Despite all that happened in 2020, the math department at Clackamas Community College in Oregon City, OR had one of its most collaborative and productive academic years. We can thank AMATYC, NSF, and the Teaching for PROWESS leadership for providing these opportunities and partnering with us to develop and carry out a plan for instructional improvement in our STEM pathway.

Back in early 2020, we found out about an opportunity to be a Phase I college in an AMATYC project focused on improving teaching through active learning. Our department had spent the past several years on improvements to our Statistics Pathway, as well as on implementing multiple-measures placement. Both of these projects helped students tremendously – our STATS pathway became more student-centered and infused with growth mindset and active learning.  Our placement office began placing students an average of 2 levels higher than the placement test had before, and those students succeeded at the same or higher rates. During all of this, we knew that our next area that needed improvement was our STEM pathway – in particular the four classes from College Algebra through Calculus II.

From the beginning, we knew our participation in TfP would give us an opportunity to work on our STEM curriculum and train our department on active learning strategies for the classroom. What we didn’t expect is the community building, and big picture departmental procedures and routines that we would have a chance to reflect on as a team. By reading papers, participating in professional development workshops, and being connected with the TfP Leadership team and our Phase I colleagues at Chandler-Gilbert CC, we have learned so much about the research on successful calculus programs. All of this has helped shape our project to better serve our department.

A few highlights from this year:

• Development of new materials for our College Algebra course, designed to foster student engagement and ownership of the material.
• Partnering with our fellow STEM faculty in Engineering, Physics, and Biology to review learning outcomes in Calculus II and create capstone projects designed to help students transition from our math pathway to their science courses.
• Regular sharing sessions with CGCC, the other Phase I IMPACT college. These give us an opportunity to learn from them and get feedback on our work.

During the next two years of our project, we will be helping our department to implement some of these best practices, such as more robust course coordination, to create a culture of sharing and learning among the faculty. This should result in a more grassroots effort to share strategies for engaging students in active learning, which fits our department better than a top-down approach. Thanks to our participation with this project, we are poised to become a more organized, more collaborative, and better informed department, allowing us to make a real impact on our students’ mathematical prowess.