Where do we begin with what I've called a dense, dark star of connected skills and habits? In our first foray into our college's teaching of Learning to Learn, we'll begin with agency, something we know is fundamental to student success. When students feel they are active agents in their lives and education, their potential soars. And we'll get there by looking at mindset. Our guest is Tom McKenna, a Math Professor and COL lead for the School of STEM. For Tom, "mindset is everything." Tom, a former Naval pilot, talks about how he's learned to build essential skills and growth mindset into his teaching from the first day of class. Listen in for Tom's perspective on the vitality a growth mindset for students, and for professors, can bring to our instructional community.

Episode webpage: https://sites.google.com/view/iepod/s3-episode-2

Ahead of our April Zoom about our FSL Common Read book, this episode begins Chapter 4: Creating Relationship-Rich Classrooms. We hear the story of Imad Mays at Pima Community College. Faced with a choice between curriculum and connection, she chose relational connection. What is your choice in these moments?

Welcome to Season 3 of Instructional Ecology. It's spring here in South Carolina, midway through our full semester. And we're kicking off an exploration of our topic for this season: Learning to Learn. Learning to learn is a complex, intertwined set of skills and crucial to success at our open enrollment college. We'll look into this set of skills and at the road of the season ahead with the help of Center for Teaching Excellence Director Mary Helen Hendrix. Find out about some of the topics and guests we'll have on the show this season and explore with us further into the web of our community.

We've wrapped up Chapter 3 for the FSL Common Read so we'll take a little break before we begin Chapter 4. Listen in to hear about the new season of Instructional Ecology that's currently in production! We'll reveal our season topic and tease a few stories you'll hear from professors and staff around the college.  

We wrap up Chapter 3 of Relationship Rich Education by Peter Felton and Leo Lambert by looking at two of the most challenging components to change at any institution: climate and culture. What do the authors say about these two elements of institution mission and what can we learn from them? Listen in for where this part of the book arrives.

This 6-minute episode puts some pressure on the authors of our Common Read book not just to tell us what we should “value” as a community but what action we would have to take to put that valuing into action. This helps us as the questions: what we do we want our culture of work here at the college to be like? What would we be willing to do to achieve it? Crucial questions to ask ourselves. 

We continue with Chapter 3: Making Relationships a Cultural Priority and touch on a topic we didn't get to in our in-person discussion. The authors find that in order to fully support students, institutions must invest in high quality teaching practices. Let's explore how the college is working to do this now and in the future.

Let's begin Chapter 3 of Relationship-Rich Education, our FSL Common Read book. We'll greet the midpoint of the book and the program by a refreshment of purpose. Then we'll begin with the chapter epigraph and finally begin to turn to how to address change at higher ed institutions.

Don't forget - all MTC faculty, staff and leadership are invited to our bi-monthly zoom Friday, January 20th at 11am! We hope to see you there and hear your perspective.

Happy new year, my community! For our first episode of 2023, we close out Chapter 2 of our FSL Common Read book, Relationship-Rich Education. We'll look at how the chapter ends on a crucial meditation: that the work is already happening and that we need more ways of making it visible in our teaching culture. How could that look at MTC? Let's think together about possibilities.

This story begins with an act of service. 

This episode is about another absolutely vital part of our college and instructional ecology: our MTC network of administrative specialists. 

This episode is going to take you all over the college. It will take you to London. To a little town in West Virginia. It will take you to a part of the campus that can feel a bit like a doctor’s waiting room. To another place on campus that has to refrigerate its students and professors. You’ll be in the guts of a printer and you’ll travel back in time to the Covid lockdown. You’ll get to see our college through the eyes of a very specific network. It's a very administrative specialist experience. We talk to four administrative specialists and the director of the program at MTC who teaches our students the skills our admins use all day.

Finally, we wrap up Season Two with some thinking about what we've found by looking at our instructional community as an ecosystem.