Breakout Sessions for Friday, November 13, 2026
Oakton was awarded a National Science Foundation Innovation in Two-Year College STEM Education (ITYC) grant to create a Learning Assistant Program in collaboration with Northeastern Illinois University and Chicago State University. To advance the grant's goals, both faculty and student LAs must be trained to implement active learning and student engagement strategies. This proposal focuses on the faculty professional development component and how Oakton College transitioned it from face-to-face to online delivery.
This brief presentation will introduce the professional development course and its online components, explain how specific activities and assignments were adapted for the online format, and share why certain elements remained face-to-face. After the presentation, the session will be opened for discussion, and we welcome your questions, comments, and suggestions about the conversion.
In this interactive workshop, participants will practice using storytelling in professional environments to discuss their experiences as Learning Assistants (LAs). First, we will create an “elevator pitch”, where students describe their LA role in under 45 seconds. Presenters will help to identify skills that LAs develop and illustrate how these transfer to next steps of educational and professional pathways. We will use the S.T.A.R. method to craft a short story (1-2 minutes) where students give examples of how the LA position helped them develop a specific skill. Finally, students will role play an interview scenario where they share their stories and provide constructive feedback. This workshop is specifically designed to help LAs talk about their experiences, but it will be relevant to all students and any faculty with a mentoring role.
Oakton College is implementing a three year NSF ITYC initiative in collaboration with Northeastern Illinois University and Chicago State University to strengthen STEM pathways through a Learning Assistant (LA) program. This poster will showcase the ongoing NSF funded project, now in its second year, presenting findings from three terms (Spring 2025, Fall 2025, and Spring 2026) which has used a mixed method approach.
What can instructors do - within the realities of an already full course - to help more students feel that they belong and can succeed? Oakton College’s Persistence Project is a faculty-led initiative built around a simple premise: meaningful faculty-student relationships can support student engagement, belonging, and persistence. Since its initial pilot in 2015, the Persistence Project has grown into a college-wide initiative in which participating faculty make four core commitments: learning students’ names, meeting individually with students early in the semester, communicating high academic expectations while reducing unnecessary barriers to success, and providing meaningful feedback early in the term. This session will provide an overview of the Persistence Project, share findings from Oakton’s ongoing assessment of the initiative, and explore what students and faculty have told us about how these practices affect their classroom experiences.
The presenters will model the relationship-rich approach the Persistence Project promotes. Participants will engage in brief interactive activities drawn from Persistence Project faculty development, including reflecting on an experience that contributed to their own sense of belonging and considering how small faculty behaviors can communicate trust, care, and confidence in students’ ability to succeed. Participants will also consider how one or more of the Persistence Project commitments could be adapted to their own mathematics and science courses - including laboratory settings, online courses, and other teaching environments in which creating individual connections with students can be challenging.
The session will conclude with an opportunity for participants to exchange strategies and identify one small, realistic practice they could incorporate into their own teaching. Participants will receive materials summarizing the Persistence Project’s four core commitments, practical strategies for implementing them across teaching modalities, and selected resources related to relationship-rich education, belonging, and student persistence.
A Learning Assistant program has been shown to provide numerous benefits to an institution and its students. Among these are increased conceptual understanding of domain knowledge and increased success rates that reduce equity gaps in student success, as well as increased student persistence and retention. In addition, there are noted benefits to the Learning Assistants themselves, such as increased depth of content knowledge, stronger growth mindset, improved metacognitive abilities, etc. A major goal of the LA program at Oakton College is to improve retention and persistence in STEM majors as our students transfer to four year institutions, and we sought to impact student success as transfers by focusing on their identity as STEM majors through developing their awareness of and confidence in their leadership capabilities in their area of study.
The role of Learning Assistant, under the guidance of their faculty mentor, is a natural leadership laboratory, in which the LAs provide guidance, make decisions, and work together with their mentor to both create and reflect on activities that are designed to improve student understanding and success. We decided to enhance that experience by providing the LAs intentional training on the nature of leadership, and how one can cultivate an awareness of themselves and of the students they serve through exploring their core values and their community cultural wealth. This session will introduce participants to Oakton’s Emerging Leaders in STEM training program, and explore the impact this program has had on our LAs and on the students they serve.
The session will include a brief introduction of how we have incorporated Leadership Training and an exploration of Community Cultural Wealth as part of our Learning Assistant training model. This will be followed by a series of activities that participants will engage in to explore their own leadership identities, core values, and community cultural wealth. We will wrap up the session with a discussion of the value of connecting Leadership Training and the CCW model into a Learning Assistant program.
In this session, you will learn about Structured Learning Assistance (SLA), program results, how faculty and SLA facilitators collaborate, and the academic support we provide, designed to reduce withdrawal and failure rates and increase pass rates in high-risk, challenging courses. Don’t miss the activities, handouts, resources, and giveaways.
Structured Learning Assistance (SLA) was developed and piloted at Ferris State University. The program fosters learning partnerships involving faculty, SLA facilitators, and students. The SLA program targets high-risk-for-failure courses, not students. SLA is an additional workshop that is attached to certain sections of some of our more difficult courses. Students in these sections are required to attend these workshops. We have found that some highly motivated and very successful students enroll in SLA courses to help ensure future success in their courses. There are no additional charges to students who participate in an SLA-supported course.
SLA has data to support funding, which is why Ferris’ program continues to grow! One of the key pieces is the collaboration that occurs between the professors and the facilitators running the SLA workshops. This presentation will focus on those features and others that make SLA effective. Data will be shared, as well as quotes from faculty and students who have taken SLA-supported courses.
Creating spaces that support students in developing deep content understanding and a sense of belonging are important factors in student success. Peer-mediated learning programs such as the Learning Assistant (LA) Model can be an effective means of forging these spaces. In the LA model students work alongside instructors in active learning spaces to facilitate the learning of their peers. The LA Model consists of three essential elements; a pedagogy course, a weekly preparation meeting, and practice in the classroom. LAs learn about effective teaching and learning (pedagogy), engage with the instructional team to prepare discipline-, curriculum-, and course-specific student supports (weekly prep), and facilitate learning within student-centered classrooms as well as other instructional spaces (practice). In this workshop we explore the LA Model and the essential elements that guide program implementation.
Mentoring moments appear every day—in the hallway after class, during help sessions, and even on email. While we often think about mentoring in positive terms, such as when we encourage another person, it’s worth remembering that mentoring has another dimension. Specifically, in order to help others to develop and grow, we often find ourselves navigating difficult conversations, such as when offering performance feedback or setting boundaries on our time. How do we turn these conversations into valuable mentoring moments? Session attendees will walk through multiple relevant mentoring situations (e.g., student mentor to student learner, student mentor to faculty colleague, faculty/staff colleague to faculty/staff colleague), unpack what makes each situation difficult, and practice moving through conversations effectively. Participants will leave with strategies for increasing the chances that mentees and colleagues will tune in and respond to the messages we aim to provide.