Faculty Learning Communities
Faculty Learning Communities (FLC) at Indiana University Bloomington are cohorts of faculty members from different disciplines or fields of study who ask questions about teaching and learning, try out teaching innovations, assess student learning, create new models of practice, and publish scholarship about their work. Each FLC shares a question, a set of problems, or a passion about a topic, as members deepen their knowledge and expertise in this area by interacting on an ongoing basis (Wenger, 2002). Generally speaking, FLCs work on an inquiry project to produce outcomes or products about teaching and learning. Faculty in such communities engage in scholarly teaching and student-centered learning, collaborating within a collegial framework that offers peer review and support.
- Affective Learning Project
- Collins Assessment Project
- Communities of Inquiry
- Freshman Learning Project
- History Learning Project
- Informatics Collegium
- Informatics New Pedagogies—New Technologies Project
- iPad Mobile Tablet Project
- Large Class Project
- Preparing Future Professors
Affective Learning Project
Arlene Diaz, David Pace, Leah Shopkow, Joan Middendorf
When an instructor challenges student preconceptions about history, it can hinder their learning. The Affective Learning Project focuses on affective barriers to clear historical thinking and argument, as identified in 24 extensive interviews with history faculty, which provided insights into the forms emotional resistance can take and how it can hinder learning.
Building from these interviews and Chi and Barton’s work, we defined the affective bottleneck as one rooted in student preconceptions about history. The simplified narratives students bring into the classroom often disrupt the learning process before it even begins and prevents students from thinking historically when classes emphasize complexity and ambiguity. Putting their preconceptions on the table—sometimes directly challenging them—is our working prescription for helping students move through the bottleneck. It is toward this end that we will continue to refine our understanding of affect in the history classroom.
Collins Assessment Project
Joan Middendorf
The Collins Living Learning Center, unlike most dormitories on campus, has an academic mission, which they would like to assess. Instructors will work together to select a learning objective related to the General Education curriculum and will develop an outcomes assessment that relates to that goal, including collection and analysis of data.
Each year the Freshman Learning Project (FLP) identifies twelve faculty fellows who teach high-impact courses and who are in a particularly good position to influence the teaching of their colleagues. These faculty are invited to take part in an intensive two-week summer seminar, in which they define a bottleneck to learning in their discipline, carefully specify the steps that students would have to follow to overcome this obstacle to learning, and develop new techniques to teach these steps in their classes, based on the “decoding the disciplines” approach. In subsequent semesters the fellows employ these strategies, systematically assess the results, and share their experiences in a variety of different venues.
Contact: Joan Middendorf (middendo@indiana.edu)
History Learning Project
Joan Middendorf
This funded project is a collaboration with professors and graduate students in the history department conducting experiments in order to:
- Define as thoroughly as possible the basic operations that are required for success in undergraduate history courses
- Develop ways of teaching these operations to undergraduates and to assess the extent to which these approaches actually succeeded in increasing students mastery of these skills
- Use the insights derived from this process to reshape the curriculum and the teaching strategies in our department
- Make these insights available to other historians and to secondary school teachers preparing students for college courses.
Contact: Joan Middendorf (middendo@indiana.edu)
Article on History Learning Project
Informatics Collegium
Joan Middendorf
Our goal is for Computer Science and Informatics instructors to move from traditional teaching methods to scholarly based teaching and learning practices. Starting with the decoding the disciplines model (Pace and Middendorf, 2004) instructors became familiar with learner-centered teaching, including bottlenecks, methods for active engagement, and CATS (Angelo and Cross). In year 2 was the fellows became familiar with the field of SOTL, including methods and outcomes for researching teaching and learning. To encourage further development of scholarly teaching, cement ideas, and increase ownership in the process, Collegium fellows will undertake SOTL studies in small groups in year 3.
Informatics New Pedagogies--New Technologies Project
Joan Middendorf, Kathyrn Propst, and Maggie Ricci,
With this award, faculty and instructors in the Human-Computer Interaction program goals are: identification of tacit knowledge skills (argumentation; “wicked problems,” collaboration); 2) coordination of core courses 3) implementation of two research-based instructional strategies--David Perkin’s “making learning whole” and Larry Michaelsen’s team-based learning; 4) exploration of technological tools to support these strategies; 5) creation of a new kind of learning space that will encourage whole learning and team-based practice; 6) development of ongoing assessment instruments; and 7) a willingness of all participating faculty to open their classrooms to visitors and—to be a showcase for new pedagogies, new technologies, and new spaces.
iPad Mobile Tablet Project
Maggie Ricci, Kate Ellis and Lisa Kurz
The iPad Mobile Tablet FLC, created in 2010, provides a selected group of faculty an opportunity to focus on how mobile tablets, specifically the iPad, can enhance teaching and learning across a wide variety of disciplines. This FLC encourages faculty to explore how mobile tablet technology enhances their ability to accomplish tasks such as promoting student engagement in the classroom, the lab, or the field, as well as assisting small group collaboration in sharing ideas and doing research. The eight faculty participants in the iPad FLC, who were selected from a large number of applicants, will share their results with the group as well as the larger IU community.
The Large Class FLC is composed of faculty from a number of disciplines who teach classes of 100 students or more at IUB. This FLC provides a supportive community for faculty who want to share ways to provide students with engaging and instructive active learning opportunities in large classes, and to handle the considerable demands and challenges of teaching a large class. They also advocate for teaching environments and policies that will enhance the instruction of students in large classes across the University.
Preparing Future Professors
Al Ruesink (Biology), Katie Kearns
The Preparing Future Professors Faculty Learning Community, begun in 2004, is a forum for sharing and disseminating resources to enhance departmental pedagogy courses and an advocacy group for improving graduate teaching assistant (associate instructor or AI) preparation across campus. Co-facilitated by a faculty mentor and a member of Campus Instructional Consulting, the learning community is composed of approximately 15 faculty members who mentor associate instructors in their disciplines. These faculty also are exceptionally active and knowledgeable in graduate instructor preparation both on campus and nationally. The group meets monthly during the academic year to discuss recent local successes and to brainstorm and enact strategies to enhance AI preparation.
The collaboration between Campus Instructional Consulting and the Preparing Future Professors Faculty Learning Community is helping to make the work of individual departments public. Members plan and facilitate the annual AI Supervisors' Meeting, contribute substantially to the campus publication "Associate Instructor Preparation for Teaching", and produce resources for their colleagues such as the brochure, “Recommendations for AI Preparation."