I’m pleased to welcome you to The TALE Blog – The Teaching-and-Learning Exchange Blog @ Kern CCD, where I’m hoping that our faculty and staff will share their tips on the future of teaching and learning. I want to thank Bob Simpkins, Anthropology Professor and former Academic Senate president of Porterville College, for partnering with me in creating this forum.
– Sonya Christian, Chancellor – California Community Colleges
Former Chancellor – Kern Community College District
About the TALE Blog
The Teaching-and-Learning Exchange (TALE) Blog provides a virtual space for faculty, instructional support staff, former faculty, and others within the Kern Community College District to contribute original blog posts that describe their insights and ideas rooted in their experiences in the classroom or working with our students, their implications for ensuring that learning occurs with intentional outcomes, and their relationship to faculty engagement and innovation, and student success.
The purpose of the blog is the facilitate communication across the district to achieve a greater sense of unity, learn from and about each other, and support each other in our work toward our mission of achieving student success with equity through this collective effort and repository of experiences.
Under the framework of Guided Pathways, Pillar 4 is to ‘ensure learning is happening with intentional outcomes’. This blog will provide a way to support reflecting upon this concept that is available to everyone in the Kern Community College District and is not restricted by the limitations of time and place. Regardless of your schedule, the blog will be here as a repository of your collective experiences and reflections. And the more stories you share, the more effective it will be!
About the Logo
The TALE Blog logo features a silhouette of the Kern Community College District service area in cross-section, as viewed from the south looking north. On the left side is the San Joaquin Valley, and then the Sierra Nevada mountain range, the Owens Valley, and the Inyo range. One goal of The TALE Blog is to help draw together this vast area through exchanges and explorations of our mutual experiential landscape. The logo was designed by blog co-creator Robert Simpkins.
Recent Posts
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Learning Through Community
By Robert Alan Simpkins I have spent much of my many years as a teacher working in a continuous grind, seemingly doing little else than teaching beyond time with my family. This year I decided to do something new – I auditioned for, and was cast in, a musical at a local theater, along with…
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The Pantheon of Experiences
by Robert Alan Simpkins A student in my Biological Anthropology class recently commented to me about a story I have been sharing with my students in that class for nearly a decade now. On Tuesday, April 1st in 2014, I traveled from Porterville College down to Bakersfield College with several Anthropology students and my colleague…
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The Role of Humility and Data in Promoting Student Success
By Michael Carley Back when I had a weekly newspaper column, one of the first ones I wrote, and still a favorite, was entitled “The Power of Humility.” It was a topic I would return to at least seven times, around once a year. I’ve even thought of expanding it into a book someday. The…
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