Anyone who believes that U.S. higher education should change, and everyone who believes that it can’t change, should take the time to read this book. Faculty Learning Communities will give you a new vision of what the faculty role can become in achieving both meanings of student success—higher levels of completion and higher levels of student readiness for the future.
Many educators, and this reviewer as well, have ardently championed High Impact Practices or HIPs (first year seminars, undergraduate research, community-based learning, internships, capstones, etc.). HIPs are evidence-based pedagogies that lead to higher levels of student persistence and higher achievement of learning outcomes, such as critical thinking and problem-solving, that educators and employers both consider “essential.”
The University System of Georgia (USG) made HIPs a system-wide priority, and tapped campus-nominated Chancellor’s Learning Scholars (CLS) to lead the reform—with equity as a core value—across all twenty-six USG campuses.
So then what happened? Vividly upending the canard that faculty reflexively resist innovation, Faculty Learning Communities shows us, in often riveting detail, how very smart scholar-teachers enlarged the HIPs directive by embedding it in a rich, ambitious effort to engage faculty leaders on every campus, not just with HIPs but with the core concepts of active, hand-on, inclusive, and integrative learning that HIPs at their best have in common.
Boldly, in a strong and reciprocal partnership between the system and campus-level teaching and learning centers, USG charted an ambitious goal of involving all full-time USG faculty with the scholarship on “what works” in fostering purposeful learning, and with the goal of embedding active learning practices in all courses, not just the two or three HIPs courses that administrators hope students will take.
Was this easy? Of course not – and this brave design for systemic change was launched before the pandemic. And yet they persisted.
The portrait of faculty and administrative creativity that emerges from these pages will give every reader new reasons for hope—and new understanding of where equity-minded student success initiatives should go.
— Carol Geary Schneider, President Emerita, Association of American Colleges and Universities; Senior Advisor for Quality and Civic Learning, College Promise; Consultant to Lumina Foundation for Quality and Equity