Faculty and Professional Learning Community Program: 2005-6 Evaluation
From CTLpedia
Connecting and Engaging Faculty and Staff to Enhance Teaching and Learning: The MCC Faculty and Professional Learning Communities (FPLC) Program Brad Kincaid, FPLC Director, Biology & Center for Teaching and Learning, 461-7103 Niccole Cerveny, Undergraduate Research Co-Facilitator, Geography, 654-7728 Ann Ewing, Classroom Research Consultant, Psychology, 461-7028 Richard Felnagle, Humanities FPLC Co-Facilitator, English, 461-7231 Donna Gaudet, Podcasting FPLC Facilitator, Math & Center for Teaching and Learning, 461-7929 Janice Jennings, Sustainability FPLC, Interior Design, 461-7724 Kaatje Kraft, Nature of Science FPLC Facilitator, Geology, 461-7054 Shereen Lerner, Global Learning Facilitator, Anthropology, 461-7306 Jonelle Moore, Humanities FPLC Co-Facilitator, English & Center for Teaching and Learning, 461-7351 Dennis Wilson, Undergraduate Research Co-Facilitator, Biology, 654-7731
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Summary
The FPLC Program goals are connecting and engaging faculty and staff to improve teaching and learning. Interdisciplinary groups engage in seminars, retreats, and communication about a selected topic. This program has engendered an unprecedented level of engagement by over 70 participants that has reinvigorated members and bridged disciplinary boundaries.
Program Description
Our Faculty and Professional Learning Communities (FPLC) Program is integral to helping MCC strive for and reflect its values of learning, excellence, inclusiveness, and community. Our FPLC Program is an institutional process promoting collaboration, communication and scholarship to achieve our strategic goals: excellence, access, student support, inclusiveness, organizational effectiveness, professional development, community engagement, and effective technology use.
Our goals and objectives include:
- Promote connections among faculty, staff and students at MCC.
- Build college wide community
- Increase interdisciplinary collaboration
- Encourage coherence of learning across disciplines
- Investigate and incorporate diversity
- Promote reflection and engagement in improving teaching and learning at MCC.
- Support teaching and learning initiatives
- Broaden assessment of learning
- Increase focus on learning
- Reward and recognize excellence in teaching
- Nourish the scholarship of teaching and learning (SOTL)
As defined by Milt Cox at Miami University (Ohio), an FPLC is an interdisciplinary group of faculty and staff who engage in an active collaboration focused on enhancing teaching and learning, which is broadly defined to include anything that can improve student success. FPLCs ideally include 8-12 members who typically meet biweekly with a facilitator for at least a year. FPLCs engage in self-selected activities that promote learning, professional development, community building, scholarly teaching, and the scholarship of teaching and learning. Participants usually select a focus course or project in which to implement an innovation related to the FPLC topic and collaborate to assess impacts on teaching and learning. Local communication about FPLC outcomes is a critical component of the program leading to enhanced campus community and improved teaching and learning.
FPLCs take their name from the highly successful student learning community movement because there are parallels in the benefits for these groups. A distinct name is necessary to avoid confusion about the target participants. At MCC, we include professional in the name of our program to acknowledge that non-faculty members of our community are necessary for us to achieve our values and strategic objectives.
FPLCs are not just another committee! "FLCs have voluntary membership; meet at a designated time and in an environment conducive to learning; treat individual projects in the same way with the group contributing suggestions and a timely schedule to completion; employ the Kolb (1984) experiential learning cycle; develop empathy among members; operate by consensus, not majority; develop their own culture, openness, and trust; engage complex problems; energize and empower participants; have the potential of transforming institutions into learning organizations; and are holistic in approach."1 Their focus on community, multidisciplinarity, and impact assessments distinguish them and promote their success.
As a tool for creating community and engaging members in pursuing our objectives, our 2006-7 FPLC Program supports six new topic-based communities: Sustainability, Undergraduate Research, Nature of Science, Humanities, Global Learning, and Podcasting. Over 70 faculty and staff members applied and were accepted into the program.
FPLC Member Expectations
FPLC members are expected to be active, reliable, supportive, and contributing members of the FPLC. We expect members to be flexible in scheduling and attending community events outside normal work hours if necessary. They must commit to attending seminars comprising 4-6 hours per month, to help build a safe support group for all participants, and to explore and discuss the literature related to their discipline and the FPLC topic.
FPLC members are encouraged and supported to conduct an evaluation project related to the FPLC topic. We expect all members to focus on an idea emerging from the literature of the FPLC topic and encourage all members to select a focus course or other college project for implementation. We also encourage and support the assessment of the implementation of their idea by providing classroom research consultation.
FPLC members are expected to communicate findings of the FPLC and their reflection on teaching and learning. We expect members to share literature reviews related to the FPLC. They must document their reflection on teaching and learning that led them to their idea. We support them in documenting their implementation and assessment of their idea. We are making FPLC documentation public to the local community by publishing it on the CTL website via the CTLpedia and by hosting a campus-wide teaching and learning conference scheduled for August 17, 2007. Support is available for those who wish to present their work at a regional or national conference or those who wish to publish their work in a multidisciplinary or disciplinary journal. We hope that some will consider continuing their work with a campus or district grant or a sabbatical.
Prospective members must apply to participate in an FPLC during the spring of each year. Before applying, applicants should discuss their participation with their Chair or Supervisor. Applications are intended to be short expressions of interest in participation, but must include some information to facilitate selection. Selection criteria may vary between FPLCs, but generally will include commitment to teaching and learning, interest level, need, openness to new ideas, potential for contribution to the community, and availability for FPLC participation.
Program Outcomes and Maricopa Values
Quality – Value Education
The FPLC program at its core promotes excellence in teaching and learning. In the language of Boyer and Richlin , the aims of our program are to help all faculty achieve scholarly teaching. In addition, the program supports those faculty who wish to elevate their work to the level of scholarship of teaching and learning by providing research consultation and assistance with presentation and publication. Moreover, the Sustainability FPLC demonstrates that learning extends beyond the classroom to our campus and local communities. Activities engaged by the Sustainability FPLC range from an all college dumpster dive to teach about the potential for recycling to organizing a campus-wide Focus the Nation event to educate everyone about climate change.
Efficiency – Value Responsibility
Our FPLC program is fundamentally an employee development program. It is efficient in that we know of no other faculty development program that achieves sustained engagement of over 70 faculty and staff for a whole academic year. It also has the ability to engage staff and adjuncts as well as fulltime faculty.
Assessment of the 2005-6 Nature of Science pilot FPLC revealed that learning from other community members had the greatest impact on participants. This was followed by learning from the biweekly seminars and the occasional retreats. Leading outcomes in the survey were formation of a respected interdisciplinary group and approaching a consensus view about the topic as a student outcome.
The pretest assessment of the 2006-7 FPLC program indicates that the collective membership holds high expectations for positive outcomes from their experience. Posttest data will be collected in May and promptly analyzed to document outcomes for members and expected outcomes for teaching and learning.
Cost Effectiveness – Value Responsibility
The costs associated with achieving all the program outcomes are primarily associated with providing the facilitators with reassigned time. Members of the FPLCs participate without remuneration. Survey results indicate that the intangible benefits are sufficient to motivate them. The assessment data indicate that members view their experience as effective professional development. Qualitative assessments support the hypothesis that the FPLC is effective in achieving its goals of connecting and engaging faculty and staff in improving teaching and learning.
Replication – Value Excellence
Documentation of the program via our website makes it easy for anyone to adopt or adapt our approach. In addition, we have developed an interactive workshop that has been presented locally and in Chicago last October at the Project Kaleidoscope National Assembly (http://www.pkal.org/documents/AfternoonBreakOutSessions.cfm).
Creativity – Value Excellence
Our FPLC Program is based on the work of Milt Cox at Miami University Ohio, but, according to Cox, our program is unique for community colleges. First the scope of our program with six topic-based FPLCs and over 70 faculty and staff engaged is unprecedented. Most other programs in community colleges are new faculty orientations, which MCC has also had for many years. In the few community colleges that do have topic-based FPLCs, they are secondary to or supportive of student learning communities. Our program is unique among community colleges in our goals of scholarly teaching for all and support for the scholarship of teaching and learning for those who wish to pursue it.
Timeliness – Value Excellence
Our FPLC program was piloted during 2005-6 with one FPLC on the Nature of Science with nine faculty. The success of this pilot led us to expand the program to six FPLC for 2006-7, which are all progressing very nicely. Evidence of the success of our expanded program comes from the enthusiastic turnout for four common events that have already been held. In January 2006, 91 faculty and staff participated in a day-long workshop on FPLCs conducted by Milt Cox from Miami University Ohio. In August 2006, approximately 65 attended a morning-long information session on FPLC. On September 30, 2006, 56 new members attended a Saturday FPLC Program Opening Retreat. And on January 9, 2007, about 52 of the 72 members attended the FPLC Midyear Retreat. At each one of these events, the level of excitement and engagement was greater than the last!
Learning – Value Education
Sharing of our successful innovation is central to our FPLC program. We are sharing information about FPLCs locally, district-wide and nationally beyond the events and workshops described above (especially the Cox workshop here and the PKAL workshop in Chicago). Locally, we printed posters describing our FPLC assessments on display in our Center for Teaching and Learning, and we have developed our CTLpedia. The latter is wiki-based database for local scholarship on teaching and learning, which adapts the Wikipedia and Scholarpedia models. Our goal is that all FPLC-related (as well as other programs) projects will be documented therein. District-wide, we are planning the first Annual MCC Teaching and Learning Conference for August 17, 2007. This day-long event will be open to district-wide faculty and staff and showcase all of the group and individual TPLC projects in lecture and poster formats. Finally, we will support FPLC participants to travel to conferences to present FPLC results that make a contribution to our knowledge about teaching and learning.
Collaboration – Value Excellence
Collaboration to impact student success is the ultimate goal of this program. Student learning is directly impacted via the instructional innovations implemented by members of the FPLCs. Connections developed between members ensures continued learning from each other. All FPLCs are interdisciplinary, so we are breaking down the disciplinary silos that isolate so many faculty and staff in their respective departments.
Thus, documented program outcomes demonstrate that FPLC program is a model that can increase the quality of education in an efficient and cost-effective way, that can be easily replicated at other institutions, that is unique among community colleges, but has demonstrated potential, that is being shared locally and nationally, and that fundamentally promotes collaboration to improve the education of students.
Categories: CTL Projects | FPLC | 2005-6 | FPLC Program
