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Welcome To The STARS Home Page
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This website is designed to function as both an informative up-to-date calendar of upcoming STARS related events as well as an archive to document previous STARS workshops.

Some sections of the website are still under construction as we're looking to add more interactive components to the site.

For upcoming STARS events, please click on the corresponding menu link on the left side!

STARS creates a place and space on our campus in which to learn. With STARS workshops and events, we provide a place to focus on teaching and learning in a structured yet flexible way. Across the campus, people are encouraged to discuss teaching and learning both formally in workshops and presentations, but also informally in the hallway or their office. STARS offers a safe place to which participants know they can go for help, inspiration, and rejuvenation. All types of learning are encouraged: formal, informal, institutional, and academic.

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History of the STARS Program
In 2002, Los Angeles Valley College was the proud recipient of a very prestigious, highly competitive FIPSE grant. The aim of the grant was to improve success, retention, and program completion rates for all students at LAVC by recruiting faculty, staff, and students to join the Strategic Team for the Advancement and Retention of Students (STARS). The motivation behind applying for the grant centered on the premise that students need to learn to become better learners--and that the way students do this is by taking more responsibility for their learning. A couple of stumbling blocks stand in the way of students learning to do this: 1) Students need course/subject specific help in learning how to learn, and 2) There is simply not enough time in class to mentor students in effective learning strategies over the course of a content-packed semester.

STARS brings together its participants both in and out of the classroom to discuss and monitor their learning. The idea is that STARS students--with the help of faculty--will learn to set goals for learning and to monitor their learning progress; in this way, STARS faculty will help students to better understand the process of learning itself.

For most STARS students, the true motivating factor in trying to become more engaged and successful learners will come from spending more time with faculty in intellectual yet socially engaging pursuits. As one student who participated in a small STARS pilot marveled, "I had no idea that teachers cared so much about my learning." For her, it was inspiring enough that faculty members had taken time out of their regular duties to focus on ways to improve learning and to engage with students in developing a culture of success.

Instead of fixing the means—such as lectures and courses—the learning paradigm fixes the ends, the learning results, allowing the means to vary in its constant search for the most effective and efficient paths to student learning. Barr and Tagg, "From Teaching to Learning—A New Paradigm for Undergraduate Education"

The STARS assume(1) every Valley college student is here to learn and learn well, so, (2) every Valley student can be a STAR.

For students to begin to take responsibility for their success they also need to feel they share responsibility for helping to define the direction their learning takes.

If both students and faculty routinely engage in dialogue about how and why learning matters-especially in terms of how course studies are relevant to real world issues and real world contexts-then more strategies to increase the meaning of class work (i.e. the "time on task") will naturally evolve.