Chapter 3: Factors Influencing the Effectiveness of Teaching-Focused Faculty Learning Communities

Faculty learning communities (FLCs) are emerging as a key strategy for institutional change, particularly for facilitating faculty adoption of more effective and inclusive student-centered teaching practices. However, FLCs vary widely in their attributes, and little is known about which attributes are important for catalyzing teaching reform. We surveyed 66 faculty members from 11 FLCs at a large, public, research-intensive university. We asked the respondents to characterize their FLC along several dimensions, then explored the relationship between these attributes and the faculty member’s psychological sense of community, the extent of their participation in FLCs, their beliefs about teaching, and their reported use of student-centered teaching practices. Characteristics of FLCs that were positively associated with sense of community included frequent meetings, open-ended duration, multidirectional communication within the group, having food at meetings, and engaging in a collaborative project. Having a strong sense of community was associated with belonging to multiple FLCs and valuing student-centered teaching practices more highly. Many (56%) respondents reported that their participation in an FLC had an impact on departmental colleagues who were not in the community, and 64% reported an impact on their college or the institution. We discuss the results within the context of a conceptual model of FLC efficacy that proposes a central role for sense of community in mediating teaching reform. This work fills a critical gap in our understanding of how faculty learning communities can be designed to best promote departmental and institutional change.