In this episode, I interview Rebecca Kaminsky, English Faculty and former Guided Pathways Coordinator at Irvine Valley College.
(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 episode with Miramar College focuses on how inquiry & action teams led to significant and gradual positive culture change (check out Miramar College's podcast episode with Dr. Lisa Brewster). This episode focuses on Irvine Valley College, which implements 12 inquiry & action teams!
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:
First, Murray participated in the conversation. Here's Murray :)
7:56:00: Getting the coalition of the willing.
The process has engaging prompts for each step and directions to help a team on their journey toward improving practices with equity intentionality.
Sample work product: Classified Professional Team's First Gen Event Series
19:17:00: A-ha's from the inquiry & action process and the move toward equitable changes to practices.
To provide a sense of the scope and breadth of the inquiry and action team work, here's the folders for the 12 teams, which includes a comprehensive work product tracker of all teams' work.
Each inquiry & action team (or "Completion Team" as IVC calls them) has its own folder with dozens of documents that record their meaningful journey to action. Humanities team example:
40:58:25: It's a lottery for students: the realization of significant grading policy variance for the same course in different sections.
Grading Variance: A team took a deeper dive into grading policies and practices for different sections of the same course. The findings showed one student with the same scores, but the policy changes the final grade depending on the section the student is enrolled in. Sometimes the variance is even more stark. Here, it is the difference between a B and C.
49:34:50: Moving beyond equity talk.
Resource: Learn about the "in-between."
About Rebecca Kaminsky
Rebecca Kaminsky is an English Professor at Irvine Valley College and former Guided Pathways Coordinator. As English faculty, she participated in multiple measures and developmental education reform implementation. In her role working on Guided Pathways, she helped institute Design Teams, implement Interest Areas, develop academic roadmaps, work on college’s Find Your Path webpages, and later IVC’s new website, and launch Completion Teams.
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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