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Rojas Named 2004 Scholar on Campus at NYC College of Technology
Rojas flanked by career counselor Mila Alper and college assistant James Jackson, Jr.
Professor Estela Rojas (mathematics), who has spearheaded a freshman-year initiative at New York City College of Technology that has significantly improved student retention rates, has been named 2004 Scholar on Campus.
She will deliver the annual Scholar on Campus Lecture, this year titled “An Education for Life: How Do We Learn?” on Monday, April 26, from 5 to 6:15 p.m., in the College’s Atrium Amphitheater, 300 Jay Street (at Tillary) in Downtown Brooklyn. The public is invited to this free event, sponsored by the Office of the Provost’s Professional Development Advisory Council, and may call 718.260.5560 for more information.
Rojas, who grew up in Santiago, Chile, will discuss how education that stresses collaborative learning, in which students work together with classmates on assignments and on test preparation empowers them to succeed academically and professionally. She will draw upon her experiences as a student and educator in her native country and in the U.S., where she has lived, studied and worked for the past 23 years.
“I began my professional career as an instructor of mathematics in Chile at the college and high school levels,” says Rojas, who followed her husband to New York where they both earned doctorates in mathematics education from Teachers College, Columbia University.
In 1986, while still a doctoral student, she became a math instructor at City Tech. “I was surprised by how passive the students were -- most expected the teacher to do all the thinking and their job was just to absorb what he or she said. For me, it was natural to work with classmates in groups and be an active learner. I saw that the situation presented an opportunity for me to challenge my students to become critical thinkers and develop their reasoning skills using mathematics.”
About this time, Rojas read the work of Uri Trisman, a mathematician at the University of California, Berkeley, who was researching why Asian and white students did better than blacks and Hispanics in math. He found that the key reason was that Asian and white students studied together and he went on to develop a collaborative learning approach to mathematics, which reinforced Rojas’ way of teaching.
Rojas began drawing upon her experiences with collaborative learning in Chile and the related theories she studied at Teachers College in her classes at City Tech, making connections that provided the framework for her unique style of teaching.
“How do we learn? We learn if we know how to ask powerful questions,” she explains. “Then we go and find the answers, reflect on them, and make connections to our previous experiences. Learning is this process of discovery and that’s how we become empowered.”
One doesn’t automatically think of writing and making group presentations as being an integral part of learning math, but in Rojas’ “learning by doing” pedagogy it is. Students keep learning journals, in which they reflect on and write about what they actually learned in the class and how they were feeling, make group presentations and work collaboratively in class to master concepts and lessen math anxiety.
She also implemented assessment techniques more in tune with the collaborative learning model. “Tests are not just about getting a grade; they are another learning tool,” she says. Rojas would give back math tests and have students go back over the tests and correct the wrong answers. They had to write why they made the mistake and how they went about solving the problem correctly the second time around.
Students also decided what grade they wanted to achieve and earned points towards that grade for class participation, quizzes and the rest of the work in their portfolios, where their journals and other paperwork were kept. So, if a student didn’t want to get an A, they were not forced to do all the work. This made them responsible for their learning and their grade.
Rojas shared her teaching techniques with some of her colleagues at City Tech. She also was asked by educational leaders in Santiago, Chile, to give workshops to teachers at five technical high schools. “The results of the 17-year dictatorship were that collaborative learning had been abolished and teacher preparation had greatly deteriorated. I started a series of four-day workshops, working with teachers from a variety of disciplines, who then began to work collaboratively with each other.”
She received a three-year grant to work with teachers in Chile and now travels there twice a year. “When you emigrate like I did as an adult, one of your wings is always broken. Working in Chile lets me give back to the people in my country,” she says. Rojas has written several workbooks in subjects such as collaborative learning, math anxiety and assessment, which she uses in her activities abroad.
Meanwhile, at City Tech many of the older faculty members were retiring, with the result that more than 125 new full-time faculty were hired over the past three years. The time seemed right to expand Rojas’ ideas of collaborative learning. Provost Joann La Perla asked her to be the director of a multi-million dollar Department of Education Title V grant, which uses the “learning communities” approach to freshmen education. It entails having professors from different liberal arts disciplines team-teach their subjects with an emphasis on developing writing skills and critical thinking.
Freshmen take classes together in small groups, conducive to giving them the necessary basic skills to become independent learners and to building friendships. A new student center provides them with a one-stop shopping package of career counseling, academic advisement and registration services. “By having students take liberal arts courses in their first semester at the college, they learn what tools they need to have to succeed in college and beyond,” she says. “As a college of technology, we have to prepare professionals who can adapt to a rapidly changing workplace,” Rojas says, “which is why it’s so crucial for students to develop critical thinking skills early on.”
The grant was implemented in fall 2001 with 140 freshmen in six learning communities. Rojas said that freshmen that were part of the program were 11 percent more likely to enroll for their sophomore year than those who were not. The following year, more than 200 students participated and there was a 10 percent increase in the retention rate. This past fall, 700 freshmen (about half the entering class) were enrolled in 30 different learning communities and Rojas expects the same degree of success when this group enters their sophomore year.
Rojas speaks with great passion and sincerity about wanting City Tech students to succeed. She knows what it is like to face obstacles to learning. When she first came to this country, she could read English but couldn’t speak or write it.
“The language barrier was a nightmare, especially when I had to write papers for school. A friend suggested that I write my ideas straight into English and not to think in Spanish. It was good advice, even though after three hours I might have just written just a couple of paragraphs when I was brimming with ideas in Spanish. But I had clear goals so I was able to persevere,” she adds. “And I try to impart that lesson to my students, too.”
4/21/04
