Chapter 13: A Teacher Education Faculty Learning Community as a Lever to Support Program Improvement Through Practice-Based Experiences

Faculty learning communities (FLCs) serve a variety of purposes, from enabling faculty across departments to apply their expertise to topics they have in common, to providing frameworks for faculty within and across departments to improve their teaching practices. In this chapter, we discuss how an FLC, utilized as a lever to support program improvement, sustained teacher educator learning and impacted practice. Using the expertise of the University of Michigan’s TeachingWorks, our learning community focused on integrating high-leverage practices, practices that are most fundamental to skillful teaching, into our teaching of prospective and practicing teachers. This chapter describes how our FLC fostered a cycle of collaborative inquiry that supported faculty in progressing towards common programmatic change goals, and shares the insights gleaned through the process. Collaboration, community, and collegiality of the FLC served as hub of the cycle, sustaining every phase of trialing and learning. Our findings suggest that participation in an FLC as part of program improvement can sustain faculty learning and professional development that impacts faculty practice and student learning in multiple ways.