Instructors Design Project

In the last few posts I've written about a team of  college instructors I'm working with who are planning a cross-curricular, integrated project for a pilot program at a community college. In the last post I described the process through which the instructional team identified four possible project-driving questions to take back to the students for their final selection. Here's what has happened since I last wrote.

Last week the math, reading and writing, and college success instructors presented the four driving questions to the students. They related the questions to the program outcomes and then asked the students to vote for their favorite question by silent ballot. The winning question was nearly unanimous as students selected the following: How can we design and develop a multi-media presentation to illustrate the ways in which students in this cohort are alike and different, and similar or dissimilar to our city at large? How can we work with our differences to become an actual community?

After the instructors tabulated the results and presented the winning question to the students, they asked them what was compelling about that question. The strongest theme to emerge was that they had entered the program with a great amount of fear and the assumption that their journey through the program would be a solo one, but in actuality, what they had experienced was that they had become a team, one that provided ongoing encouragement, support and even accountability for each other.

Today in our instructional team meeting we revisited the connection between the program outcomes, the theme of teamwork, and the selected question, examined the college calendar (4 weeks remaining in the term) and decided to modify the question slightly to accommodate the short time frame. They dropped the comparison with our city at large, and settled on: How can we design and develop a multi-media presentation to illustrate the ways in which students in this cohort are alike and different and how have we worked with that to become an actual community?

The next step in our meeting was to identify the student work products that, when completed, would serve to answer the question. The four products were as follows:

1. Develop five written interview questions each, to include finding ways to ask how their peers went from fear and isolation to a sense of community (reading and writing class).

2. Interview another student in the cohort and record the interview on video (outside of class).

3. Conduct independent research around group dynamics and effective team communication (college success class) and represent their findings from their independent research and interviews in graphs (math class). Compare and contrast qualitative vs. quantitative research (math and college success classes).

4. Write a personal reflection on their own experience of moving from fear and isolation to community and success through a choice of written poetry projects from a set of activities I shared around healing trauma.

The final project will be a 15-20 minute student presentation in which some interviews, some original poetry selections, and some of the graphs will be selected by the students to represent their work in answer to the driving question, making sure that each student (about 10 total) had one piece of work represented in the final multi-media product.

My admiration for this team of college instructors continues as they unanimously decided to replace their current remaining course activities with the above, realizing they could accomplish their original course outcomes along with the project outcomes using the cross-curricular, integrated assignment they'd just designed.