“What’s so great about a Learning Community?”

A case study of three learning communities offered as part of Temple’s Learning Communities Program included a discussion of the experiences of faculty. This portion of the study centered on the question, “How do professors and graduate assistants experience Learning Communities?” The study revealed that the flexible design of learning communities allowed teachers to shape communities in ways that reflected their own interests and priorities. For one professor, the academic connection was the important aspect of Learning Communities. All of the professors interviewed for this study reported that teaching in a Learning Community had changed their pedagogy or philosophy toward teaching and learning in some manner. Some professors reported that they gained more of a “student perspective”. Others described an increased understanding of the impact of group work on teaching and learning. Several faculty members came away form the Learning Community experience with a renewed sense of excitement toward teaching. Others were so pleased with the success of their learning community courses that they implemented changes in their teaching styles in their non-learning community courses.

-Creating Learning Communities; N Shapiro & J Levine, 1999