Chapter 1: Designing For Student Success: Using the Faculty Learning Community Model to Prepare Faculty for Deeper Engagement in Student Success

Amid growing concerns about inequities in student outcomes, many universities are engaging in institutional change projects aimed at closing equity gaps in retention and graduation rates. At our university, such an effort led to the creation of a “Designing for Student Success” faculty learning community (FLC), with the recognition that disparities in student performance in individual courses contribute to larger institutional patterns. The goal of the year-long FLC is to help faculty (a) recognize the importance of the role they play in supporting the success of all of their students and (b) explore course design and instructional strategies that have been shown to reduce courselevel equity gaps. In spring semester, faculty engage in bi-weekly meetings with a highly structured curriculum to explore different barriers to student success and evidence-based strategies that can be used to overcome or remove the barriers. At the end of the first semester, faculty develop a course revision plan for changes they want to make in their course and then implement those the following semester. In this chapter, we describe the design of our FLC and present assessment findings from the first three cohorts of the FLC. Knowledge of the goals and design of the FLC, as well as our lessons learned and recommendations, may be useful for faculty developers intending to develop a similar FLC focused on student success.