Start Here
Key Content
FLC Overview
Be sure to start by reading the FLC Framework. The “Three Rs”—Relationships, Relevance, and Rigor—will be central to our thinking as we work together to develop equitable teaching practices and resources.
Requirements for Participants
This Faculty Learning Community helps you produce just one thing: an Action Plan.
The Action Plan is a detailed plan for implementing an equitable teaching practice into one or more of your courses. It walks you through every step:
- Identifying a need your students have
- Choosing an evidence-based practice that is well-suited to address the need
- Creating a timeline for implementation
- Determining what challenges or needs you may have, and what resources can help you address them
- Crafting an evaluation plan to measure efficacy
Participants in our FLC will be at different points in their equity awareness and practice. Further, we all have unique campus/community environments, students, and challenges. Just as insisting your students all take exactly the same learning path in your classes is likely to hamper learning for many, we know that insisting all of you complete the same path to an Action Plan would be counterproductive. We are interested in helping you develop your competence, not in tracking your compliance, so we will not be taking attendance, tracking your discussion posts, or otherwise forcing you to learn in a prescribed way. We will require the submission of a completed Action Plan by the end of our community’s time together, but your engagement with the remainder of our learning activities and resources is up to you. That said, you are much more likely to get the most from our FLC if you engage! Here are the ways you can do so.
Readings, Links, & Videos
Each two-week module will contain “key content” and a “deeper dive.” You can anticipate that the key content will be part of the discussion in your live sessions, so try to read or view that material prior to attending the live session for the module. If you find yourself intrigued, skeptical, or otherwise seeking related information, take a look at the deeper dive for that module. NOTE: the Deeper Dive in Module 3 is an important place to find resources for specific types of equitable teaching practices you may choose to pursue for your Action Plan.
Live Sessions
In addition to a one-hour kick-off meeting, you will be meeting with your community every other week for 90 minutes at a set day and time, for a total of five sessions (see the Course Overview for a schedule and Zoom link). While we do understand that life and professional obligations are inevitable, you will get the most out of this community by being present for these sessions. If you must miss a session, check out the Community Conversations document linked in the Start Here opens in new window module for an outline of the session and related conversation.
Discussions
“Post once, reply twice…” NOPE. These discussions are designed to help you stay connected to your colleagues, grapple with difficult questions, and receive feedback as you develop your Action Plan. We often reference the discussion board conversations that happen between live sessions when we meet for each module; they are a key element of our community.
Your participation will not only help you grow as an equity-minded educator, but it will give your colleagues the benefit of your discipline-specific insight. Reminders for when we’d prefer for you to have posted to each discussion have been placed on the course calendar, but there are no due dates. We’d really love to see you going back to earlier discussions to reply to your colleague’s posts, especially if later community sessions prompt additional insights worth sharing.
Surveys
We will survey you four times, all of which will be anonymous.
- Pre-Session Survey: Based on the UW – Green Bay Equity-Minded Worksheet for Instructors of Online Courses, we ask for your self-evaluation of your current teaching practices, along with input on what equitable practices you would like to see your community discuss.
- Midpoint Feedback: We ask for some very brief feedback at the midpoint to ensure we “course correct” as needed.
- Post-Session Survey: This survey returns to the same self-evaluation you completed before the community’s start, adjusting the open-ended questions to allow for your feedback on the community experience.
- Faculty Learning Communities Six-Month Survey: We will be reaching out approximately six months after the end of our community meetings to hear more about the sustainability and effectiveness of your Action Plan. Regardless of outcome, understanding the effectiveness of these communities will improve transparency and help guide our collective equity work.
FLC Schedule
Below is an overview of the schedule for our learning community. Although there are other ways to run your FLC, we choose to have our modules span a two-week period, meeting live for one, 90-minute session within that module. Depending on the academic calendar in place when you are participating, a “Break Week” may be part of your schedule. We tend to place all materials related to the Action Plan into the “Break Week” module, especially since it often lands around Module 3, when participants should be starting the Action Plan.
Our Community Agreements
Examining the role of systemic racism in higher education can feel very challenging, particularly as we honestly consider our complicity and how to address it through changing our mindsets and practices. In order to have these difficult conversations, it’s important to establish agreements for how our community will navigate. During our Module 1 live session, participants will collaboratively development agreements for doing just that. We ask you to decide the following:
Ways to Stay Connected
Community Conversations Document
Our live meetings employ a shared Community Conversations document in order to offer greater collaboration among participants. Within this document, you’ll find the agenda for each live session. Participants are encouraged to add their own comments and resources throughout our live sessions. You are also asked to choose, before or at the start of each module’s live session, which Key Content you would like to prioritize for discussion, including any specific aspects that are of interest to you. This helps your facilitators ensure that all members of the community are collaboratively determining the direction of our conversations, and that what we cover is specific to your needs and interests.
An additional benefit to using this collaborative resource is that, should you be unable to attend a live session, you can refer to the document to see what our community chose to discuss and what links or insights they offered to each other. Our Community Conversations approach means that each FLC cohort has a unique experience, tailored to their community’s specific needs. It also places responsibility for engaging with the community onto the participant, decentering the facilitator’s role in the learning process.
Community Conversations Template
Microsoft Teams
Our inaugural group of Faculty Learning Communities expressed a desire to share resources with each other, casually chat outside of live meetings (in a less formal way than what the discussion boards in D2L allow), and stay connected beyond our official FLC session period. There’s a tool that every faculty member, staff, and student throughout Minnesota State can access, called Teams, that allows you to do all of those things.
We’ve set up a Teamsite for our FLCs where you can share stuff, either with all the participants in all of the discipline-specific teams, or just within your discipline-specific group. It’s also where we put things like our Community Conversations document and the spreadsheet of participants.
Not wild about using Teams? No problem! There isn’t a single thing we’re asking you to do that requires you to go into our Teamsite. We just want to offer it to your community as a resource.