RIGHTS -- Inalienable! "Because my mommy said so!" It's a known fact.... How many of you have heard this when asked 'What are your Rights'? Are these your responses? These assumptions are repeated often without forethought or as a glib response to the question. How do we learn and/or establish the RIGHTS we assume that we have because we live in a democratic society. Obviously we have been taught, soaked, and at times brainwashed into believing that -- we deserve -- are given -- or should expect these RIGHTS whatever they are to be irrevocable and STATIC -- just because.
However, we as people, students, members of organizations, ethnic groups, etc., forget that we do indeed have rights -- but rights are DYNAMIC -- and they change -- they must be flexible -- and can be misconstrued according to definitions both denotatively and connotatively serving the purposes of whoever is defining it to suit whatever occasion, situation, and/or hidden agenda.
Then what are RIGHTS? How do we define them? Do we define them with rhetoric -- with words that are written for us or ingrained emotional reasons handed down from eternity? How can we be assured that what we believe is true, honest and straightforward? This is indeed a conundrum!
There is also the mistaken ideation with many that because we have RIGHTS that the PRIVILEGES that goe with certain rights are automatically assumed. Is this a correct assumption? A privilege you must remember -- is EARNED and is not an automatic GIVEN.
Of course we have rights, but if those rights are violated, abused, and/or altered due to a hidden agenda, the privileges that go with these rights can be taken from us or rightfully denied.
For example, Education is a right, but it is also a privilege and we must remember this. With your membership in PTK, the rights and privileges therein indicates that you should be well rounded in all areas -- academics, service to your school and community, to each other, your family, and most importantly yourself. Priorities must be set and focused upon to maintain this delicate balance to create a homeostatic environment of success.
How do we achieve this environment of success? RESPONSIBILITY -- of course. We as individuals and as a group must take the responsibility of our actions and not blame others for our failures, laziness, procrastination, and inadequacies. You will find that with the responsibilities and actions that we take to rectify, ameliorate, and habilitate everything both in and out of our environs -- SUCCESS will always be readily achievable.
Therefore, as the theme PTK espouses for this academic year of 1995 and '96 we as individuals and as a group in unity must meet the challenges at the personal, campus, and community levels.
We therefore, should always try to espouse the following:
RIGHTS:
PRIVILEGES:
RESPONSIBILITIES:
Grace is a member or the Faculty Development Committee.
Whether we call it critical thinking, problem solving, analytical reasoning, or creative thinking, faculty members in all disciplines and at all levels of higher education share a common goal: we would like our students to be able to perform the complex mental operations that will allow them to be successful in our classes as well as their future careers. While improving our students' thinking skills is a clear goal, there seems to be no single recipe that will succeed for each of us and for our particular students. It is apparent, however, that at least two main ingredients are essential: we must convince students that improving their thinking skills is necessary, and we must teach students the thinking skills that they need.
How do we convince students that improving their thinking skills is necessary?
Instructors of upper-level undergraduate and graduate students may not need to ask this question. Instructors who attempt to teach thinking skills to beginning-level college students, however, often encounter the plea, "Just tell me what you want." Students who are at the dualistic level of intellectual development described by Perry (1970) regard us, their instructors, as the ultimate authorities. These students often consider the development of their own thinking skills to be at best a "frill" and at worst an intrusion in the REAL substance of learning as they conceptualize it.
Show how thinking and learning are connected. One effective method of convincing our students skeptics that thinking and learning are inseparable processes is to emphasize from the beginning that our course has two complementary goals: to promote knowledge of the subject and to develop thinking skills. We can then demonstrate how thinking skills are used for the purpose of learning the subject. For example, we can assist our beginning-level students in developing strategies to pick out the major concepts or the most relevant information as they approach a section of text. If, as a result of practicing this skill, students' performance on tests and assignments in the course improves, their doubts about the importance of learning thinking skills will diminish. In addition, we will have helped them learn an ability that they will need in future courses: identifying the most important points in a chapter of an introductory biology textbook, for example, calls for many of the same thinking skills that identifying the salient issues in a case analysis demands in an upper-level or graduate course.
Create a sense of "mental disequilibrium." This is another technique for motivating students at all levels to think about course content rather than merely to memorize it. At the beginning of each class, pose a problem or raise a controversial issue related to the day's readings and/or class activities. Then, spend a few minutes at the end of the class soliciting students' ideas about how the problem or issue might be addressed. Students can work individually or in groups and can be asked to present their ideas either orally or in writing. This brief exercise will give students the opportunity to practice applying their knowledge and will also hold them accountable for doing so. The technique has two additional advantages; first, raising a question or issue in advance helps students by giving them a focus or framework for organizing the material that emerges during the class session. Second, student responses at the end of the class help you by giving immediate feedback about how well they grasped and applied the concepts introduced.
- Assess thinking as well as content knowledge. Assignments and examinations probably constitute the most powerful means of persuading our students that thinking skills are a necessary component for success in our classes. (Is there any college instructor who has not been confronted with the query "Will this be on the test?") If we are serious about encouraging our students to think more effectively, we must ask them to demonstrate both knowledge of content and mastery of thinking skills. There is no one "correct" type of assignment or examination question for this purpose. Term-paper assignments can be structured to guide even beginning-level students beyond summarizing the research and ideas of others into offering and justifying their own ideas and conclusions. Multiple-choice and short-answer test questions, if carefully constructed, can require students to go beyond lower-level thinking skills of recall and recognition of factual information (Bloom, 1956) into application and analysis. For example, after reading a paragraph describing the situation faced by a manufacturing company, students answering a multiple-choice question in economics are asked to select the response that will allow the company to maximize profits. In order to arrive at the correct answer, students must be able to choose and apply relevant rules and calculations to the situation described (Cameron, 1991). Another way to make multiple-choice tests into more thought stimulating exercises is, for a few selected questions, to have students describe their reasons for choosing or not choosing each answer (Statkiewicz and Allen, 1983). Because essay-type questions and assignments ask for open-ended response, they are useful for assessing higher level thinking and problem-solving skills. Essay questions are not without their pitfalls, however; a weighty question that appears to call for students to demonstrate sophisticated thinking skills may actually ask for a reiteration of information covered in class. The most effective question or assignment for assessing thinking skills is one that provides opportunities for students to use course-related knowledge and skills in a new situation or on a problem that they have not encountered before (Hart, 1989). How do we teach our students the thinking skills they need? A detailed answer to this question is beyond the scope of this article; however, the following ideas can be useful for instructors in all disciplines. - Model our own thinking processes. This is one very powerful, but often overlooked, technique. Our students are often intimidated by us, convinced that we were born competent in our subject area. We reinforce that illusion when we come into class time after time and unerringly analyze problems or issues in a definitive way that leads inevitably to the correct or most plausible solution. Most students have no idea how long it has taken us to reach our current level of competence. One writing instructor came upon a dramatic way to demonstrate that good prose does not flow magically from the author's brain onto the printed page. His students had been resisting the revision process. After asking them to read a published short story of his own, he brought to class a wastebasket overflowing with crumpled early drafts of that story. The whole atmosphere of the class changed: seeing the physical evidence of their instructor's struggles gave the students the courage to begin revising their own work. While many of us lack such tangible artifacts of our own past endeavors, we can occasionally work aloud through a problem or issue that is new to us. This will give students a more realistic picture of the mental efforts we must put forth when we approach novel problems or material: "Well, that seemed to lead to a dead end, so I better back up and see what happens when I do this.." We can point out the actual steps in our thinking process as we go along: "At this point I usually try to think of the different ways I know to approach problems like this..." In this way we can provide our students not only with answers, but also with valuable insights into our own individual and discipline-related thinking processes.
- Have students work together. We can build on the previous suggestion by giving students a problem or issue and asking them to work in pairs. One partner thinks through the problem aloud, while the other partner encourages accuracy and thoroughness by asking questions such as, "Why did you take that particular step?" or "Can you explain that in more detail?" (Whimbey and Lochhead, 1986). In addition to involving the entire class in active participation, asking students to work aloud transforms thinking into a visible operation that can be more readily evaluated. This technique can help students learn how to monitor the effectiveness of their own thinking processes, so that they are no longer dependent solely on us for feedback. - Give many practice opportunities. Students do not automatically apply thinking skills they have learned to other problem situations even in the same class, much less to other courses (Salomon and Perkins, 1989). Whatever thinking skills we emphasize, it is critical to give students many opportunities to practice applying those skills to a diversity of course-related issues and problems. - Collaborate with colleagues. As stated above, college students seem to have difficulty transferring thinking skills from one setting to another. We can work with faculty members in our own and in other disciplines to identify thinking skills common to our courses. We can then build into the course assignments that will reinforce students' use of those skills in a variety of classroom and clinical situations. If we take the time to teach thinking skills, how will we cover all of the content? Most of us are reluctant to omit, condense, or defer teaching any part of the discipline to which we have dedicated our professional lives. It may help us resolve the dilemma, however, if we view the teaching of thinking skills as an exchange, rather than as "giving up" something. We will be trading a small amount of course content for skills that will foster a deeper understanding of the discipline and that will allow our students to continue learning long after they have left our classrooms. References Bloom, B.S. (1956). Taxonomy of Educational Objectives. New York: Longman. Cameron, B.J. (1991). Using tests to teach. College Teaching, 39(4), 154-155. Hart, K.A. (1989). Assessing growth in thinking in college classes: a caveat. Accent on Improving College Teaching and Learning. Ann Arbor: National Center for Research to Improve Postsecondary Teaching and Learning. Perry, W.G. (1970). Forms of Intellectual and Ethical Development in the College Years. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston. Salomon, G. & Perkins, D.N. (1989). Rocky roads to transfer: rethinking mechanisms of a neglected phenomenon. Educational Psychologist, 24(2), 113-142. Statkiewicz, W.R. & Allen, R.D. (1983). Practice exercise to develop critical thinking skills. Journal of College Science Teaching, 12, 262-266. Whimbey, A. & Lochhead, J. (1986). Problem Solving and Comprehension (4th ed.). Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum. (Reprinted with permission from Teaching and Learning, Published by The Office of Faculty Development, UH-Manoa, Spring/Summer 1994) GENDER/ETHNIC EXPECTATIONS AND STUDENT EXPECTATIONS Although overt stereotyping is not as common as it was 20 years ago, subtler bias persists, hurting both females and males, especially those from diverse cultural backgrounds. The way teachers treat students reflects this bias. Gender/Ethnic Expectations and Student Expectations (GESA) examines five Areas of Disparity in the classroom and then encourages teachers to utilize research-based instructional strategies and resources to eliminate the disparities. The Areas of Disparity include; 1) Instructional Contact 2) Grouping and Organization 3) Classroom Management/Discipline 4) Enhancing Self-Esteem/Self-Concept 5) Evaluation of Performance The Areas of Disparity have proven to be generic and are applicable to concerns related to gender, race, national origin, developmental or physical disability, socioeconomic class, perceived ability, or any of the labels which tend to deal people out or permit them to deal themselves in or out of the educational system. The ways in which the disparities manifest themselves may differ within the between specific groups. The GESA program is based on the premise that in order to ensure quality and excellence on an equitable basis, school districts need to directly confront the issue of gender, race, ethnic and other bias in teachers' interactions with students. Once teachers have examined their own biases, as demonstrated by their own behavior toward all student, necessary curricular and other changes can be accepted more easily. Teachers who have participated in the GESA program increase the use of non-stereotypical behaviors, materials and activities. When disparities based on gender, race, ethnicity, class, and teacher expectations are reduced, students experience improved academic and interpersonal achievement and enhanced self-esteem. Participants are often amazed to learn about the effects of gender, race, ethnic, and other differences in their perceived expectations of students. GESA has been recognized by the National Education Association (NEA), the National State Boards of Education (NSBE), and the National School Boards Association (NSBA) as one of the most effective programs for students at risk. GESA has been recommended and utilized successfully in collaboration with National Science Foundation and Eisenhower grantees, School Improvement and Restructuring efforts and with district staff development funding. Nineteen HCC, two ETC, and nine DOE teachers have embarked on an academic year GESA training program. Funding for this training has been provided by a grant from the Office of the State Director for Vocational Education and The Carl D. Perkins Vocational and Applied Technology Education Act of 1990. Five Saturday workshops have been scheduled between November and March. After each workshop, teachers may observe in one another's classrooms, recording interactions and climate factors studied at the workshop. The workshops also provide teachers with resources to address specific curriculum issues in their classrooms. Participants from HCC and ETC include; Jess Aki, Cosmetology Kay Beach, ETC Staff Development Coordinator Jerry Cerny, Teacher Trainer and Faculty Development Coordinator Margaret Haig, Assistant Dean of Instruction Jim Hein, Aeronautics and Division IV Chair Kathy Kamakaiwi, Cosmetology Roger Kwok, Physics and Bridges Program Wayne Lewis, Mathematics Miles Nakanishi,, Human Services Ivan Nitta, Automotive Technology Stanley Oganeku, Division IV Programs Sandi Okasaki, ETC Counselor for Auto Body Repair and Painting Frank Ortiz, Sheet Metal Marcia Roberts-Deutsch, Art and Division I Chair Sherrie Rupert, Counseling and Committee on Gender Issues member Bert Shimabukuro, Automotive Technology Milton Tadaki, Auto Body Repair and Painting Lisa Takeuchi, Human Services Gordon Talbo, Automotive Technology Allen Tateishi, Refrigeration and Air Conditioning Stan Torricer, Welding Rona Wong, Counseling CHRISTMAS TRIVIA CONTEST In what country is Merry Christmas said this way? 1. Feliz Navidad 2. Joyeux Noel 3. Maligayang Pasko 4. Sheng Tan Kuai Le 5. Wesolych Swait 6. Of what is Frosty's hat made? 7. In what State can the city "Santa Claus" be found? (Hint: the state borders Illinois) 8. What well-known Christmas tale (also a song) did Clement C. Moore write? 9. What does the word wassail mean? 10. Name Santa's reindeer in the order in which the pull the sleigh. 11. What color are the berries on mistletoe? 12. What color aluminum tree was Charlie Brown suppose to get for the Christmas play? 13. What do you call the Mexican ornament that is broken on Christmas? Name the song from which each of these lines is taken; 14. He's making a list and checking it twice. 15. Troll the ancient Yuletide carol. 16. Say hello to friends you know and everyone you meet. 17. Fill your hearts with a Christmas cheer. 18. Children laughing, people passing, meeting smile after smile. 19. Let every heart prepare him room. 20. What does Alvin the chipmunk want for Christmas? 21. For whom is the poinsettia named? 22. Who tries to steal Christmas from the Whos in Whoville? 23. In what Christmas children's book do the animals living in a small canyon learn about Santa when they discover a discarded Christmas tree? 24. Some historians believe the first American Christmas carols were sung by a tribe of Indians. Which Indians tribe was it? 25. What part of Rudolph glows? FACULTY SPOTLIGHT DIVISION I Harvey Lacey, Instructor, Psychology, was recently featured in a "Star Bulletin" article documenting his delivery of a non-credit course last summer on how to get on a game show. Harvey has appeared on one game show and qualified for another. He states that the biggest key to getting on a show is a keeping a big smile on your face. Harvey won appliances for his appearance on "High Rollers," an early Alex Trebek quiz show. David Panisnick, Professor, Religion, regularly teaches at UH-Manoa in the Department of Religion during the summer. He has other ties to Manoa including supervising three Religion graduate students who will be teaching Religion 150 (World Religions) here at HCC this spring. DIVISION II Miles Nakanishi, Assistant Professor, HSERV/Early Childhood, and Cindi Uyehara, Instructor, HSERV/Early Childhood, report that the Professional and Career Education for Early Childhood (PACE) program has reached a milestone: surpassing 5000 enrollments in this early childhood and training outreach program. The Governor's Office of Children and Youth Open Doors Project has contracted PACE to provide 96 workshops next semester. These workshops will break new ground as they will include 98 workshops on the neighbor islands. Linda Buck, Professor, HSERV/Early Childhood, is the principal investigator of this contract. Chulee Grove, Instructor, OSH, spent two months last summer with the U.S. EPA Region IX laboratory in Richmond, California. The majority of her time was spent at superfund sites, where she gained first-hand experience in site characterization and field sampling techniques. This was funded by the Partnership for Environmental Technology (PETE) Faculty Associate Program. Stacy Rogers, Assistant Professor, Fire Science, spent two months last summer at the Public Works Center at Pearl Harbor where he obtained hands-on experience in hazardous material/waste management, and tentatively established an internship program for students from the OSH program. This was funded by the Partnership for Environmental Technology (PETE) Faculty Associate Program. Kathy Kamakaiwi, Assistant Professor, and Jess Aki, Instructor, both from Cosmetology were recently honored on the KITV Channel 4 Hana Hou Volunteer of the Week segment. They were recognized for their service to the community through their work at the Manoa Valley Theater. Channel 4 recognized Kathy and Jess for bringing their knowledge and expertise from the classroom into the community theater. The Cosmetology students, under the advising of the Cosmetology instructors, Nancy Beth Au, Professor, Kathy Kamakaiwi, Assistant Professor, Jess Aki, Instructor, and Samantha Wright, Instructor, recently designed hair styles for the Holiday Season, as well as dance numbers, and entertained the shoppers at Ala Moana Shopping Center's center stage. DIVISION III Nobuko Pugarelli, Professor, Japanese, presented a paper titled "Oe Kenzaburo and the Fifty Year Postwar Period" at the Annual conference of the Asian Studies of the Pacific Coast last summer. Her paper has been accepted by the association as one of the best presented at the conference and will soon be accessible through the HomePage of the association on the World Wide Web. DIVISION VI Merv Chang, Associate Professor, Architectural Drafting, has won the Hawaii District Class "A" (3.5 Hydroplane) Championship for radio controlled model boats for the 1994-95 season. He will be competing in the 1996 North American Model Boating Associating (NAMBA) National Championship Regatta in California next July. Merv can be found racing his boats most Sundays on the Kahaluu pond. He hopes to bring home some trophies from the Nationals! DIVISION VIII Evelyn Puaa, Instructor, TLC, is the Chair of the Conference Committee for the Hawaii Mathematics Association for Two Year Colleges. She recently coordinated the first annual Fall Conference. Several other HCC math types attended including Frank Mauz, Associate Professor, John Sword, Instructor, Karen Deutsch, Lecturer, and Claire Herold, Instructor, TLC, who facilitated a discussion group on the state budget and community college mathematics. _______________________________________________________________________ If your activities/news were not included in the Faculty Spotlight and you wish them to be, pass the information on to any FD Committee member. The information will be included in the next issue of the Faculty Development Newsletter. ________________________________________________________________________ This newsletter was organized and published by your HCC Faculty Development Committee. Members: Jerry Cerny, (Coordinator, Co-editor), Wayne Lewis, (Co-editor), Grace Ihara, Kathy Kamakaiwi, Pat Gooch, Lei Lani Hinds, Elizabeth Sakamaki, Ivan Nitta, Mike Jennings, Shanon Miho, and Evelyn Puaa.