to give it a try!

Tue Rust

(925) 439-2181 Ext 3474

Los Medanos College