Digging Deep

For years, many people have believed that if community college faculty could do substantive research, they would be teaching at four-year schools instead. Tarrant County College is proving otherwise. 

When Terry Mouchayleh, executive director of TCC’s Faculty Academy, joined the College in 2012, she sought to create the Mastery of Teaching Institute (MTI) to support faculty and staff through teaching and learning.

Originally, Mouchayleh envisioned the faculty meeting once a month with outside experts, but five faculty members from across the District asked to design the MTI. Ultimately, the task force created an opportunity for faculty to spend a year researching, implementing and analyzing results of a new pedagogical technique or strategy in the classroom. This represented a departure from the typical mindset for a community college, where focus tends to be on teaching, not research.

Robin Birt, director of strategic initiatives, served on the task force that developed the MTI. She sees the positive impact it can have on faculty, students and TCC as a whole. “It shows that TCC is invested in the faculty and shows students that we are truly focused on student success,” she said.

Once the task force had designed the Institute, it formed a cohort of nine faculty members. This inaugural cohort met monthly, advised and supported one another and performed extensive research on their own.

“Faculty members enjoy research,” said Mouchayleh. “It is satisfying to be able to test some things like trends. Do they really work?”

Kelly Tribble, director of faculty development, meets with the cohort monthly. Orientation takes place in May, research starts in June and instructors begin testing their theories during the following spring semester. “We never say anything failed,” he said. “Research still matters, even if you don’t get the results you hoped. You still know more than you did before.”

Colin Jenney, a research analyst with TCC’s Institutional Intelligence & Research (IIR) department, has been a big fan of the MTI since he learned about it during a presentation in the program’s first year. “I was ecstatic to hear such forward thinking ideas,” he said. Before joining TCC, Jenney was part of a similar program that supported a network of more than 20 top-ranked research universities.

“It was considered to be an innovative idea at the university level. However, to implement such a program at a two-year school is truly enlightened.”

Colin Jenney

Jenney attends MTI meetings to offer assistance to members of the cohort. Through a collaborative process, the cohort member works with Jenney and the IIR team to develop the design, procedures, instruments and any other tools needed for research.

While some members of the cohort were initially intimidated by the research process, ultimately, they were enthusiastic. “It was a chance to rediscover myself as an instructor,” said Bhavani Kola, a mathematics instructor at Southeast Campus. “MTI was a door for me to explore the teaching world. I was excited to research and experiment.”

The cohort created the projects to be researched with student success in mind. Kola researched “Measuring Engagement Strategies to Determine What Works Best to Activate Student Success and Retention.” Through her work in the MTI, she used new ways to engage students, which led to positive results.

Paul Luyster, an associate professor in the Biological Services Department at the South Campus, said he signed up to participate in the MTI because “I hoped that it would allow
me to formalize the research I was already doing to find best practices that could improve success rates in my own classes.” He was able to confirm his hypothesis that the results of a
diagnostic test could determine a student’s potential success or failure in Anatomy and Physiology I.

“I was excited about signing up for the Institute, because I knew it would provide me with an avenue to dive deeper into the learning process of students,” said Karen Haun, associate professor of accounting at the Southeast Campus. For her project, she compared the success of students in three-day, 55-minute classes in Financial Accounting and Macroeconomics versus classes that were two-day, 80-minute classes.

Southeast Campus Associate Professor of Kinesiology Melissa Evans researched the relationship between physical activity and academic achievement. “I learned so much about the amount and type of data available from TCC’s Office of Institutional Intelligence & Research. They were a great resource and very helpful,” she said.

“Support for research of this kind and scope is uncommon at the community college level and I so appreciate the opportunity.”

Melissa Evans

Although research at the community college level is unusual, this concept has great potential according to Colin Jenney. “I see the possibility of a larger outreach for TCC’s MTI program,” he said. “Given the number of other two-year institutions in the DFW Metroplex and in the nation, MTI offers opportunities to forge new relationships with other colleges while maximizing scholarship and educational excellence.”