Student Success & Equity with Dr. Lisa Brewster

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Learn about inquiry and action teams and how they help college educators continually improve their craft.

In this episode, I interview Dr. Lisa Brewster, Communication Faculty and Guided Pathways Coordinator at Miramar College, San Diego.

(Scroll down to access the transcript.)

This podcast is part of an inquiry & action teams series, starting with how Santa Barbara City College implements their teams per career & academic community, program, and discipline (check out SBCC's podcast episode with Margaret Prothero). The second episode unpacks how Irvine Valley College implements twelve teams (checkout IVC's episode with Rebecca Kiminsky). This episode focuses on Miramar College, which implemented inquiry & action teams that led to significant and gradual positive culture change. 

Inquiry & Action Teams (fully explained in this video, which shows the contrast between this type of team and a case management team).

We cover the following key topics:

02:08:55: Dr. Brewster's creative outlet.

11:08:25: Launching the inquiry & action work. Two teams: STEM & Humanities, Arts, Languages & Communication (HALC).

The process has engaging prompts for each step and directions to help a team on their journey toward improving practices with equity intentionality. 

19:33:50: Data-informed focus of the first two teams launched. The STEM team's projects included creating paired courses to better support students in math and a faculty-to-student mentoring program for science students. The HALC team focused on the student voice and improving online teaching and learning. 


28:51:00: Next cohort of teams and their work: Business & Entrepreneurship (B&E) and Social & Behavioral Sciences and Education (SBS&E) The B&E team focused on clarifying the path into business and ensuring students understood their career opportunities. The SBS&E team focused on creating community in an online environment through canvas. 

35:17:50: The impact of inquiry & action team work on the broader campus.

41:52:00: Positive culture shift continues as the college works on a variety of projects. Select project highlighted below.

"Every student takes at least one course in term 1 on topics of interest that 'light their fire' for learning." Dr. Davis Jenkins, CCRC Senior Research Scholar
Miramar created "light the fire" PD modules.

A canvas was created for each ACP. All in-coming students are automatically enrolled in their ACP canvas to create community and ensure students have access to critical information to inform their academic journey.

47:38:50: Advice for educators who take on culture-changing work  

Select Dr. Lisa Brewster episode quotes:

"The college finally got to the point where they recognized that a committee of 35 wasn't actually going to move anything on campus. They needed to really look at how do they create a structure on the campus that will engage people."

"As the Guided Pathways coordinator who was meeting with the first two inquiry and action teams, and reading their documents and going through what they were doing, I saw that they were hitting the same thing just in different ways. They recognized that the biggest concern that we had for our students was that they didn't feel like they belonged to either a community or the college. It's been exciting to see that each of these teams looked at almost the same thing, came up with different approaches or strategies, and then how it's snowballed into the whole campus."

"You have to look at your culture. I think that's an important and you have to look at where they are and then you have to look at who you are, and your personality. You have to be able to do two things. One, you have to be able to make those connections, individual connections with people. And you also have to be willing to say and show that you don't know everything and that you are on this journey with them and that there's no right or wrong. Even when the teams were going down a path and maybe I didn't see it or I wasn't sure, it wasn't me to judge, it was them to figure out the journey."

About Dr. Lisa Brewster
Dr. Lisa Brewster began her higher education career in 1992 during her master’s program in Speech Communications at San Francisco State University. In 1999, Lisa moved from San Francisco, where she taught in the Communications department at the University of San Francisco, to begin her career as a faculty member at Miramar College in San Diego. During her tenure at Miramar, Lisa has had many opportunities to engage in conversations about the evolution of higher education serving as the Learning Outcomes Coordinator when SLO’s were being introduced to community colleges, as the Basic Skills Coordinator, when California began the redesign of developmental courses, and now with Guided Pathways. As a change agent, Lisa takes pride in building a collaborative process where faculty, classified professionals and managers collectively work together to institutionalize strategies aimed at improving student success and equity. 

About Dr. Al Solano
Al is Founder & Coach at the Continuous Learning Institute. A big believer in kindness, he helps institutions of higher education to plan and implement homegrown practices to improve student success and equity by coaching them through a process based on what he calls the "Three Cs": Clarity, Coherence, Consensus. In addition, his bite-sized, practitioner-based articles on student success strategies, institutional planning & implementation, and educational leadership are implemented at institutions across the country. He has worked directly with over 50 colleges and universities and has trained well over 5,000 educators. He has coached colleges for over a decade, worked at two community colleges, and began his education career in K12. He earned a doctorate in education from UCLA, and is a proud community college student who transferred to Cornell University.

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