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March 1, 2002
Barbara Leigh Smith, Co-director
National Learning Communities Dissemination Project
The Evergreen State College
It's a pleasure to be with you today. A special thanks to the Maricopa folks for an excellent conference. This is a wonderful learning opportunity for all of us and a terrific time to re-gather our strength as a community committed to educational reform. I have no illusions about how difficult this work can be down in the trenches. It's often an emotional roller coaster on the precipice between hope and despair, especially in the tough fiscal environment we now face. I have enormous respect for all of you who work with such creativity, dedication and perseverance. You are the reason learning communities have become such a vibrant force for educational change.
I'd like to turn my comments today toward the question of sustainability and what it will take to realize the full potential of learning communities. I also want to place learning communities in the context of larger efforts and trends in higher education. Learning communities are now a large-scale movement, touching hundreds of institutions of all types. My overall argument is that we are now at a turning point where we need to raise our aspirations and move more towards transformational thinking rather than thinking of the learning community effort as simply an interesting project or innovation. I'll end by sketching out what I see as the key areas of challenge and opportunity. I think you'll hear lots of resonance with what others have said at this conference.
As many of you know, I've been in this work for a long time. Right now I'm co-directing a large national learning community project funded by Pew Chairitible Trusts with Jean MacGregor. This project's central goal is to move the LC effort to the next stage in terms of both quality and reach. To this end, we've been sponsoring summer institutes for campuses wanting to send teams to do serious institutional planning, developing a major website, writing a series of monographs to be published with AAHE (12 to be exact), working with 57 learning community fellows who we see as a next generation of leaders, and sponsoring regional events like this one.
(By the way, the website includes a national directory of learning communities. Please register your program on our LC website if you haven't done so already. The address is on the back page of the handout you have with the bibliography.) As I said regional conferences like this one are part of our effort. Another one sponsored by the Association of American Colleges and Universities (AACU) will be held in April in Atlanta. In June there is yet another in Minneapolis sponsored by Augsberg College. Next fall there will be others in the southeast. Our hope is that we will make this good work more available to large groups of people by bringing it to different regions of the country. Taking different groups of people to LC conferences and to visit campuses is a great way to recruit people to LC's.
Another project I'm involved with is called the "Project on the Future of Higher Education." This group met last weekend in Tucson. Everyone in the group is convinced that higher education is in a pivotal period of transformation as a result of a variety of factors including the growing mobility and diversity of students, the increasing emphasis on student learning, the impact of technology, and growing resource constraints. The project is trying to develop models of higher education that can simultaneously increase the quality of student learning and reduce cost. Fifteen of us gather every three months to talk and write about this. Even though this is a very smart group of people, this has been a very tough job... I want to share a little bit of the thinking since I do think that LC's are one of the emerging strategies to address the core dilemma of increasing the quality of student learning in a time of limited resources. It will also give us a better sense of the larger system dynamics in which we are caught.
There's a fairly widespread national consensus emerging about the issues facing us. It's clear that we are on the edge of nearly universal higher education but still operating with an infrastructure and many policies and assumptions that no longer work. As a result, we are caught in a number of paradoxes. This is one reason why we all feel crazy some of the time as we try to pursue education reform.
At our meeting last weekend, Peter Ewell described the current situation in terms of "key dialectics"---seemingly opposing positions, both of which are right and both which must be accommodated. The only way out of the apparent contradictions is a conceptual shift and new institutional structures and ways of doing things.
One of the major conceptual shifts that has been advanced is the move from a teaching to a learning paradigm. While the article by Barr and Tagg that made that argument had the unfortunate effect of polarizing a lot of people, it has a certain resonance with much of the thinking about where we are headed in terms of putting student learning at the center of our work. If you think that form must follow function, it is an important move. Putting learning first helps define what is core and what is periphery in our institutions in terms of promoting student learning. It provides a lens through which to view all of our policies, practices, and structures. And of course we will uncover many contradictions. Our institutions are cluttered with many perverse policies from the standpoint of supporting student learning.
If we are indeed facing nearly universal higher education, which seems indisputable, and a situation in which a college degree is to our society what a high school degree was a 100 years ago, then we have to ask serious questions about what a 21st century degree should look like and how to work more successfully with our students.
Paradoxically, although American higher education is the envy of the world, the level of student achievement and student preparation needs improvement. Yesterday Vince Tinto mentioned low expectations and there is a huge amount evidence that this is the case. Although nearly 75% of the population goes to college, a recent study showed that only 42% had completed the high school curriculum required to go to college. As a result 40% take remedial courses. Even more alarming, nearly half of those who go to college never graduate. It's also clear that there is a growing mismatch between what we think is important and what employers and parents want. A practical education that prepares students for the workplace is becoming increasingly important. And that is not a simple issue of occupational training but rather a more complex kind of capacity for dealing with a rapidly changing world, what has sometimes been called life long learning. This is why the emphasis on many active learning approaches on unscripted problems is so important. Problem solving skills is way more critical than memorizing specific bits of information that will soon become obsolete.
Yesterday we heard that how people go to college has changed dramatically. In the old days when I went to college, students typically attended the same college for four years. Coherence was clearly defined in the degree. Since most students lived on campus, there was a healthy and natural interchange between the curricular and the co-curricular experience. There was strong sense of community resulting from the residential character of many institutions.
Almost no one attends college that way anymore. Most students now commute and most work, so building a strong sense of academic engagement and community is a challenge. Students have also become much more mobile. A recent study of the 1988 high school graduating class showed that 54% had attended two or more colleges. That number has certainly dramatically increased. Studies of student transfer show that they "swirl" (a term that Maricopa invented, I am told) rather than flow logically from high school to college or from two year to four year institutions. In fact, there is substantial lateral movement across four-year institutions and considerable reverse transfer between two and four- year schools. Distance courses are now starting to further increase the complexity of where students find their education.
At the same time, most colleges have dismantled their requirements in terms of common courses. Fragmentation has become a pervasive feature of the current environment. Now all of this is probably good from the standpoint of providing students with opportunities to individualize their education but it raises serious questions in terms of planning and coherence. Balancing individualization with coherence is one of the major apparent contradictions in the current environment.
Many believe that the only way out of this dilemma is by emphasizing learning outcomes which have a portability and coherence beyond a single institution, and by thinking of the student rather than the curriculum or a single institution's program as the central force for coherence. Students, according to this line of reasoning, should be expected to become more responsible, more intentional, and better informed navigators and planners of their education. This calls for a different curriculum and different kinds of support. Advising becomes key. Vehicles like summative student evaluations, cornerstone and capstone courses and projects , and various active learning approaches provide ways for the student to accomplish this. LC's have become a significant way of to organize courses into more coherent combinations, often also providing the time and space for a good marriage of experiential and content learning. And as everyone said yesterday, they also offer a powerful way to build community into the classroom.
Another key dialetic is around the organizational structure. Ewell calls this Modular vs. Cross-Cutting Organizational Structures. We are organized around academic departments which work very well for many purposes, but not well for others. There is growing recognition of the rigidity this builds into our colleges. Many see a need to have more cross cutting organizational structures to accommodate such things as general education, interdisciplinary studies, learning communities, and innovation in general. All of this "other stuff" is constantly at risk and on the margins of most institutions. Most learning communities are caught in this organizational rigidity.
The third contradiction Ewell talks about is the changing faculty role. He calls this the paradox of Disaggregated vs Integrated Faculty Roles in Instruction. We have, as was noted yesterday many faculties. Most institutions have barely begun to deal with the status, role, and support issues resulting from this. Furthermore some parts of the faculty role that used to be integrated are now being disaggregated, especially as a result of the use of technology. The technology universities are the best example of this dis-aggregation of faculty roles. Within the four key faculty roles of curricular design, content delivery, mentorship, and assessment, different people are now taking on different parts of what used to be a single integrated role.
The disaggregation of faculty roles can be liberating or fragmenting, good or bad, depending upon what is put in place. It can enhance attention to all aspects of the roles, some of which are currently under-developed, especially advising and assessment. In some institutions deliberately formed teams such as IUPUI are being forged, giving new energy and sophistication to the educational delivery system and taking advantage of too often neglected expertise in the library, in student affairs, in other parts of the institution, and outside in the community. The use of students themselves through various peer leadership models also represents a different way of thinking about instructional roles and expertise. Learning communities have been quick to take advantage of this trend, often developing highly sophisticated roles and relationships that enrich the learning environment and build a larger sense of the community of educators.
Though learning communities are often described as a pedagogy, they are fundamentally a curriculum restructuring approach. They've become pervasive because they are so adaptable to different institutional environments. Where they've had deepest impact, it is because they are a way of addressing some of the key dilemmas we now face. Dating something like this is difficult, but I would say the learning community movement is about fifteen years old. A watershed date is 1984 when the influential report Involvement in Learning was published. Recommendation Five called for "every institution of higher education to create learning communities, organized around specific intellectual tasks and themes." Coming on the heels of the significant report , A Nation at Risk, the Involvement in Learning report was distinguished by its focus on the process rather than the content of the curriculum, pointing to three critical conditions for excellence: student involvement, high expectations, and assessment and feedback. Active learning and the establishment of learning communities were stressed as two critical arenas for increasing student involvement and responsibility. Vince talked about these key factors yesterday.
While the first LC dates back to the Progressive Era and a small number of learning community programs developed in the 1970's and 80's on both the east and west coast, the effort really gained momentum in the 1990's as a result of the growing national emphasis on undergraduate education. Five efforts were especially notable: First, John Gardner's ambitious thirty year effort to improve the freshman year through his work on student retention and freshman year seminars at the University of South Carolina. Second, Ernest Boyer's and Lee Shulman's work on the Scholarship of Teaching called for a broader definition of faculty work and scholarship as well as a more empirically grounded sense of good practice. This was a blatant attempt to raise the status of teaching. At the same, Pat Cross encouraged teachers to experiment in their own classrooms using classroom assessment and classroom research. Richard Light's work also demonstrated that we all have a lot to learn from our students about their learning, even at Harvard. There were also a number of efforts to bring legitimacy to the teaching enterprise in a disciplinary context. The American Association for Higher Education, the Association for American Colleges and Universities, the League for Innovation in the Community College and the American Association of Community Colleges were all active in promoting the agenda to improve undergraduate education.
So the overall climate for focusing on undergraduate education has been positive in the last fifteen years. This gave the LC reform efforts status and built a network of kindred spirits. There has also been a robust dissemination effort through the leadership of important high education organizations and government and private funding sources that kept the conversation going and provided arenas for finding resources, experimenting, and cross fertilization. All of this gave the reform effort energy, important in sustaining commitments.
The learning community effort is now a very broad and diverse movement, covering everything from simple linked classes to living-learning programs to fully integrated team taught programs. John Gardner's recent national survey of the Freshman Year provides our first data on how widespread the effort is in different types of institutions. As Figure 1 indicates, LC's are widespread in all types of colleges and universities. The learning community effort continues to grow, now touching 400-500 institutions of all shapes and sizes.
see the full size image of this graph
There's been a kind of predictable falling out around certain models in different types of institutions because of natural structural compatabilities. As more and more schools have moved to semester system calendars and smaller chunks of credit and students have become more part time, it's become necessary to build learning communities of varying sizes. Faculty load also influences this. Community colleges in general tend to have more ambitious LC's in terms of team teaching and curricular integration. Not surprisingly the Fig model and the Freshman Seminar approach is most pervasive in research universities because it works quite easily with the current distribution system for general education and can be staffed with part time faculty and graduate students. Nonetheless, some of the FIG models are quite sophisticated with substantial use of active learning. A number of research universities such as the University of Washington see LC's as a platform for implementing other reforms in service learning and technology.
Not surprisingly, the quality and scope of learning community effort varies widely. In some institutions, it is only a few linked courses but in others, it includes a substantial portion of the freshmen class, even in very large universities. Many institutions have found that they can be a galvanizing force for change within an institution, empowering people to see their roles and relationships in new ways. In some institutions, learning communities have become a powerful way of building community in the classroom as well as new connections outside the academy.
The creativity that lies behind many learning community designs demonstrates what deep and empowering learning can look like. But, I must also acknowledge, that too many efforts are little more than block registration with little change in the teaching and learning environment. In many institutions the effort operates on the margin re-enforcing old divisions between student and academic affairs or disciplinary divides over remedial and college-level preparation. In many institutions that have had fairly well established learning communities for some time, there is a kind of "settling in" process that is unlikely to move the effort to its full potential. Many excellent efforts have become limited simply because they have become insular and not reached out beyond the early adopters.
As I look over this effort, I've come to the conclusion that the learning community movement is at an important crossroads. To fully realize its potential, we need to take the right next steps and ramp up our expectations. We need to make the right investments in certain strategic areas to sustain and improve our efforts.
Scaling-up innovations is always a challenge. Education reform efforts come and go, and truth be told, most have limited impact. There are several reasons for this: first, mostefforts are piecemeal, and there is an under-investment in faculty development, curriculum reform, and the overall infrastructure needed to support the reform effort. Furthermore, many efforts are not guided by clear goals. Few institutions actively cultivate this essential dialogue about purpose in an on-going way.
As the following table indicates, learning communities have been developed to address a variety of goals and purposes.
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Improve retention, increase student learning and achievement, increase time on task, promote teamwork and active learning, develop student leadership, increase the success rate for under-represented students in certain majors |
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Promote experimentation, broaden pedagogical repertoire, increase faculty engagement with one another, promote interaction between faculty and students, and between junior and senior faculty |
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Increase coherence of general education program, make curriculum more interdisciplinary, infuse skills such as writing and speaking across the curriculum |
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Enhance the quality of undergraduate education, increase the sense of community within the institution. Promote collaboration between faculty and staff., create entry points for study in the major, create coherent linkages for students in a minor |
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Increase connection between the academy and the community by building learning communities with service or civic learning components
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The news from the assessment work is positive but limited. There has been an accumulating body of research demonstrating learning community effectiveness, often conducted by individuals who are also active as higher education speakers so their results quickly reached those of us who are practitioners. Alexander Astin's influential work What Matters in College provided an important analysis of the factors associated with student learning. It painted a complex picture showing that student learning is influenced by the overall setting as well as many of the uncontrollable features of our institutions –for example, their size and student profile. Both the form and the content of the curriculum clearly mattered. He suggested that the implicit curriculum—the pedagogy, values and culture of a place ---made a difference. Along these same lines, George Kuh's Involving Colleges described the power of a "salient ethos that values learning" and the kind of yeasty engagement that can happen in such environments. All of these studies raised the question about how---indeed whether --- these environments could be created in institutions so often organized around different values and practices?
Vince Tinto's influential research confronted this question directly, demonstrating how involvement in learning could be promoted, even on commuter campuses. Looking at three very diverse institutions, freshman interest groups at the UW, coordinated studies at
Seattle Central, and clusters at La Guardia Community College, Tinto's research demonstrated that collaborative learning and learning communities could create intense communities of learning. Furthermore, these three examples demonstrated that learning communities could be adapted to very different institutional environments.
Another important study by W. Norton Grubb and his associates focused on teaching and learning in community colleges. Based on firsthand observations of hundreds of classrooms, including many learning communities, this work titled Honored but Invisible argued that serious efforts are needed to support good teaching. While they found much to recommend learning communities, the actual implementation they observed was very uneven, often representing a kind of dumbing down of expectations, with narrow combinations of skills courses without context or content courses. Much of the other assessment work on learning communities consists of single institution studies, often through doctoral dissertations.
We know that learning communities are associated with higher student retention, lower withdrawl rates, better rates of degree completion, more time on task, and higher student satisfaction rates, short and long term. A number of studies explore the longer term impact through studies of alumni and/or seniors.
We know that learning communities can be powerful engines for success in critical filter courses that have high rates of student attrition. If I could put them in one place, it would be in the crucial first quarter of the freshman year when the culture and expectations are established about what going to college means. We also know that they are associated with higher rates of student achievement, student intellectual development and learning gains, though the evidence in these most important domains is much harder to come by, simply because the necessary research hasn't been done.
Even more important is the gap in our understanding about what aspects of the learning community environment make a difference in student learning. One study comparing four institutions (one of which was a learning community) in terms of critical thinking found that two features of the teaching and learning environment seemed to be key differences: an emphasis on class discussion and an emphasis on writing and re-writing. This kind of research provides an important yardstick for assessing our efforts. All learning communities are not created equal, and the more we come to understand the particularities of why some have more impact than others in terms of student learning, the more effective we can be.
So what about these other goals? We know that learning communities are a powerful form of faculty development, especially insofar as they include team planning and team teaching. One only has to look at the pervasive privacy of the academy to understand why bringing groups of people together can be so powerful. Significant change can only really happen when faculty see themselves in new ways and when they re-conceive their relationships and commitments. Working with colleagues is a key way to accomplish this. At the same time, we actually know very little about the impact of learning communities on faculty that isn't largely antecedotal. This is virgin territory for future research.
When one moves to the larger aspirations of learning communities in terms of goals for the curriculum, or the institution, or the community, we see a real divide in the learning community assessment effort, and how limited the evidence is. This takes us back to the point about the piecemeal nature of many reform efforts and the absence of a larger frame of reference. Many LC's remain fairly narrow "retention efforts" or "orientation to college" initiatives. Good in their own right - but far less than they might be.
Transformative change efforts require us to go deeper. To further think about this, I'd like you to look at a model from a recent American Council for Education publication by Peter Eckel, M. Green, Barbara Hill and W. Mallon called On Change III: Taking Charge of Change: A Premier for Colleges and Universities (1999). It provides a way to think about transformation change.
Little depth and pervasiveness
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Great depth and pervasiveness
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Adjustment
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Isolated change or
extensive but shallow change
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Transformational change
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The big national studies are talking about a need for transformation models to address the future in higher education. We have some examples, but not enough, of institutions that represent transformational change. On most campuses, the learning community effort is on the periphery, and they remain fragile, but some are moving towards sustainability and transformation.
Reform efforts vary in both depth and pervasiveness. Truly transformational efforts tend to be both pervasive and deep. When we say that an effort is pervasive, that means it is broad and far-reaching within an institution. Transformed campuses are characterized by numerous integrated changes in their culture, structures, policies and practices. Indicators would be changes in pedagogy, changes in the curriculum, and student learning outcomes. Along with these one would see changes in budget priorities, new organizational structures, changes in policies and decision-making structures. Attitudinal and cultural change is an important component often manifesting itself in new interactions and relationships, changes in self-image and rationale.
Alverno College is often cited as the best example of a transformed institution where a whole different notion of student learning around carefully defined, measured abilities was put in place with the entire institution reorganized around this notion. King's College is based on the Alverno approach and represents another transformed institution as does Empire State College and the University of Phoenix. The Evergreen State College is another example of a transformed institution coherently organized from the start around learning communities. Many of these examples are new institutions, far easier to change.
We do have transformative examples of existing institutions as well. Portland State University is a good example of a transformational effort where its learning community program has become a way of articulating a new and robust mission as an urban university and numerous changes have been made to the institution's structures, policies and practices to support this. Wagner College, a small liberal arts college in New York City, is another example of a transformative effort where learning communities have become a key element in their institutional identity and a strategy for addressing a host of different issues. St Lawrence University is an example of a transformative effort that is both a living-learning model, a profound form of curriculum integration and a diversity effort all at once.
At the University of Washington and the University of Oregon LC's have become synonymous with the freshman year with three fourths of the freshman enrolling in learning communities. At the University of Washington learning communities have been used as a platform for implementing many other reforms. While neither of these examples represent deep transformation of the research university culture, they do have enormous reach and institutional support.
Both La Guardia and Skagit Valley Community College are transformative efforts built around re-envisioning their general education programs. Other community colleges such as Grossmont in southern California have made learning communities a key strategy for developing more effective developmental education programs. (This is not meant to imply that these institutions have arrived in some permanent way, because this is an-going business and transformed practices and structures can become reified, ossified, and obsolete over time.) The trick here is to have a clearly defined goal and audience and build an appropriate support system.
I'd like to end by suggesting seven challenges or key arenas if learning communities are to realize their potential. These provide a kind of barometer for assessing our own efforts so I encourage you to do that as I move along. Where is your institution's LC effort in terms of these challenges?
First, The Challenge of Student Learning.
We now know a great deal about student learning. We need to figure out better ways to put this into practice. I think learning communities provide one of the most robust places for this to happen. Because they involve large blocks of time and credit, LC's provide a broad arena for implementing a variety of other powerful pedagogies and promoting what has been termed "deep learning" and "teaching for understanding." Service learning, collaborative learning, writing and the other "across the curriculum" efforts are natural companions. The challenge of improving student learning isn't simply about introducing teachers to a few new "techniques." The relationship between pedagogy and content is much more complicated than that and many of our ideas about this are unexamined and/or based upon misconceptions. It's a much deeper challenge about understanding how people learn, what effective learning environments look like, how modern technologies might impact learning, and how all of this shapes the role of the teacher. There is no shortage of good literature for exploring this. Two excellent resources are John Branford's book How People Learn and Lionel's Gardiner's Redesigning Higher Education for Dramatic Gains in Student Learning. Other suggestions are in your bibliography.
Second, the crucial role of Faculty and other educators.
Meeting the challenge of student learning goes centrally to the issue of learning community goals and pedagogy, to issues about how we design learning communities, how we recruit and reward our faculty, and how we support faculty development. We also need to re-examine our notions of who is a teacher.
We know that LC's can be a powerful platform for staff and faculty development. At the same time, learning communities across the nation are under-investing in the critical faculty development activities needed, and too many learning communities are little more than co-registration devices, with little or no alteration of the teaching and learning environment. Not surprisingly, these LC's do not show dramatic increases in student achievement.
We are at a critical juncture with the large-scale retirements now facing the academy. In fact, as Finkelstein, Seal and Schuster points out in their recent study of the new faculty of the 1990's, much turnover has already taken place- one third of the total, a growing proportion off the tenure track. This research also suggests that there are not substantial differences in the teaching practices and priorities of the newcomers although the demographics of this new cohort are markedly different from the previous generation. John Gardner corroborates that. His recent study of freshmen students reports that lecturing is the most utilized pedagogical technique and that students say this is their least preferred teaching method. Most would like more experiential education activities.
With the imminent retirement of much of the nation's faculty, this is a very good time to invest in sustained faculty development and to rethink the ways we support the development of excellent teachers. We need to build systematic programs based upon what we know about student learning. Faculty belief systems remain a critical barrier to implementing new approaches to teaching and learning.
The third challenge is the Challenge of Diversity
This is a multifaceted issue that is partly about who participates in LC's (students and faculty), about what the curriculum is, and also about how the teaching and learning environments are structured. We need to continue to assess our efforts in terms of who they actually serve and whether they are actually serving their intended purpose. We need a much deeper understanding of our curriculum and where students succeed and fail. Many progressive "non-traditional programs" intended to reach under-represented populations turn out to be enclaves for more mainstream students while many students of color are concentrated in low priority, poorly staffed areas of the curriculum. In my opinion, as a national movement, the rhetoric of LC's is far ahead of the reality in terms of seriously addressing the multiple issues of diversity.
We know that LC's can provide a powerful means of serving an increasingly diverse student population. Learning community approaches, properly constituted, can readily address diverse learning styles. They can be used to dramatically increase student retention, especially among our most vulnerable student populations. Some schools have used them strategically to address the very serious retention issues in gateway courses or parts of the curriculum, that are not serving students well. Every school has some of these. Many schools have been emphasizing developmental education since this is an area that is a graveyard for too many students. There are some excellent learning communities explicitly established to support students of color, some around radical collaborations of high schools and colleges or two and four year colleges. Learning communities are also an excellent venue for developing a more multicultural curriculum. We've also learned that they will not necessarily attract students of color without a diverse faculty and a curriculum relevant to their needs. It's very important to begin by closely examining where your students actually are in the curriculum.
The fourth challenge is around technology
For the last several years, there has been much confusion and hyperbole about the role of technology in higher education. Many people were saying that technology would transform us. For some this evoked nightmares, for others utopian dreams. I think it's become very clear now that technology is a pervasive feature of our society. It can be a very positive tool in higher education. With their stress on face to face interaction and community, some think LC's are hostile to technology, but we are now seeing very creative uses of technology in learning communities.
A recent project funded by the Pew Charitable Trusts also demonstrates that technology can be used to both increase quality in terms of student learning and reduce cost. This course redesign project headed by Carol Twigg at RPI is an important story. This is not about using canned courses and distance learning. She has now worked 35 institutions focusing on the 25 key large courses that account for more than half of the enrollment in America's colleges. She tells riveting stories of how courses such as Spanish, Algebra, Biology, Chemistry, and Statistics have been redesigned for greater student success. While the story about the uses of technology are important in this project, the more important lesson is about institutions taking structure seriously as a variable they can change. In this respect, this project has much in common with the learning community approach. There's a great sink hole of inefficiency in our institutions that are reflected in courses with high withdrawal and failure rates. These are ready targets for learning community development.
I don't have any ready answers about learning communities and technology but I think those of us in the learning community movement need to take a serious look at the positive opportunities to enhance student learning through the judicious use of technology.
The fifth challenge is around assessment
I've already said some things about assessment and what we know about the impact of learning communities. Now I want to make a pitch for thinking about assessment in a particular way. Assessment should be thought of as an ongoing process and a key element of all learning community planning and implementation. It's everyone's business. It should be happening at multiple levels with multiple approaches. In the classroom, in the planning process before the effort begins, in the reflection process at the end. Assessment should be used to improve the learning community effort as well as to prove that the investment is worthwhile. The first thing skeptics ask is for the numbers; the things that move them are the personal stories like we heard yesterday from the students.
In too many learning communities, assessment is seen as a narrowly defined measurement exercise at the end of the effort rather than a critical opportunity to learn more, communicate with others, and improve the overall effort. Institutions with thriving, far reaching learning community programs such as Temple University and Skagit Valley Community College have used assessment to great advantage as a key tool in building their LC program. The focus of assessment needs to be on the effectiveness of the process of achieving one's goals…This is far more important than the goals or outcomes themselves because it keeps the effort moving. A key element, of course, is maintaining goal alignment and common purpose. Obviously, this must be a collaborative endeavor.
The sixth challenge is around Institutional Change
Eventually all innovations must move from being an innovation or an interesting project to being a reform. Being a reform requires structural change, reworking roles and relationships, and generally becoming part of the organization with appropriate support and legitimacy. A number of learning communities have successfully done this; many more face this challenge in the future. In many institutions, the learning community effort has become robust precisely because the organizers have been savvy about working with the existing organizational structures and adapting them to their needs. Successful contemporary models have often evolved through a process of working with institutional givens, and carefully cultivating the climate and support systems for institutional change.
There are many ways to think about educational reform. As Hyak and Cuban have pointed out in their interesting book, Tinkering toward Utopia, education reform is often characterized by a naïve rhetoric of progress towards utopia and a reality of small incremental changes. This can breed pessimism. Indeed, many learning communities report that faculty are cynical about persistent calls for reforms delivered by a rapidly rotating parade of academic administrators. The emotional dimensions of change efforts are important, especially when the goals are longterm. Change agents need to "keep the hope" if the effort is to survive. We need a kind of pragmatic utopianism that is grounded in what's possible but looking towards higher, more long-term goals.
One of my favorite writers, Parker Palmer, has called for us to organize a movement for education reform with all the organizing savvy that goes with that. He also describes how movements develop ways of rewarding people. In the early stages the rewards come from living one's values, from belonging to a community, and from finding a public voice. As movements mature, a more systematic pattern of alternative rewards (must) emerge along with an integration of the innovation into the existing organization.
We need to think about institutional change in a more comprehensive and long term way. It is not at all unusual for the learning community developmental process to take six or seven or more years to even stabilize in terms of basic operations such as enrollment planning. Thinking in terms of innovation isn't enough if this effort is to have staying power, much less a large impact.
This is an area that needs more serious attention. Across the nation we see persistent weaknesses in terms of leadership structures, resource investments, faculty development, real curriculum integration, and pedagogical change. With the enormous expansion of interest in LC's there has been a loss of focus and quality, and a kind of settling for the lowest common denominator. This is a very difficult arena, especially in light of the high rate of administrative turnover (3-5 years) and the well known tendency for everything to go on hold when a key leader departs. This requires creative solutions to the apparent paradox of finding support that runs against the grain of how we are organized.
Finally, and most important, learning communities face the challenge of purpose. Many learning communities begin in a flurry of enthusiasm without clear goals or planning. This is not a bad thing . It's typical of innovations. But if the effort is to last and have a significant impact on an institution, the institution needs to eventually come to a common understanding about why they are doing learning communities and organize appropriately to support them. The question I want to raise about this is whether our vision is large enough? We badly need a serious conversation about educational purpose.
Yesterday Vince argued that we need to get beyond co-registration when we think of LC's. I strongly agree. At no time have the questions "education for what" and "education for whom" been more pressing. At no time has it been more important to look carefully at what we do and be able to document its effectiveness. We need to continue to ask whether there are ways in which the learning community idea can be made even more powerful in terms of student learning and institutional reform. We need to be realistic in the ways in which we approach organizational change while still holding onto the kind of idealism that pushes us towards higher goals.
We need to ask ourselves have we gone far enough in terms of actually putting learning community theory into practice? Have we redefined our education systems, our support systems, our core processes, our ways of assessing student learning? Will history look back on this learning community movement as another innovative effort that came and went, or will it look back on this effort as something that opened the door to really profound change in the curriculum and pedagogy of American higher education?
This is tough work, but I've been amazed at the creativity and ingenuity of people like you. I think we've got a good shot at it. The learning community movement is poised to be a major player in the national conversation about putting student learning at the center of the enterprise. Clearly, higher education has changed dramatically. The colleges of the past, our community of memory, no longer exists, but learning communities can provide a community of aspiration that is empowering and meaningful, and transformative in terms of student learning.
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