At Las Positas College, our collaborative team of English and counseling faculty has used collaborative inquiry to connect student voices, institutional data, and program innovation to examine LPC’s English curriculum.
Our inquiry project was inspired by our department’s long-standing questions about our open-access basic skills program structure:
- Is a two-semester developmental English track needed?
- If so, which students need this track?
- Why is our one-semester, accelerated developmental English track so successful?
- What processes are required to identify and guide students to one track or the other?
- What instructional support structures are required to help all students be successful?
The opportunity to focus on these questions with the intensity of attention made possible by the FIN grant has forever changed us. Elena Cole, our team leader, said it best in a video made at the mid-point of the first semester of our two-year grant.
Video [“LPC Inquiry Update”]
We hope that this site demonstrates why inquiry has become so important to us. Visit the links under “Inquiry Beginnings” to learn more about our initial program structure, the questions we brought to our inquiry project, and how our program is evolving to meet learners’ needs. You will also find information about our team and our school. Click on “Student Power!” to learn how central student co-inquirers have been to our project. Consult “Data Everywhere” to access the data we gathered from our students. Look to “Data into Action” to see how our inquiry has led to changes in our assessment and placement process, our curriculum, and our program structure. Click “Research Tools” to access blank versions of our inquiry tools: course reflections, telephone inquiry, lesson study, students interviewing students, surveys, and researching other programs. We have found these tools essential to learning more about our learners’ needs and to illuminating the student success and SLO data our school already collects. Finally, visit “Going Public” to review our various presentations on our inquiry.
