Creating Connections with Learning Communities

1
Creating Connections with Learning Communities

• October 8, 2004

2
Overview

• Definition, descriptions
• Benefits
• Students
• Faculty
• College
• Challenges
• Curriculum
• Faculty involvement
• Administrative support
• Closing comments

3
Definition of Learning Communities

• The purposeful restructuring of the curriculum by
  linking or clustering courses that enroll a
  common cohort of students
• To build community and foster more explicit
  connections among students, faculty, and
  disciplines

4
Elements of Learning Communities

• Cluster of courses
• Often team-taught or team-planned by faculty in
  different disciplines
• Integrated course content around a centralizing
  theme
• Designed to foster deep engagement
• More opportunity for community building in the
  classroom
• Greater student-to-student and student-to-faculty
  interaction

5
Effective Learning Communities

• Based upon active learning
• A natural platform for implementing various other
  reforms such as collaborative learning, service
  learning and inquiry-based learning
• Encourages a focus on larger themes such as
  diversity and civic engagement

6
Degree of Integration

• Varies significantly
• Linked courses may share an assignment or a topic
  or even a theme to some degree
• Fully integrated courses tend to have all
  content, assignments, and activities focused
  around a central theme
• Curricular coherence
• Contextual arena for learning

7
Benefits for Students

• Improve student achievement
• Engage students intellectually and socially in
  community
• Instill a sense of belonging
• Increased commitment correlates with higher
  completion and persistence rates
• Create conversations of respect
• Increased support for first-generation and
  culturally diverse students
• Foster innovative and engaging teaching

8
Benefits for Faculty

• Provides sustained, daily conversations about
  teaching practices and theory
• Foster best practices
• Counter faculty isolation
• Re-energize faculty commitment to student
  learning
• Perception of greater intellectual and social
  engagement
• Greater respect for and connection to colleagues

9
Benefits for the College

• Broaden faculty interest in interdisciplinary
  studies
• Strengthen teaching practices
• Develop stronger relationships throughout the
  institution
• Encourage collaborative efforts from many areas
• Fosters dialog about how best to support students

10
Challenges with Curriculum

• Students do not arrive transcriptless
• Complex array of issues around
• faculty load
• student course requirements
• facilities
• and more

11
Challenges with Curriculum

• Consider
• Starting with heavy-enrollment, general education
  courses
• Targeting the needs of developmental students
• Developing learning communities around majors

12
Challenges with Faculty Involvement

• Associate learning communities with powerful
  pedagogies such as
• collaborative learning
• experiential education
• service learning
• others

13
Challenges with Faculty Involvement

• Maintain a strong faculty development program to
  provide peer support and resources
• Have a positive, inclusive approach for those who
  are ready to be involved

14
Challenges with Administrative Support

• Not familiar with rationale and benefits
• Environment of limited resources leads them to
  believe there is no way to help

15
Challenges with Administrative Support

• Garner administrative support
• Invite administrators to hear student reflections
  or send copies of reflections
• Ask administrators to speak in support at some
  event or activity
• Thank them when they can help
• Include administrators in conversations about
  teaching and learning

16
Learning Communities

• Education is essentially a social endeavor
• Connection to other people and to the community
  at large
• Reflection and introspection
• Coherence and relevance

17
Creating Connections with Learning Communities

• October 8, 2004