In a collaborative project involving San Francisco State University and the Foothill-DeAnza Community College District, Summer Teaching Institutes continue to be offered to community-college faculty of the San Francisco Bay area. These institutes introduce faculty to the concepts and attitudes of scientific teaching and provide professional development for faculty to change their practices to include goal setting and assessment to determine whether the goals have been met. In this expanded second stage of the project, a second Advanced Summer Institute is available to graduates of the first who are interested in collaborating to develop a common assessment tool. This tool applied to the population of San Francisco area community college students generates powerful data measuring the effectiveness of scientific teaching on student learning. Additional activities of the emerging learning community include Teaching Squares, groups of four faculty at one or several institutions who meet together regularly to share teaching strategies and observe each others' classes; and Classroom Partnerships between a mentor community college faculty member and a SFSU graduate student interested in pursuing college-level teaching as a career. The enthusiastic response to the first phase of this project demanded that it be extended and amplified. To do so in the direction of establishing data on effectiveness makes the experience all the richer. This project is being jointly funded by the Directorate for Biological Sciences and the Directorate for Education and Human Resources, Division of Undergraduate Education as part of their efforts toward Vision and Change in Undergraduate Biology Education.
