The Garden Learning Community

The Garden Learning Community

Where STEMs and Flowers Bloom

  

The Garden is a friendly, welcoming community — designed with each student's learning style in mind. We focus on all learning styles and tempos.

Our counselors, instructors, and STEM Center tutors are trained to understand potential challenges you may experience if you participate in any of our Garden-affiliated programs.

Getting Started

The Garden is here to help if you participate in any of these Foothill programs. You will need a referral through your program coordinator, instructor or counselor to access tutoring in The Garden.

Virtual and OnCampus Tutoring in The Garden

For Online Tutoring:  We use Zoom to pair you with a tutor. You'll need a quiet space and a computer with a microphone to participate.

To see the current Garden Hours,  Log in to your Canvas to access The Garden hours, for both Online and OnCampus.

Our Philosophy and Methods

The Garden opened on Feb. 20, 2020, as a collaborative project among several founding Foothill College departments and program, including Athletics, Disability Resource Center (DRC), Geography, Math Performance Success (MPS), Psychological Services and Veterans Resource Center (VRC).

These groups have a common strategy to strengthen a student's foundation for success, by leveraging principles found in Universal Design for Learning, and principles of Neurodiversity.

The Socratic Method is applied to identify gaps in the student’s knowledge, regardless of the class level of the topic being tutored, so that learning and confidence levels increase in parallel. 

Once the foundational elements are in place, the student can go forth with much greater ease and confidence, as additional knowledge is added on a very strong foundation.

ALEKS in The Garden

To increase both the knowledge and confidence levels of our students, we are providing an AI (Artificial Intelligence) driven learning system called ALEKS, which has been usedsuccessfully for several years as part of the Summer Bridge Math program at Foothill College.

The ALEKS software is available on the computing workstations in The Garden.

 

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