Breakfast

Mt. SAC Repertory Dance Company presents "Concessions"

Roberto Morales and Dylan Tillman

Welcome Remarks

Introduction: Education with Empathy

Professor Krislam Chin

Book Signing and Lunch

Student Support Program Tables

Session 1

Breakout Information Below

Teaching with your values: Critical consciousness and socio-technical instruction

Eugene L. D. Mahmoud

In this session, I would like to share the development of a project-based activity that allowed students to quantitatively and qualitatively analyze the design of voting district boundaries in the 2024 national election. Through this activity, students explored gerrymandering and adopted their technical learning to consider the ethical and professional responsibilities of the engineering profession. In addition to group collaboration, data analysis, and programming outputs as assessment deliverables, students participated in the activity through peer feedback, self-assessment, and a video presentations.

Fostering a Classroom Environment of Supportive Community, Depth of Content, and Mutual Respect

Jane Nazzal, PhD

In this session, participants will explore strategies for helping students reflect on their identities and use that self-awareness to build stronger relationships and a sense of community in the classroom. We'll also discuss how to create an environment that invites diverse perspectives, encourages thoughtful discussion, and promotes mutual respect while deepening content understanding.

Scaffolding Student Support-Seeking Behavior: Instructor Best Practices

Dianne Rowley, Learning Assistance Department

Explore instructor best practices in scaffolding academic support-seeking behaviors into course assignments and assessments. In other words, how can instructors embed opportunities for authentic collaboration with tutors and librarians into coursework?

Session 2

Breakout Information Below

Generative AI: How we got here and where we go from here

Eva Figueroa and Loni Nguyen

In November 2022, Open.ai launched ChatGPT. In just over 2 years, generative AI has rapidly improved and impacted higher ed resulting in both challenges and opportunities. From an equity perspective, this session considers the technological advancements that led to the launch of generative AI and explores research-based recommendations for adjusting to this change. Presenters will share specific examples of teaching with generative AI in Anatomy courses and practical resources to be adapted by participants. Participants will have hands-on work time to customize the recommendations, examples, and resources presented in this session to their own courses.

Integration of Student Learning Outcomes (SLOs) and Formative Assessments to Foster Equity-Minded Teaching and Learning

Prof. Kamran Golestaneh

Let’s reshape SLOs and harness their equity-friendly connection to assessments and student success. Teaching and learning can become complicated when our students bring diverse backgrounds—race, culture, family dynamics, socioeconomic status, and academic preparation—into our courses. When SLOs are clearly stated and analyzed, they can help our students meet course expectations and achieve success without compromising learning standards.

I will demonstrate the process of closing the gap between formative exams and SLOs, using ZipGrade and Excel analysis in the most effective way. The ultimate goal is to report students' strengths and weaknesses for each tested SLO and for each student, rather than just providing an overall exam score. Class statistics on the success rate per SLO will help us identify, shape, and fine-tune our teaching strategies.

You (session participants) will experience the process, starting with an anonymous short quiz on water quality and witness its full data analysis!

The 'other' AI: Authentic Interaction

Cassandra Velasco, M.A. Professor of English

Inspired by pedagogical practices brought to light by Gloria Ladson-Billings and Geneva Gay, this session highlights how creating authentic interactions between instructors and students facilitates not only retention, but more importantly, encourages students to recognize that the most important lesson to be learned when embarking on their educational journey is to value themselves.

Session 3

Breakout Information Below

Centering Equity in Tutor Professional Development

David Sarabia Manager, Academic Support Coordination; Dr. Kristina Alvarado Director, Academic Support and Achievement Center

Centering equity in our Tutor Professional Development work begins with recognizing and understanding the identities and needs of the students we serve. Our student population predominantly comes from the working-class, working-poor, and historically underserved social and educational backgrounds, many of whom are least familiar with the culture and expectations of postsecondary education. This reality underscores two key premises that inform our work: these identities matter, and the cumulative impact of underserved educational and social experiences can lead to academic disempowerment. By recognizing that these formative experiences shape learning at Mt. SAC, we create supportive environments where tutors demonstrate empathy and compassion.

In this session, participants will reflect upon and apply the centerpiece of our professional development program: Student Empowerment Strategies. These communication strategies, centered on the practice of Radical Empathy, are designed to highlight, and validate students' capabilities, aspirations, and the cultural and intellectual wealth they bring to our classrooms and academic support centers.

Self & Collective Refection as Strategy: Learning from Queer & Women of Color Educators

Librarian Prof. Eva Ríos-Alvarado

Self and collective reflection in our teaching can harness aspects of the conscious and subconscious to examine how we teach and who we are as educators. Designing your own grounding culturally responsive philosophy(ies) will undoubtedly require you to reflect and consider yourself in the cycle of teaching and learning. This session is structured to empower a personal and collective reflective moment by engaging our personal and collective teaching frameworks as critical conscious making. Invite some time pre-semester, in this session, to consider ourselves in relationship to our educational philosophies in practice. Learning from the teaching practices through the voices of other educators, we will use our time to reflect and discuss 4-5 quotes by women of color and queer educators.

Enhancing Equity through Transparent Assessments and Actionable Feedback

Prof. Alexa Stanfield

Let's be more equitable by being transparent with our students about how we assess and what we expect out of them! In this session we will learn about the importance of using clear and specific rubrics in our assessment of students to enhance equity, along with providing actionable feedback to help students improve. We will discuss strategies to develop rubrics that align with our student-learning outcomes, objectives, and expectations as instructors. In addition, we will look at what actionable feedback is and how we can incorporate it into our courses.