CEP812

Problem of Practice

Lyman Briggs College has an enrollment of nearly 1900 students with only about 35 faculty to interact with while taking Briggs courses.  Even though the class sizes are much smaller than the normal general university required courses it still makes it hard to have that continuous interaction and bond that makes a students experience and education very beneficial throughout their undergraduate years.  Like many faculty they all host office hours to address questions and work out issues that so many students encounter in a course.  Even some of the faculty learn their students names before the course is over but do they really know the student and is there communication bridge that the students feel is missing? We go a bit further by offering an occasional e-mail to selective students announcing particulars to their majors but a majority of the communication is done at office hours, when and/if they are held.

So what seems to be the problem if this process has been followed for several years?  Well, the little amount of actual communication that encounters outside the classroom isn't really enough to ensure that students are grasping the materials and staying a float with the coursework.  It's apparent that many of the students are being 'taught' the materials but being taught the material doesn't mean that the students are 'learning' the materials.

Areas of concern: communication, following-up, validating, and ensuring students are understanding the materials.

Are there technology techniques that faculty can are are using to communicate with their students?  Yes, most of our faculty e-mail their students about upcoming exams and reminders on deadlines for homework.  E-mail and other types of information push (RSS feeds) are being used only to keep them informed, there isn't really any interaction between the faculty and students in this type of communication. Some of our faculty are also on several social networking sites but these aren't used for communicating about course information, it's more a personal site that typically has past students that want to keep up with how faculty are doing after they have graduated. Are there software applications that test the material and skills of the course, sure.  Lyman Briggs has one of the faculty members who wrote Lon-CAPA that is an on-line questioning software that allows a certain amount of time and attempts at questions.  Does this truly give accurate information about if a student is truly learning the material or does it just show that they are extremely smart doing mathematic problems and aren't understanding the common sense as to something does one thing while another does this?  There are many people that are extremely book smart in life, but have very little common sense when they do things.  To fully evaluate if students are really learning the material and be proven that our faculty are doing everything they can to make sure of this, there needs to be a change.

To address this important issue I propose the planning, implementation, and evaluation of a Professional Learning Community (PLC) that brings our Briggs resources (administrators, faculty, staff, and alumni) to create a collegial group who are committed to student learning. The community engages in a variety of activities including sharing a vision, working and learning collaboratively, visiting and observing other classrooms, and participating in shared decision making. The benefits of professional learning community to educators and students include reduced isolation of teachers, better informed and committed teachers, and academic gains for students. The concept of PLCs have been around for a few years now and although each have specific purpose for their existence they all usually share some common characteristics that make them successful.  The first step of a PLC is teaching the participants how to collaborate.  Collaboration just doesn't happen overnight so getting all participants to be on the same page and asking for input into the process helps individuals to lower their guards and begin sharing their ideas.   In any type of group, "trust" has to be established and respected among the participants. In any type of collaboration environment, having trust among participants and that their goal is collaboration not competition. In any new project, there needs to be adequate amount of "time" that the faculty, staff, administrators, and students to meet together and discuss their issues they discovered from previous weeks. By allowing time to discuss issues with students, this open door communicating could turn out to be a much more frequent item and thus office hours could become of the past. In order to have a successful PLC, it's also been noted that it can't be done internally, but in the case of Lyman Briggs College, it will be crucial to get some "outside help". That could mean potentially Alumni or even faculty from others departments or colleges to be brought in to provide a fresh set of eyes on the project.  Lastly, it's important to remember "L" stands for learning and that means helping one another and providing support. Chances are good that not everyone is going to agree on every decision, but through healthy discussions the group will come to some type of decision which inevitably better for everyone.

Plan:

The first steps are getting the faculty along with staff and administrators to meet and discuss the purpose and reasons why the PLC is such importance not only to them but to our students, the planning phase. This could be achieved prior to our fall semester at our annual Lyman Briggs Retreat where we all get together to start the new school year off on the right foot and all on the same page. So, presenting the college with a 10 minute PowerPoint presentation to cover what we want each student to learn, how when we know when each has learned it, and how will we respond when a student experiences difficulty in learning. The planning phase will also include the creation of sub-groups which could be grouped by curriculums, but to provide the greatest affect we'll have the groups cross-curriculum to provide a broader view of the scope.

Phase two of the plan involves selecting the appropriate technology tool(s) that provide the greatest impact while still providing the benefits for creating the PLC. Some initial tools that will be evaluated will be blogs, discussion boards, wikis, and any free or maybe paid on-line PLC bundled tools, or even a future application by brighterlogix (www.brighterlogix.com/). This phase of the project could realistically take several weeks to acquire the information and have the community formulate on the best tools for the job. For this course, one of the initial tools will be used in the implementation phase.

The last phase (III) involves one of the most important parts of any project which is the evaluation phase. This phase might start half way through a semester to ensure any unforeseen issues or 'hiccups' are caught before proceeding or the phase may start at the end of a semester of classes to get a larger pool and more time for the PLC to get situated and develop. Based on the feedback and outcome from the evaluation phase, the community will look at the outcomes and either proceeds with changes, continue on our path with no changes, or if needed we gather to revisit phase two and proceed. If our outcome of the PLC hasn't shown to work, we haven't done our job and therefore our students and us have failed as both learners and teachers. I'm very confident that with our committed community members and our best interest not only for our students but ourselves, I feel that this project will grow and expand our community involvement and we will succeed.


How does this project address the four common places of education? As the PLC gets on it's way, the faculty who are active in the PLC project will get feedback and suggestions not only from other faculty members in the college but from outside the community. The teachers of this project will be the faculty themselves as well as our outside resources who will provide a different perspective not being so close to the classrooms every day operations. The learners for the project will be those that are collaborating into the PLC, so this could be the faculty, students, and even our administrators. We all have something to learn from the PLC, if the community isn't going to be a 'give and take' type of community there is no sense of even the PLC project. We learn from others and share with others and during that process we may not all agree with one another but we discuss, learn from one another, and proceed. Our initial project will consist of at least one faculty member from each curriculums (physics, mathematics, chemistry and history and philosophy of sciences (HPS)) to start the initial conversations and planning. Providing faculty from each of the curriculums from the start will ensure that future discussions and decisions toward the PLC are being decided by the community and not just a selected few individuals. The initial setting for our PLC to start taking shape will begin at various professional development opportunities. The first being our annual Briggs retreat where all faculty and staff are required to attend. Having everyone in one room gives the greatest opportunity to provide an overview and direction on where our PLC wants to go. After these sessions, there will be bi-weekly meetings to make sure everyone is addressing any tasks or questions they may have about how the PLC is evolving. Potentially, these discussions could be placed in discussion boards or a wiki for electronic retrieval and provide viewing from other community members as well as our out side resources. Plus, Briggs community are heavy on showing our accomplishments and projects so as this project develops, it will be heavily recorded and shared with not only our own community but as well as our alumni.

Resources and sites that discuss creating and continuing support for PLCs in Secondary Education:

Baldwin, R. (2008). Professional learning groups in secondary schools: what makes them effective?. Retrieved from www.edplus.canterbury.ac.nz/socialscience/documents/plgpaperf.doc

Cox, M.D. (n.d.). Website for developing faculty and professional learning communities (flcs): communities of practice in higher education. Retrieved from http://www.units.muohio.edu/flc/

Faculty learning communities: what are they?. (n.d.). Retrieved from http://www.units.muohio.edu/flc/whatis.php

Professional learning communities - open text corporation. (n.d.). Retrieved from http://www.opentext.com/2/sol-industry/sol-ind-primary-secondary-education/sol-ind-primary-secondary-education-professional-learning-communities.htm

Vermont department of education - state board of education: the transformation of education in vermont. (n.d.). Retrieved from http://education.vermont.gov/new/html/dept/transformation.html