Chabot College
UNIT PLAN
MEMO TO: Chabot faculty and staff
FROM: Institutional Planning and Budget Committee
DATE: October 6, 2005
SUBJECT: Preparation of your 2006-07 unit plan
To facilitate long-term and short-term planning for Chabot and all its units, the Institutional Planning and Budget Council has developed a format for each unit to use in creating its plan. The unit plan for each unit is due to your Dean or Immediate Supervisor no later than December 9, 2005.
The Unit Plan not only clarifies a direction for continuous improvement for the unit and thus for the college, but also allows each unit to recognize its uniqueness and gives a voice to each unit.
Your task as you complete the unit plan is to describe your unit thoroughly. Include what is unique about you, what you are proud of, what your hopes and needs are, etc.
What is a “Unit?”
During summer of 2005, the IPBC met to talk over what should be considered a unit. After an exercise, the information generated was condensed into the following definition:
“A Unit is an entity/group which
a. has a mission that is definable and related to the college mission, and
b. provides a specific or related operational or educational service.”
At the end of this form, you will find a handout from IPBC that details this work of IPBC on Unit Plans. A draft list of which units should do a Unit Plan is included.
Do We Still Have to do a Discipline Plan?
No. The information that would have been included in your discipline plan (if you indeed had to do one of those) is subsumed in the Unit Plan.
Where do I Find the CEMC Enrollment Report?
Ask your Dean or Supervisor to run the reports that you need for Item #5a. Each semester should be run separately. Use the Division/Subject/ Course/Section report to attach to the Unit plan. This is the report where you can see enrollment for each section separately.
Where do I Find the Success Reports?
Ask your Dean/supervisor to provide this information (needed for Item #5e) to you. Use the most recent data available.
Where do I find the Disicpline Plan Spreadsheet? This is needed for Item 5d.
Go to the Chabot Intranet. In the “Committee Intranet Websites” area, click on Institutional Planning and Budget Council (IPBC). Search for the Unit Plan spreadsheet. Copy it to your desktop or whatever directory on your computer makes sense. You’ll need to do Discipline Plan Spreadsheets separately for Summer, Fall, and Spring.
CHABOT COLLEGE UNIT PLANS
2006-2007
Unit Plan Narrative
DUE TO YOUR DEAN OR SUPERVISOR DECEMBER 9, 2005.
Unit:
ESL (English as a Second Language)
Division or Area to Which You Report:
Language Arts
Author(s) of this Unit Plan:
Fe Baran, Gayle Hunt, Carol Murray, Linnea Wahamaki.
Date: December 5, 2005
NOTE: If an item does not apply to your unit, you need not answer it. If you are doing program review, attach the paperwork from your program review materials and DO NOT answer items 1 through 6 below.
1. Mission of this Unit:
To prepare our students with the language and study skills needed to reach their goals, whether academic, business, or society-related.
2. Description of the Unit:
a. The achievements of your unit from last year/what you are proud of:
Our students consistently make us proud with their performance and persistence.
b. Special activities of your unit:
In addition to a variety of academically-oriented ESL courses, our unit also is responsible for the Language Center, which provides ongoing tutorial support to ESL students and foreign language students here at Chabot. For the past year, two of our instructors, Gayle Hunt and Linnea Wahamaki, have been designing an experimental CALWORKS/ESL project to help improve success rates of voc-tech students at Chabot. This particular program has been in the developmental stage since spring semester 2005 and will be implemented in the spring semester 2006. Additionally, this project will allow us to expand the open hours of the Language Center from the current 16 hours/week to
32 hours/week.
c. How your unit is staffed (what categories/classifications of people work there?):
Our unit has five full-time ESL instructors, one shared full-time instructor (Foreign Language), and twelve adjunct instructors.
d. Add any other information you feel is necessary to describe your unit.
No.
3. Goals and Objectives of the Unit:
a. What goals/objectives are you planning to work on and what will you achieve in 2006-07?
For the upcoming 2006/2007 academic year, our unit has two goals:
1) Reaching out to the college through the CALWORKS/ESL project;
2) Improving students’ ability to edit their own work (ESL SLOAC).
b. List the activities you will do in support of achieving each of these goals.
1) Offer two sections of ESL 128 specifically for Chabot’s voc-tech student population. Two sections will be offered spring 06, fall 06, and spring 07.
2) Organize and conduct monthly level meetings for ESL 110 core courses to provide ESL instructors with the opportunity to discuss student learning outcomes related to development of self-editing strategies. Compile and distribute relevant information and offer a workshop for all ESL faculty in March, 2006 to evaluate the efficacy of the various strategies under discussion.
c. If there are costs over and above the 05-06 budget, fill out one of the “Proposal for New and Improvement Initiatives” forms and attach it to your unit plan. You will find a blank one of these forms attached to this document.
d. Describe how the goals in this item relate to the goals you list in Item #4.
4. Relationship of your unit to the 2006-07 Strategic Plan (attached)
Reflecting on the information in item #3 and the 2006-07 Strategic Plan, which of the goals/objectives in the attached 2006-07 Strategic Plan is your unit going to address in 2006-07? How do you plan to address these goals/objectives? A copy of the 2006-07 Strategic Plan is attached to this document. Please complete the chart below with this data.
STRATEGIC GOAL ADDRESSED / YOUR SUBGOAL / ACTIVITIES TO ACHIEVE THE SUBGOAL / RESPONSIBLE PERSONS / COSTSB3, A3, A2, D2 / Increase success rates of voc-tech students at Chabot College. / Offer two ESL 128 sections; target afternoon availability; expand open hours of the Language Center until 6 pm 3 days/week. / Gayle Hunt / (Covered by CALWORKS grant)
D2 / Improve learning success rates in ESL classes, particularly in ESL 110’s. / Refer students to Language Center more regularly; coordinate Language Center work with teachers. SLOAC project. / Language Center Coordinator and ESL instructors. / N/A
5. Written plan for the unit:
The written plan for the unit replaces the former discipline plan. It is the part of the unit plan where you talk about what you propose to do during the coming year and justify those activities or actions. There are questions and requests for information below to elicit information in this area. If the question/request for information does not pertain to your unit, there is no need to answer it.
Access and Equity:
Our ESL program offers a variety of courses from the high-beginning through advanced levels. In order to provide easy access to our courses, we schedule day, evening, and weekend classes as well as short-term classes. Our core courses (ESL 110s @ 6 units each) continue to be offered at various times during the day as well as the evening timeslots, providing access to both day and evening students.
We continue to offer a variety of short-term, lower-load support courses, which have higher enrollment caps (as high as 44 students), thus improving our efficiency.
In addition to the usual sources of program information for students, we also have an ESL website address which is updated each semester. This site explains our program, course offerings, and registration process. The Schedule of Classes also contain block ads about the ESL Program, the Language Center, and specific courses.
Our ESL 110A enrollment is capped at 25; however, possibly because this is an entry-level course, we have noted a higher than usual dropout rate. Therefore, ESL 110A instructors have agreed unofficially to take 30 students. These ESL 110As typically fill to capacity, so by increasing the number of enrolled students, we will improve our WSCH.
For the past few semesters, our ESL 110Cs have been consistently overenrolled and filled with students very early in the registration process. This caused a number of potential students not to have access to the ESL 110C level. To remedy this, we have added an additional evening section, which has greatly eased the enrollment problem and provided access to more students.
Perhaps the result of increased student fees, some of our ESL 110 daytime sections have experienced unusually low enrollments. This resulted in the last-minute cancellation of an ESL 110A section from our fall schedule. We will keep an eye on the enrollment numbers over the next year to see if we need to reconfigure the number of sections we offer.
ESL 113 – Introduction to CAI Language Learning has had less than full enrollment for the past few semesters. This could be the result of simply having more tech-savvy students coming into our program and thus not needing basic computer skills. We experimented with the schedule and offered it on a Tuesday afternoon during the fall 2004 semester. However, this timeslot did not show significant improvements in enrollment, and now we have rescheduled it in the Friday afternoon timeslot. We continue to advertise the course heavily among English, WRAC, and ECE staff in hopes of improving enrollment. We’ve have decided to omit it from the 2006-2207 schedule.
ESL 114 – Editing for the Advanced ESL Writer is a late-start course. We recently changed the enrollment cap from 15 to 25 students. In the past this course was offered each semester and then dropped to once per year with the hopes of increasing enrollment. However, due to continued low enrollment, we are omitting it from the 2006-2007 schedule.
The CALWORKS grant funding is allowing us to open the language Center an additional 16 hours/week. This is have a positive impact on student access since the expanded open hours will target late afternoon/early evening students, who up to now, have not been able to utilize the Center’s services.
Student Success:
In order to enhance student success, we continue to have regularly scheduled meetings among our instructors at each level of our program throughout the semester. These meetings are generally well attended and provide us the opportunity to communicate within levels as well as across levels regarding our curriculum, materials, and student success. These meetings also serve as an important communication link with our adjunct staff. During the 05-06 calendar year, PFE funds were available to partially reimburse attendance by adjunct instructors. This funding has had a direct and positive impact on attendance.
The Office of Instructional Research continues to be instrumental in generating data to answer questions regarding student success, especially involving the success and retention rates of those students using the Language Center versus those who do not.
Rachel Ugale continues to update our SARS tracking system and provide us with data about Language Center usage.
Overall student success could improve through the following:
· Hiring of a part-time classified staff member: The Language Center staffing has deteriorated since the Grant funding finished. Under both the PFE and FII grants, the coordinators had sufficient paid time to supervise and coordinate Language Center activities as course enrollment and drop-in use was high. Since then, both course enrollment and drop-in use have been declining, likely at least partly due to lack of consistency in overall supervision (coordinator hours have been severely cut). Further, getting work-study receptionists has become harder and harder. Under the grants we proposed having an Instructional Assistant to cover all the hours. We shall now formally request such a position: Instructional Assistant II, half time (@ approximately $16/hour). This person would be in charge of the daily operations and would be responsible for staffing, training, record-keeping, and overall maintenance of the Language Center.
· Expansion of qualified instructor hours in the Language Center: Currently our ESL instructors volunteer time in the Language Center whenever possible. We have peer tutors available during open hours; however, tutors do not have the same qualifications/training as instructors and, therefore, are limited in the kinds of tutoring they can give our students. Student success could improve if students could depend on access to ESL instructors in the Language Center during all open hours. Also, low-level ESL students are frequently going to the WRAC Center for help or to enroll in ENGL 115. Quite plausibly, these students are relying on the WRAC’s services because of its extended hours and more sections of ENGL 115. However, they would be better placed in the Language Center where their second language learner needs could be addressed more thoroughly. We now formally request that funding be made available to pay for the expansion of instructor hours in the Language Center.