Instructional Ecology

As we enter Persephone Days here in Columbia, when we drop below 10 hours of daylight in 24, we again try to sit in that pause when things have gone wrong and we're unsure what to do next. We talk with Tinesha Croom who is both an advisor and a faculty member at the college. Her perspective in both of these positions offers important perspective on student response to failure and how we as faculty...

Welcome to the second in our series of failure storytelling this season. And it’s got some incredible scope to it. Today’s storyteller not only tells his failure stories as needed, he has a published a short autobiography that unflinchingly describes the very difficult first half of his life. Hameen Shabazz, in our Academic and Career Advising unit, endured a turbulent and violent childhood. The p...

We're back in Chapter 2: Learning Matters of our FSL Common Read book! Here we connect the text to a very cool project happening at MTC: this semester's rollout of a series of seven video PSAs about learning principles in our MTC community! Listen in to hear about Theater professor Ilene Fins' creative way to get learning best practices to our community in new ways. Don't learn alone! Watch the vi...

In this episode, we engage one of the issues that higher education has never solved: what to do when students' academic failure is rooted in their life circumstances outside of the classroom. As an open enrollment college with neither dorms nor on-campus food service, we don't provide a baseline of basic needs support that residential colleges do. Also, we serve a broad sampling of the community s...

Join us to talk about Chapter 2: Learning Matters! We talk about the tension between discouraging trends and optimism for what's possible when we focus in new ways on learning in our institutions.

Welcome to our first of the failure stories this season. We're offering the chance to faculty and staff to tell their experiences with failure in higher education to make visible the experience and after-effects of failure. When students hear stories about those who are successful and understand that success is far more complex than it appears, they have the chance to gain perspective when they fa...

We're in the dark now and we begin with an element of failure that makes it radioactive in higher education: its emotion. The feeling of failure is intense and those in an educational community often have little guidance about best practices when a student is in failure and feeling strongly. So our guide this episode is someone who sits with student emotion all day: Cyntrelle Legette, one of our t...

Welcome to Season 4 of Instructional Ecology!  In this first episode of the new season, we stand at the gates of the underworld of higher education: failure. We kick off the season with our guiding questions and our intentions for this season. We'll be once again moving around the college to better understand the place of failure in higher education and how we might better respond to students expe...

The FSL Common Read is back this month! Let's get ready with a glimpse into chapter 1 at the very beginning where the authors situate us in the world as they see it. In this episode, we see the authors suggest that we can flourish amsit the challenges and uncertainty of the moment we live in.

Our next full season of Instructional Ecology drops in September! Listen in for details of the topics and who we're in conversation with in our community.

The Fall semester is about to begin! Ease into our new FSL Common Read book, The Undergraduate Experience, with a quick look into the Introduction. The authors have particular hopes about how communities like ours will use this book. Our first FSL Common Read event is next month so get here's a chance to get a sense of the conversation ahead!

We announce our book for the upcoming 2023-2024 FSL Common Read beginning again in August!

Our season finale is here in our time together about learning to learn. The "dense, dark star" we began with has proven to be a constellation of many centers of light and gravity. In this episode, we spend time considering all we've uncovered this season, across the college as well as within the seven skills or states of being we explored.  We'll have a quick check-in with Christine Witkowski, pro...

In Episode 8, Connection, we talked with Angela Griffin, an MTC Psychology professor. In our original recording of that conversation, she told a harrowing and rich story of failure in her higher education life.  We've turned that story into its own short bonus episode so that we can give it due attention.  Join us to hear Angela's story and think through how you would have handled the situation as...

We began our season with the dense, dark star of the skills of learning to learn. By today’s episode, late in our season, we see that single star has been revealed to be an intricate constellation of disparate points of light and gravity. Our conversation in this episode is about creating constellations of meaning and support through the skills and experience of connection. Our guests have come to...

What does it mean to study in higher education? Many, many students who arrive at our doors don't have concrete answers because they have not been taught methods for higher education.  This episode digs into the skill of studying and ways of teaching those skills in the classroom and in tutoring. We turn to the Academic Success Center's experts to get these answers. We talk with ASC Director, Troy...

We're at the end of our FSL Common Read year together and on June 9th, we'll have our final Zoom event! We'll discuss the "Postscript in a Pandemic" that the authors added in Spring of 2020 to close out their book. In this episode, we look at the Postscript to think about how the pandemic was so challenging for higher education relationships and how MTC responded.

In this episode, we arrive at an inevitable part of the process of learning: failure. But do students understand that failure is inevitable at some, or many, points?  This episode is a three-way conversation between your host, STEM advisor William Golston, and professor of Political Science TJ Kimmel. Together, we compare experience with failure in education and our two guests talk about how they...

Play! Over the course of the 20th century, research brought to light what now seems obvious: that playing is how children learn first and best about the world and their lives in it. But in our culture, adults usually are not supposed to be seen to play. Does this mean that we're sacrificing a source of learning possibility? Is there a place for play as learning in higher education? Our two guests...

This episode’s aspect of learning to learn involves a skill that can become a lifetime’s habit of mind: self-reflection. Intertwined with agency, reflection is the skill that differentiates between having experience and learning from experience. It's quite possible to refuse to learn and change based on experience: it's reflection that leads to action that gives learning traction. In this episode,...

It's time for the April FSL Common Read Zoom! We'll be discussing Chapters 5 and 6 of our book. In this micro-episode, we consider two brief examples of how colleges have changed a few basic practices to enact relationship-rich principles to great effect. We at MTC won't be able to replicate these practices exactly - but we CAN transform them to fit our circumstances and the way our students need...

Moving on from our conversation about tools students can use in learning, we come to a state of mind or state of being: frustration. In this episode, we explore a highly ambiguous part of the learning process. For some, frustration is a spur, a sign that learning is picking up steam and that they just have to keep working because they're getting closer than ever to their goals. But for many studen...

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...

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...