Foothill College Student Success and Equity Innovation Grant 2019

I am currently working on a team with Henry Fan and Steve Silva to develop a more robust set of learning support resources for Foothill College students. Together we are working on the Conquering College Project. In this Conquering College project, we focus on empowering Foothill students to achieve their goals by providing a learning support services program. This program consists of three powerful components including

1) An online video series entitled How We Conquer College: Student Practices. This video series will feature Foothill students sharing experiential knowledge in the form of narratives, storytelling, family and community histories, scenarios, and short biographies. These videos will empower diverse Foothill students to share their insights, experiences, and consejos with future generations of students who come to Foothill. The idea is to enable the cultural circles with peer-instruction from more advanced Foothill students.

2) An online video series entitled We’re at Foothill College to Help You Succeed that introduces Foothill students to what Foothill College Faculty and Staff would like their students to do, expect, and prepare for to succeed. 

3) A selection of Conquering College Principles worksheets (inventory, prompts) that provide students with detailed guidance on how to implement the suggestions made by students and staff in the video series.

Henry and Steve have produced some great samples of the type of work we want to accomplish. Below is a link to videos of Foothill students sharing wisdom about how they Conquer College! Enjoy.

FH Student Success and Equity Innovation Grant Sample Playlist

Conquering College, Study Skills Activities

My main goal as a coach, mentor, and instructor of college math students is to inspire, support, and guide you to create significant learning experiences in your education. To do so, I encourage you to focus exploring and developing six dimensions of learning in your courses: caring, learning how to learn, foundational knowledge, application, integration, and the human dimension. When considering all of the categories of significant learning, I believe that learning how to learn is by far the most important dimension of your work.

With this in mind, I hope to guide you to create systems that empower you to do deep, deliberate practice on a day-to-day basis.  Below are a series of activities that I call "study skills homework." These activities are designed to help you critically reflect on your learning. Many of these exercises will help you create and refine systems to thrive in your Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics courses at an accredited institution of higher education in the United States.

Let’s start with the Conquering College Laboratory Activities first. These activities guide students through some fundamentally important skills to create effective, efficient, research-based learning skills.

• Conquering College Lab 1: Schedule to Succeed

• Conquering College Lab 2: Prepare for Deep Learning

• Conquering College Lab 3: Prepare for Flipped Learning 

• Conquering College Lab 4: Create Your Dream Binder

• 40+ books to enhance and deepen your college education

My favorite way to introduce Conquering College ideas is through these types of lab activities. Below you’ll find some raw material that I plan to use in the future to create more of these types of labs. For students who want to learn how to get high grades on graded, in-class exams, I recommend working through activities 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, and 8 in that order (Note: Study Skills Activity 3 below covers similar ideas in less depth than Conquering College Labs 2 + 3. In other words, if you finish Conquering College Labs 2 + 3, you’ll get a much more thorough introduction to what is covered in study skills activity 3 below.

The goal of all this work is to help you develop yourself as an intentional, independent, self-regulated learner.