Part 3 - Phase 1

Steps for Initiating a Learning Community

While every learning community will be unique, there are some typical steps that most instructors will find useful in working through the initial planning and implementation phases.

Phase One: Pre-Implementation

Identifying a Need for Learning Communities

The first step in initiating a learning community is to identify potential areas for integration in your curriculum. Evidence of such potentials can come from a number of sources. Students may comment on the helpful overlaps or troublesome confusions they find among their courses. Faculty may identify weaknesses in their own courses and look for complementary strengths in other courses in the curriculum. Faculty and administrators may share a concern for a particular population of students in the college, who may have special curriculum needs. When the opportunity for integration is documented, faculty members responsible for the relevant courses can begin a dialogue, exploring the interrelationships among their courses. Even this first step can bring a renewed sense of community to the faculty members involved.

Trying Small-Scale Linked Course Activities

If instructors want to do more to develop the interrelationships among their courses, they can plan activities which will be shared by students from two or more courses. These activities could include, for example, joint discussion of themes which cut across their courses, reactions by one class of students to works produced by another, joint service learning projects, or field trips. Such activities, even if they are brief, one-time events, allow the faculty to experience more directly the overlaps in their courses. The barriers between isolated courses begin to break down for students, too, as they see the connection between the course they are currently enrolled in and others.

After experimenting with linked activities, instructors may begin to wonder how much more effective they could be if they developed a linked course program of courses. This would allow them to co-enroll students and to build course parallels into the entire semester's activities.

Determining the Feasibility of Linked Courses

There are several questions which need to be answered before undertaking the more ambitious task of linking entire courses. First, will instructors have the time and flexibility in their own schedules to plan and carry out such a task? Especially in a small college, it may be difficult to cover all course offerings if some instructors are committed to learning communities. Second, will students enroll in the linked courses? Will they feel it restricts their schedules? Will they want to enroll in the number of hours your learning community entails? If learning communities are a new idea on your campus, will students understand what it is all about?

To answer these questions, discussions should be held with college administrators (especially the department chair and dean of instruction) and with advisors and counselors. A brief presentation can be made defining linked courses and outlining the potential benefits of the new approach. When their input is actively sought in this way, administrators and staff can offer invaluable insights about the logistics of accomplishing the goal of integration. In the discussions, the following questions should be raised: (1) Can instructors involved in piloting the new innovation receive planning time and/or reassigned time? (2) How large is the pool of potential students? (3) How many courses can reasonably be linked? (4) What is the most appropriate scheduling of courses? (5) How should the new offering be presented in the printed course schedule and in the computerized course listings? Advisors and counselors will play a central role in explaining and recommending the linked program, so ongoing communication with them is vital.

Preplanning a Linked-Course Program

When the feasibility of a linked-course program has been established, instructors should meet the semester before implementation to plan. The first step in this planning process would be to exchange syllabi so each person can look for correspondences in course competencies and course activities. Then instructors can meet in an informal session during which they "walk" the other instructors through their course, explaining in-class activities and assignments and sharing personal reflections about the joys and problems of their courses. The course parallels which are identified through this sharing activity can be listed in a simple table (See Tables 2 and 6).

This table can lead to the development of a linked calendar with columns for each course and rows for each day of the class session. This calendar will allow instructors to schedule activities in each course to take advantage of the connections across courses while maintaining their autonomy. At the same time, it allows the possibility of planning one or more joint activities for their students. The linked calendar represents the instructors' best thinking prior to the implementation of the linked program. Instructors will find, however, that they still have much to learn; many more insights will emerge and unforeseen problems will have to be solved.

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