What Faculty Learning Communities Can Do for You

By Cynthia Rutz, Director of Faculty Development, CITAL

Some of your faculty colleagues have been meeting regularly this year to explore a teaching topic that interests them and then making positive changes in their classrooms. That is what our Faculty Learning Communities (FLCs) do. In the following article, Abbie Thompson (Psychology) talks about what she learned about her own strengths by taking part in the “Teaching to Your Strengths” FLC. Then Zsuzsanna Szaniszlo (Math & Stats) describes experimenting with different kinds of grading in her FLC on “Unconventional Grading Methods.”

Abbie Thompson: Teaching to your Strengths

Abbie has been at VU for four years and this is the third Faculty Learning Community (FLC) that she has participated in.  What keeps her coming back to FLCs year after year is the different perspectives on teaching and the connections she makes with colleagues all across campus. The latter was especially important for Abbie because six months after she began teaching at VU  the COVID lockdown came along and severed many connections she was starting to make with colleagues.  

She highly recommends joining an FLC to other junior faculty. Because CAS junior faculty are protected from committee work in their first three years, they don’t have many chances to meet colleagues from other disciplines.  An FLC can bridge that gap.

Abbie found that this year’s FLC on Teaching to Your Strengths was less structured, more holistic than others she has attended. Rather than reading books and articles, the participants all took the CliftonStrengths Assessment.  This helped them to identify their individual strengths and weaknesses.  Especially helpful was identifying blind spots and pitfalls to watch out for. 

For example, one of Abbie’s strengths is as a learner. One pitfall of that is wanting to always be the expert, so being reluctant to take a leap and try something new.  One way in which Abbie tried to avoid this pitfall was to remove her psychology hat when taking the survey itself. As a psychologist who understands psychometrics, she had to resist reading up on the literature about the survey.  She realized that even if it were not the most valid instrument, it could still point out some things worthy of her attention.

Lori Miltenbeger, Director of the Career Center, was the co-leader of this FLC.  As a trained administrator of the CliftonStrengths Assessment, she helped them interpret their results. The members also met in pairs to share ideas about how to make use of their results in the classroom.  Having a mix of disciplines really helped in generating ideas for curriculum design.

 Abbie shared that she was able to apply her new self-knowledge to her research.  She has always mapped out her research studies well in advance. But having lost some of her work in the recent fire, she needed to learn to be more comfortable going with the flow and being a little less structured.

What Abbie would like other faculty to know about teaching to your strengths is that you are probably already doing this to some degree.  You just need to learn to embrace the things you do well and put those front and center in your classes.  Many of us suffer from imposter syndrome, especially new faculty.  It can help to have another source confirm your strengths so that you can really own them and teach like yourself, not anyone else.    

Members of this FLC were:  Co-leaders: Sara Gundersen & Lori Miltenberger. Members: Abbie Thompson, Lucas Kelley, Alberto Lopez Martin, Ryan Cole, and Jennifer Marley

Zsuzsanna Szaniszlo: Unconventional Grading Methods

 Zsuzsanna became interested in this topic due to a grant that she, her co-leader Jenna VanSickle (Lilly Fellows Program) and other VU colleagues received from the National Science Foundation.  The grant prompted her to learn all she could about Standards-Based Grading (formerly known as mastery-based grading).  She spent last summer transforming one of her classes to this mode. In this form of grading, students can’t pass without actually learning the material. Students like it because they have all semester to demonstrate that they have met the standard. What Zsuzsanna likes about it is that when students get an assessment back they focus on what they missed and how they can improve for the next attempt. This changes the dynamic so that she becomes their support person rather than their judge.  

But the FLC did not focus on a single kind of grading.  They looked into contract grading, ungrading, specifications grading, as well as other forms of unconventional gradings. They read together the book Ungrading, edited by Susan D. Blum. Zsuzsanna and others from VU heard Blum speak at last year’s Midwest SoTL Conference in South Bend. 

For most FLC members, this was the first time they had encountered these alternative forms of grading. So guest speakers Luke Venstrom and Scott Duncan filled the group in on the competency-based learning they have instituted with VU’s engineering students. This is a teaching strategy where students have multiple opportunities to show that they have mastered the material in a course.  Studies have shown that competency-based techniques can have a positive effect on retention and allow students who are behind to catch up and be successful.

In December, each FLC member planned a new grading project that they could implement during the spring semester. Kevin Jantzi is allowing his students to correct mistakes on exams, earning back up to 30% of the points they missed. He finds that the extra points really motivate students to put in the time to discover and correct their errors. Jennifer Winquist is using an “ungrading” approach with multiple drafts of an empirical research paper. Kevin Goebbert is trying out specification grading for his students who make maps with various meteorological data. The maps are assessed based on the standards he sets out, ensuring that they master this valuable skill. 

Zsuzsanna would tell faculty looking into unconventional grading that it pays rich dividends, but does require a little more work at the beginning. To decide what your students need to master, you must clearly identify the specific learning objectives for your class. The payoff is that discussions are much richer, and students who are underprepared will have plenty of chances to catch up. To get started, she highly recommends attending The Grading Conference. This inexpensive (only $50!) online conference will be held this year on June 9 and 10.  

Members of this FLC were: Co-leaders: Jenna VanSickle, Zsuzsanna Szaniszlo. Members: Jelena Byers, Theresa Carroll, Kevin Goebbert, Kevin Jantzi, Daniel Maguire, Jennifer Winquist