Faculty Prioritization Committee
ESL Request: 1 FT replacement position
ESL supports all divisions in the college by reducing the number of unprepared students in your
class.
But we can do more and we can do better. Here's what we're working on now:
•
•
•
Creating a new ESL curriculum a new curriculum that will take ESL students all the way to
English 1A AND provide greater depth and breadth of preparation in reading, writing, speaking
and cultural knowledge. This will mean better-prepared students in the classes you teach.
Developing better assessment practices to make sure students who need ESL classes actually
take the ESL assessment and receive ESL instruction. Again, this will mean better-prepared
students in the classes you teach.
Raising the bar on our expectations AND ensuring that all our part-timers are in the loop and
grading consistently. Again, you get better-prepared students.
We're ALSO
• Working with local adult schools to develop a single throughline from all local adult school
programs to our Chabot's ESL program.
• Exploring the creation of noncredit courses for students who can't
• afford credit courses or need English for their job or life in the U.S., but are not going to pursue
a degree or transfer.
BOTTOM LINE:
We're trying to do a lot more the serve our colleagues and the community but with fewer faculty. We
originally had 5.5 full-time ESL positions but are working with only 4. We're asking for a position
to bring us back to our original contingent of five full-timers.
This semester and next, we'll only have two full-time faculty, and we've had to put nearly all the above
projects on hold. We want to get them back online as soon as possible; a new hire will get us back
developing our program to better prepare students for the classes you teach.
Appendix F1A: Full-Time Faculty Request(s) [Acct. Category 1000]
Audience: Faculty Prioritization Committee and Administrators
Purpose: Providing explanation and justification for new and replacement positions for full-time
faculty
Instructions: Please justify the need for your request. Discuss anticipated improvements in student
learning and contribution to the Strategic Plan goal. Cite evidence and data to support your request,
including enrollment management data (EM Summary by Term) for the most recent three years, student
success and retention data, and any other pertinent information. Data is available at:
http://www.chabotcollege.edu/programreview/Data2015.asp
Spreadsheet: To be considered, requests must be added to the Resource Request Spreadsheet. You can
find the template for the spreadsheet here:
http://www.chabotcollege.edu/prbc/academicprogramreview.asp. Add your requests to your
spreadsheet under the 1000a tab and check the box below once they’ve been added.
Total number of positions requested (please fill in number of positions
requested):
☐YES
3
Summary of positions requested completed in Program Review Resource Request
Spreadsheet (please check box to left)
CHABOT COLLEGE
CRITERIA FOR FILLING CURRENT VACANCIES
OR
REQUESTING NEW FACULTY POSITIONS
Discipline ____ESL_______
Criteria 1.
Percent of full-time faculty in department.
Fall 2012 Spring 2013
Fall 2013
Spring 2014
Fall 2014 Spring 15 Fall 15
FTEF
(Contract)
3.6
3.36
3.50
2.89
3.76
2.49
1.48
FTEF
(Temporary)
3.84
3.62
4.01
4.66
3.57
4.77
6.2
# of Contract
Faculty
4
4
4
3
4
3
3, 2
Name of Recently Retired Faculty (in last 3 yrs)
Date Retired
From the most recent:
ESL used to have 5.5
full-timers, but now
Linnea Wahamaki (Aug 15)
only three, and one is
on leave and another
to be on a sabbatical
(Fa17-Sp18).
Fe Baran (Dec 09)
Gayle Hunt (Jan 10)
Carol Murray (on disability from Fall 08?)
There will be only
one instructor
teaching the full load
in Sp 16.
Frederik Hodgson (ESL and French)
Angela Blair on leave (Oct 15) and reduced load (Sp 16)
Criteria 2.
Semester end departmental enrollment pattern for last three years.
Fall 2012
Spring
2013
Fall 2013
Spring
2014
Fall 2014
Success Rate:
73%
72%
71%
73%
68%
FTES:
443
427
469
357
407
Briefly describe how a new hire will impact your success/retention rates.
• Things that don’t get done without more full-timers: Assessment
improvement, curriculum improvement, increased program consistency
made possible by level meetings and common midterms and/or finals,
continued Trio/Excel coordination, and continued coordination with Adult
School (AB 86). Getting these done, in addition to more time for
teaching, will directly contribute to improved student success/retention
rates.
• Both the waitlist data and the initiatives we mentioned indicate that more
faculty must be hired. At least some of the new hires must be full-time if
we want long-term mitigation of the shortcomings we have defined.
2b. Librarian and Counselor faculty ratio. Divide head count by the number of full time
faculty. For example, 8000 students divided by 3 full time faculty, 1:2666
Fall 2012
Spring 2013
Fall 2013 Spring 2014
Fall 2014
N/A
Criteria 3.
Meets established class size.
WSCH
Fall 2012
Spring 2013
Fall 2013 Spring 2014
Fall 2014
2,816
2,378
2,851
2,331
2,601
73.35
361.23
88.63
387.36
72.79
336.56
82.56
354.99
FTES:
89.14
WSCH/FTES 394.23
If there are any external factors that limit class sizes, please explain.
1). Composition classes in both English and ESL have always had lower caps
because of these classes’ significantly greater grading load. Keeping the cap at 25
in an ESL core course is necessary to ensure that the instructor has the minimum
turn-around time even though most instructors have been taking at least a few
additional students. Most ESL instructors give at least four writing assignments
in each core class with the multiple draft process, which is shown to be most
effective. Depending on the type of assignment, instructors can easily spend
several to a dozen hours per stack of papers per draft (e.g. 30 minutes/paper x 25
students = 12.5 hours). We usually give feedback in stages having students write
at least two drafts before grading their work. Therefore, each writing assignment
can require more than 100 hours of instructor time outside the classroom. In order
to help the ESL student become a better writer, we provide individualized writing
skills support, which is very time consuming as each student has different needs
and it takes careful analysis of what they have written and providing encouraging
yet constructive feedback in terms of content, organization, and grammar in
language understandable to students at different levels.
2). While most instructors take more than 25 students, some of the Bldg. 800
classrooms assigned to ESL courses (e.g. Room 851) can comfortably seat only
25 students, leaving enough room for the instructor to walk through the class.
3). A lack of an ESL dedicated lab with at least 25 computers led to the canceling
of the Fall 15 offering of ESL 150 (ESL guided skills lab). The new ESL lab
(Room 146A) is equipped with only 16 computers.
Criteria 4.
Current instructional gaps and program service needs. List the courses to fill the
gaps, if applicable.
•
•
•
•
Our students need greater preparation in speaking and listening. To meet
this, we need at least one more speaking and listening class, and we also
need to revise our current speaking and listening courses.
They need more time to develop writing and reading skills. To address
this, we would like to make grammar instruction a separate course at each
level instead of combining it with reading and writing. We’d also like to
add a lab hour to our reading and writing classes.
We as faculty have found we need more time to adequately cover the
grammar our curriculum requires. This would be solved by steps listed in
bullet #2.
Only 25-33% of our graduates make it to English 1A within two years, if
ever. We think these numbers will be significantly improved by the
bridge curriculum we are designing: ESL 15A and 15B plus the two
support classes that will accompany them. See the “Where We Are Now”
section of our narrative an explanation of these courses.
Criteria 5.
Describe how courses and/or services in this discipline meet PRBC’s three tier
criteria. These include:
• Tier 1: outside mandates (e.g. to ensure the licensure of the program.)
• Tier 2: program health, (e.g. addresses gaps in faculty expertise and creates
pathways, alleviates bottlenecks, helps units where faculty have made large
commitments outside the classroom to develop/implement initiatives that support the
strategic plan goal, and helps move an already successful initiative forward.
• Tier 3: Student need/equity, (e.g. addresses unmet needs as measured by
unmet/backlogged advising needs, bottlenecks in GE areas and basic skills, impacted
majors in which students cannot begin or continue their pathway.)
Tier 1: NA
Tier 2: One of our four full-time faculty (Kent Uchiyama) is devoting half of his
load to work as the ESL Academic Coordinator for the Trio grant-funded Excel and
Aspire programs. Next semester he’ll also be devoting an additional 4 CAH to
represent Chabot at the Mid-Alameda County Consortium to coordinate
community college and adult school curricula. As a small program, we need a full
contingent of full-timers to maintain our program quality. As explained in the
“Where We Are Now” section of our narrative, historically ESL has had 5+ fulltime instructors, and this was an adequate number to maintain the strength, quality,
and consistency of our program. As we seek to shoulder more responsibilities such
as the Excel and Aspire programs as well as MACC, we need to at least restore our
previous number of full-timers, if not increase it.
Tier 3: As noted above, for years we have seen gaps and shortfalls that we have
wanted to fill in our program:
• Our students need greater preparation in speaking and listening.
• They need more time to develop writing and reading skills.
• We as faculty have found we need more time to adequately cover the
grammar our curriculum requires.
• Only 25-33% of our graduates make it to English 1A within two years, if
ever.
We have made plans and even written curriculum to address these issues, but the
implementation will depend on having enough full-time faculty to do the leg work.
At our currently reduced numbers, we don’t have the manpower to do this, much
less all of the other initiatives we’ve mentioned.
Criteria 6. Upon justification the college may be granted a faculty position to start a new
program or to enhance an existing one.
Is this a new program or is it designed to enhance an existing program? Please explain.
This is designed to enhance the existing program, as well as to simply maintain its
integrity.
Criteria 7.
CTE Program Impact.
We are interested in preparing our ESL students to meet workplace demands and
become more employable, in addition to improving their academic English.
However, we do not have enough staff to conduct needs analysis or have a
dialogue to find out in which area(s) contextualized ESL courses would be of
most use or to coordinate with instructors in other disciplines to do the
curriculum work.
For several years, students in Chabot’s Nursing Program, both native speakers
and language learners, often took ESL 128 (the ESL student-teacher tutorial) to
prepare for the TEAS test. This was done through an informal arrangement with
the nursing program; if a student had lower-than passing TEAS scores, their
instructor would refer them to us. Although these Nursing students said they
found the class useful and benefited from it, we had to cancel it. There were
several reasons, but one of them was that no full-timer was available to teach it.
ESL 128 requires either a full-time instructor or a very seasoned part-timer who’s
had training. With more full-time faculty, we might be able to offer the class
again, which would benefit our students as well Nursing students.
Criteria 8.
Degree/Transfer Impact (if applicable)
List the Certificates and/or AA degrees that your discipline/program offers.
Provide information about the number of degrees awarded in the last three years.
Degree/Certificate
# Awarded
2012-2012
2012-2013
AA requirement
GE transfer requirement
Declared major
Criteria 9.
Describe how courses and/or services in this discipline impact other disciplines and
programs. Be brief and specific. Use your program review to complete this section.
As mentioned above in Criterion 5, without ESL, a large body of students will
lack the tools and strategies necessary as our program prepares second language
learners to succeed in an academic environment, and this is where we foresee
the greatest impact of our request for additional faculty. Restoring our full-time
faculty to their previous numbers will allow us to continue and develop all the
initiatives mentioned in the “Where We Are Now” section of our narrative:
work with adult schools, work with the Mid-Alameda County Consortium, work
with English, enrichment of our program, and work with the Trio grants. If we
don’t get more faculty, we will have to cut back and even stop a lot of the good
work we’ve started. Maintaining the quality and consistency of our program
comes first, and we’re seeing this starting to slip as we try to assume more
responsibilities with reduced numbers.
Criteria 10. Additional justification e.g. availability of part time faculty (day/evening)
Please describe any additional criteria you wish to have considered in your request.
NA As previously explained, our need for full-time faculty is based on all of the
additional work we are doing on coordination with other programs on and off
campus, coordination within our own program, and addressing gaps in our
curriculum.