Towards Contextual Experimentation: Creating a Faculty Learning Community to Cultivate Writing-to-Learn Practices

Source: Studying Teacher Education, Volume 12, Issue 1, 2016, pages 20-36

In order to explore ways to integrate new pedagogical practices, five faculty members created an informal faculty learning community focused on writing-to-learn practices, an inquiry and process-based writing pedagogy.

The faculty members learned the writing-to-learn practices together, periodically met to discuss how they implemented the practices, and reflected on each other’s instructional methods in the contexts of their own experiences. They engaged in a self-study in order to understand how the collaborative nature of the learning community helped them to learn and use the new teaching practices.
After participating in a series of workshops together, they shared written reflections about their experiences of employing the practices in their own classrooms.

The findings reveal that participation in a faculty learning community provided an engaging and effective way to learn and make use of new pedagogical practices. Participants gained practical adaptive strategies from each other, felt supported in their experimentation with the new practices, and analyzed more deeply the ways in which the new practices could be integrated into their teaching.
The authors describe how an informal faculty learning community can be an effective tool for faculty to research, learn, and analyze the learning of specific pedagogical practices.