Embedded within various residence halls, our learning communities are residential spaces that bring together faculty, staff, and students around a specific focus. Exclusive seminars and class sections, events, and connections with instructors and staff help make a large university feel smaller and more intimate.
What is the learning community?
A learning community is a small group or cohort of students who share common academic goals and work collaboratively in the classroom with one or more professors.
What is the purpose of a learning community in college?
Learning communities seek to improve academic success, raise retention rates, enhance student satisfaction and ease the transition to college by connecting students with peers and making the first-year curriculum more coherent, cohesive, synergistic and relevant to students’ interests and aspirations.
What are the benefits of a learning community?
Learning Communities provide the following benefits:
- Participation in an LC boosts the chances of academic success.
- Students in LCs get to know their professors and classmates better.
- Students in LCs create lasting friendships.
- Students in LCs have the opportunity to broaden their learning experience.
What is an undergraduate learning community?
Learning communities provide a fresh approach to general education by enabling students to co-enroll in two general education courses and a first-year seminar that are united by an integrative theme selected by the faculty.
What is an example of a learning community?
They cite four generic forms of learning communities: curricular, classroom, residential, and student-type (p. 116).
Should I do a learning community?
Students involved in Learning Communities show greater academic achievement, greater involvement on campus, more motivation, greater intellectual development and are more apt to stay in school. They are often more intellectually mature and responsible for their own learning.
Why do you want to join a learning community?
Boost your chances of academic success. Get to know your instructors and classmates. Create lasting friendships. Broaden your learning experience.
What are the key components of a learning community?
Characteristics of professional learning communities include supportive and shared leadership, shared values and vision, collective learning and application of learning, supportive conditions, and shared practice (Hord, 2004).
What are three characteristics of learning communities?
In our review of the literature, we found what seem to be common relational characteristics of learning communities: (1) sense of belonging, (2) interdependence or reliance among the members, (3) trust among members, and (4) faith or trust in the shared purpose of the community.
What is the purpose of a PLC?
PLCs—which harness “an ongoing process in which educators work collaboratively in recurring cycles of collective inquiry and action research to achieve better results for the students they serve”—are a common and proven practice to promote teacher collaboration that increases student achievement.
What are the advantages of living in a living learning community?
Greater academic support opportunities (convenient access to tutoring, supplemental instruction courses, major-focused programming) Frequent interaction with faculty and staff outside the classroom. More positive perception of the residential experience. Greater connection to the university at large.
What is the biggest benefit to a professional learning community at a school?
1. PLCs allow educators opportunities to directly improve teaching and learning. PLCs allow teachers an easy way to share best practices and brainstorm innovative ways to improve learning and drive student achievement.
Are Learning Communities good in college?
Studies also suggest that learning communities may have modest positive associations with outcomes such as course completion and persistence in college.
How do Learning Communities work?
Learning communities do that, he writes, by “connecting students with peers and making the first-year curriculum more coherent, cohesive, synergistic and relevant to students’ interests and aspirations.” Done right, they must be more than clusters of linked classes; the involved faculty members must work together to
How is a graduate learning community different from an undergraduate learning community?
Undergraduate professors typically provide information and direction, whereas graduate faculty might focus more on facilitating debates and discussions. At a graduate level, classroom time is shared. Professors will engage you, and you’ll be expected to contribute to a conversational, collaborative class experience.
What does PLC mean for teachers?
professional learning community
The term “PLC” stands for professional learning community. As traditionally defined, a PLC is “an ongoing process in which educators work collaboratively in recurring cycles of collective inquiry and action research to achieve better results for the students they serve” (DuFour, DuFour & Eaker, 2002).
What are the 3 components that make up the professional learning communities?
The PLC concept is often misconstrued as simply holding more staff meetings. But it’s much more than that. It’s a process that’s focused on three major components: learning, collaboration, and results.
How do you contribute to a learning community?
Contributing to a Learning Community
- Share your learning through emails, blogs, tweets, presentations and conversations.
- Collaborate with colleagues to develop curriculum, student learning endeavors and school-wide learning events.
- Ask questions, share ideas and innovate preferably with others.
- Share your expertise.
What are the 3 big ideas of a PLC?
As you delve deeply into the three big ideas of a PLC – a focus on learning, a focus on collaboration and a focus on results – you will gain specific, practical and inspiring strategies for intervention for transforming your school or region into a place where all students learn at high levels.
What are the 5 components of professional learning community?
As a result of extensive research, they cited five elements of a professional community: (1) reflective dialogue, (2) focus on student learning, (3) interaction among Page 7 teacher colleagues, (4) collaboration, and (5) shared values and norms. Each element is briefly defined here.