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Building Communities of Active Learners
Southwest Regional Learning Communities Conference
February
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Vincent Tinto
Syracuse University
Keynote Address Presented at the Southwest Regional Learning Communities Conference
February 28-March 1, 2002
Tempe, Arizona
Good morning. It is an honor to be asked to open this conference where so many talented and dedicated people have come together to share their work on learning communities. But the honor is yours for you and your colleagues across the country are engaged in an effort that has the potential to transform higher education as we know it and the way our students experience learning.
This is not to say that colleges and universities are not concerned about student learning. Many speak eloquently of the importance of student learning. Just read their brochures. Indeed more than a few institutions invest substantial resources in programs designed to achieve that end. Some even hire consultants to help them do so. But for all that effort, most institutions have not taken student learning seriously. They treat student learning, like so many other issues, as one more item to add to the list of things to be addressed by the institution. They adopt what Parker calls the "add a course" strategy in addressing the issues that face them. Need to address the issue of diversity? Add a course on diversity. Need to address the issue of student learning, in particular that of new students? Add a freshman seminar or better yet recruit students with better test scores and high school grades. Therefore while it is true that many institutions talk of the importance of student learning, most have not taken student learning seriously. They have done little to change the overall character of college, little to alter the prevailing nature of student educational experiences, and therefore little to address the deeper roots of student learning. As a result, most efforts to enhance student learning, though successful to some degree, have had less impact than they should or could.
What would it mean for institutions to take student learning seriously? Among other things, it would mean that institutions would stop tinkering at the margins and make enhancing student learning the linchpin about which they organize their activities. They would move beyond the provision of add-on services and establish those conditions that promote the education of all, not just some, students. To be serious about student learning, institutions would recognize that the roots of student learning lie not only in their students, but also in the very character of the educational settings in which they ask students to learn.
What should those settings look like? What are the conditions that promote student learning? The good news is that we already know the answers to these questions. An extensive body of research identifies the conditions that promote learning, in particular during the students' first year of college when learning is so malleable.
Here I want to place the emphasis on the conditions in which we place students rather than on the attributes of students themselves. Though some might argue otherwise, student attributes are, for the great majority of institutions, largely beyond immediate institutional control. Though we all desire to recruit more able students who are themselves more likely to learn, there is little most institutions can do, in the short-run at least, to change the skill mix of students they enroll. This is not the case, however, for the settings, such as classrooms, in which place our students and ask our students to learn. Such settings are already within our control and can be changed if we are serious in our pursuit of student learning.
So what does research tell us about the conditions that promote student learning?
First, high expectations are a condition for student learning. Student learn best in settings that hold high expectations for their learning, provide clear and consistent standards for their learning, and do so in ways that apply to all students, not just some. As Laura Rendon reminds us, finding validation as a learner is for many students, especially first-generation college students, critical to their success in college.
Second, support is a condition for student learning. Settings that provide academic and social support that is accessible to students are settings in which students are more likely to become successful learners. Here the operative word is become. Least we forget the first year is a period of becoming, a period of transition that requires students make a series of academic and social adjustments to college. Without academic and social support some students are unable to make that transition.
Third, feedback is a condition for student learning. Learning best occurs in settings that provide learners frequent feedback about their learning as they are trying to learn. Here I refer not only to entry assessment of learning skills and early warning systems that alert institutions to students who need assistance, but also to classroom assessment techniques as described by Tom Angelo and Patricia Cross.
Fourth, involvement is a condition for student learning. Settings that actively involve students in learning, especially with others, are settings that yield increased time on task and in turn greater learning.
Unfortunately, the educational experiences of most students are not involving, the time they spend on task disturbingly low. Learning is still very much a spectator sport in which faculty talk dominates and where few students actively participate. Most students, especially those in the first year, experience learning as isolated learners whose learning is disconnected from that of others, where the curriculum is experienced as a set of detached, individual courses, one separated from another in both content and peer group, one set of understandings unrelated in any intentional fashion to the content learned in other courses. Though specific programs of study are designed for each major, courses have little academic or social coherence. It is little wonder that students seem so uninvolved in learning. Their learning experiences are not very involving.
What should institutions do? How should they reorganize themselves and construct settings that promote student learning? And how should they engage the many students who work or commute to college? For these students, indeed for most students, the classroom may be the one, perhaps only place where they meet faculty and student peers and engage in learning. For that reason, the settings we build to promote learning must include, indeed begin with, the classrooms of the campus.
Fortunately, we have a range of strategies to draw upon that seek to actively involve students of learning within the classroom. Several that immediately come to mind are cooperative and/or collaborative learning, problem-based learning, service learning, classroom assessment, supplemental instruction and/or study groups, and of course learning communities.
For those who are new to the field, learning communities have a number of characteristics. Learning communities require students to enroll in two or more courses together. In this way, students are asked to share the experience of taking courses together. But the courses students take are not random or coincidental. They must be linked by an organizing theme or problem that gives meaning to their linkage. This is the case because an important attribute of learning community is that they serve to build academic as well as social connections between what otherwise would be discrete academic and social experiences. To do so learning communities also require that the faculty and staff who teach in them collaborate. The point of doing so is to ensure that the experience of the learning community provides for an academic coherence that crosses the borders of the linked courses. Finally, an increasing number of learning communities are altering the way students experience learning so that students not only share the curriculum, they share as well the experience of learning the shared curriculum. Not surprisingly, faculty and staff are turning away from the reliance on traditional lecture methods to the use of more active learning strategies such as cooperative learning, collaborative learning, and problem or project-based learning.
One of the many virtues of learning communities is that they can be applied to a variety of majors and fields of study and can be adapted to the needs of varying groups of students. For instance, they are being adapted to the needs of undecided students as well as those who require academic assistance. One of the linked courses may be a career exploration and/or developmental advising course or, in the latter case, a developmental level or study skills course. In residential campuses, some learning communities have moved into the residence halls. These "living learning communities" combine shared coursework with shared living. The power of these and other arrangements is that they enable the institution to integrate the provision of academic assistance to the social and academic needs of students in ways that is connected to their needs as learners.
Research has shown that learning communities, in particular those that are fully integrated, yield a number of important benefits for students. First, students tend to develop supportive peer groups and find personal support via the interactions that occur within those groups. As one student noted in an interview, the learning community in which she was enrolled was "like a raft running the rapids of her life." Second, students in learning communities tend to spend more time together, in particular more time studying together. And they do so in ways that extend beyond the borders of the classroom. As one student said "class continued even after class." Third, in finding more support and spending more time studying, students in learning communities become more involved in a range of learning activities, learn more, and persist more frequently than do students in more traditional learning settings. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, students in learning communities, in particular those that employ active learning strategies, speak of "learning better together." They come to experience and, in turn, value the power of environments that provide for a multi-lensed, multi-voice learning experience that require students to "think, re-think, and even re-re-think" about what their learning. As one student noted, "you not only learn more, you learn better."
It should be observed that one of the other benefits of learning communities is that they provide an academic structure within which collaboration among faculty and student affairs professionals is possible. In many cases, such as those described above, the "faculty" of the learning community is made up of both academic and student affairs professional. For the learning community to succeed, they must work together to ensure that the linked courses provide a coherent, shared learning experience that is tailored to the needs of the students the community serves.
In closing let me return to the question with which we began, namely what colleges and universities should do if they were serious in their pursuit of student learning. Let me offer several suggestions.
First, colleges and universities should make shared connected learning the norm, not the exception, of student college experience, especially during the critical first year of college. Whenever and wherever possible students should be asked to learn together and to do so in ways that integrate the knowledge they gain from various courses. And they should participate in learning environments that requires them to be active in shaping what is learned, that recognizes that knowledge is socially constructed through connection conversations among learners, students and faculty alike, that it is not simply the result of receiving knowledge from others.
Second, colleges and universities should take seriously the task of assessing student learning and providing feedback to students about their learning. Let me be clear. Though testing can be seen as a type of assessment, I am not referring to testing but to assessments such as portfolios, reflective diaries, one-minute papers, and the like, that engage students and faculty alike in shared conversations about what is being learned. Equally important it does so in ways that enable faculty and students to alter their behaviors so as to enhance learning.
Third, colleges and universities should connect academic assistance in its various forms to the curriculum and to student efforts to master the curriculum. Assistance should not isolate students in stand alone efforts that, however well intended, frequently serve to track students to remedial enclaves that undermine efforts at academic assistance. The use of developmental learning communities, about which you will hear more today, is only one of several possibilities.
Fourth, we must move to reorganize our own work and develop collaborative partnerships across campus on behalf of our students. Too often faculty and student affairs professionals sit in their own fiefdoms; their efforts on behalf of students fragmented and uncoordinated. In the same way that students benefit from shared learning and from the collaborative structures that support learning, so too can we all benefit from working together in settings that promote collaboration.
Finally, colleges and universities must take seriously the task of faculty and staff development and invest the resources needed to see that task to its completion. Least we forget the faculty in higher education are the only faculty in education, from kindergarten through graduate school, who are not trained to teach their own students. As a matter of practice, we are not knowledgeable of theories of student learning, and intellectual and moral development. Nor are we trained in a range of pedagogical methods and assessment techniques.
In closing, let me observe that if we here are serious in our pursuit of learning communities, we too would take seriously the task of faculty and staff development. To make a point that I am sure you will hear more than once during the next two days, co-registration does not a learning community make. Learning communities are not simply places of social connection that promote involvement and retention. At their best, they represent an educational as well as curricular reform that seeks to change the way students learn and we the faculty and staff teach. As we here are only too well aware, our ability to build powerful learning communities rests upon the capacity of our faculty and staff to construct learning settings that engage our students in shared, connected multi-lensed conversations that are the foundations of learning. Perhaps that is why so many institutions find it hard to move beyond the early stages of learning communities and tap their full potential for educational reform.
Second, if we are serious in desire to see learning communities move beyond the periphery to the center of campus educational life, we have to better understand difference and the challenges of inclusion in our work. We have not done enough to understand how different students encounter and make sense of learning communities and the ways in which they varying experiences shape their learning.
Finally if we are serious in our desire to see learning communities become institutionalized on campus, we too would take seriously the task of assessment, both formative and summative. Our belief in our work does not excuse us from the need to assess our programs and demonstrate that what we claim we do, we really do do.
Well, my time is up. Let me close with a thought. In the same manner that our students benefit from being connected, so too do we. Take the opportunity this conference affords and make a point of learning from each other. Build connections and stay connected. So let me end by giving you my email address and my university and home phone numbers. If we do not have the opportunity to talk during the next two days, please feel free to reach me in Syracuse. Thank you and enjoy the conference.
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