Faculty Learning Communities

Are you interested in learning more about active learning? Are you interested in connecting with faculty at different stages of transforming their courses using active learning approaches? Are you interested in connecting active learning in the classroom to other aspects of your career, including service and research? This FLC will connect and support faculty interested in adopting the best active learning strategies in their classrooms to meet the learning needs of their students. In doing so, our goal is to bring together an interdisciplinary group of instructional faculty to support one another in developing and improving active learning strategies by discussing what is working for them in the classroom, ideas they are trying to bring to the classroom, challenges they are having in implementing activities in the classroom and brainstorming about how activities or classroom time could be enhanced.

(facilitated by Justin Ingels)

Join this FLC for opportunities to share and discuss evidence-based mentoring best practices, continue our ongoing project of developing and launching a mentoring badge for faculty and staff, and to generally foster a culture of mentoring across the university. Our goal is to provide resources and best practices in support of mentorship across UGA, and we welcome all who share this general interest with us to join!

(facilitated by Bethany Bagwell)

Do you teach a project-based course? Are you eager to integrate real-world applications into your students’ learning experiences? Interested in exploring the impact of such classes? Join our FLC! The Capstone Initiative brings together instructors and coordinators involved in the capstone projects for various majors/degree programs across the University of Georgia to help develop an understanding of the various upper-level project-based courses offered at UGA and identify and promote best practices amongst the group. By understanding how each of the capstone / project-based courses is run, we work on establishing best practices for running and teaching these types of courses, as well as identifying pathways for collaborations between programs. The discussion of this FLC promises to enhance the student experience in these capstone courses and enable UGA to solicit larger / multidisciplinary projects for them by leveraging the expertise of not only a particular college or major but also the entire university.

(facilitated by Jorge Rodriguez)

Authentic learning happens best when students are engaged in learning environments that foster reflection, purposeful dialogue, and the ability to ask questions of genuine inquiry. This FLC seeks faculty interested in investigating research and practice of developing dialogically organized instruction and dialogic teaching across subject areas and within different class size environments. Faculty from all disciplines are invited to join the discussion. FLC meetings will include professional development, as determined by participants, on the practical application of dialogic elements in pedagogy as well as the exploration of literature on dialogic practices in higher education, and the development of a research agenda around the topic.

(facilitated by Brandy Walker & Don Nelson)

This FLC invites faculty across campus who want to delve into how content-independent skills (e.g., public speaking, informal writing, networking, interpreting verbal and non-verbal communication, empathy, conflict resolution, cohesive teamworking, collegiality, forecasting, time management etc.) make the difference for students between “getting a job” and “keeping a job” or ascending in the workplace. This FLC will also explore the forces in today’s society that interfere with or impair the development of these skills (e.g. the move towards more online communication). FLC participants will discuss, list and prioritize soft skills that can applied cross disciplines, and also discuss how these skills are developed – with a focus on identifying instructional activities that highlight the importance of soft skills and allow students to practice them. Our ultimate aim will be to provide recommendations for skills that can be integrated into courses and develop an outline for an abstract or manuscript on the topic.

(facilitated by Sonia Hernandez)

Have you ever taught in correctional settings (e.g., prisons, jails)? This FLC is for faculty with a strong interest in (and/or experience) teaching justice-involved people. This year we will build on previous work to create new and strengthen existing prison education programming at UGA. Our work will include generating a proposal to expand programming, identifying sources for financial support, forming / strengthening partnerships with correctional agencies, and providing education to the broader UGA community about the benefits of prison education. More information is available at our website: https://ctlsites.uga.edu/collegeandcorrections/.

(facilitated by Sarah Shannon & Jean Martin-Williams)

In this FLC our goal is to bring together faculty for relaxed discussions about teaching, using James Lang’s “Small Teaching: Everyday Lessons from the Science of Learning” as our guide. With support and encouragement through this FLC, participants will focus on their own teaching and course, and implement at least one small change in their classroom to enhance student learning and up their teaching game. All are welcome!

(facilitated by Adrian Burd, Gaylen Edwards, & Sarah Robinson)

Rapidly advancing immersive technologies (e.g., virtual reality [VR], augmented reality [AR], mixed reality [MR], extended reality [XR], etc.) bring opportunities for digital transformation in research and education. Our goal in this FLC is to bring together practitioners from across campus, promoting interdisciplinary discussion and collaboration on the use of immersive technologies for teaching and research. Our FLC will serve as an opportunity for conversations about best practices, state-of-the-art software, hardware, and our experiences, while also collaborating on the implementation of immersive technologies (e.g., VR headsets) in different contexts.

(facilitated by Inseok Song & Nandana Weliweriya)

Are you among the many instructors interested in food, farming, and rural life, and how these themes are related to issues of sustainability, diversity, and inequality? Join us to discuss courses you are currently teaching or planning to teach. We will meet periodically to share the outline of our courses, and discuss what readings, activities, speakers, and materials work best in class. The plan is to identify themes, overlaps, and redundancies, so as to develop a coursework road map for students interested in these issues.  We will also use the time to discuss new and exciting books, articles, and films.

(facilitated by Bram Tucker & Pablo Lapegna)

To be effective, educators must not only master their discipline, but must also learn how to communicate with their students. They must deeply listen, engage appropriately, participate in the moment, and think on their feet. This FLC is an opportunity for faculty of all experience levels to expand their skills through exposure to improvisational theatre, while exploring how the theory and practice of improvisational skills apply to pedagogy, critical thinking skills, and creativity.

(facilitated by Jonathan Haddad & Morgan Taylor)

Are you a non-tenure-track faculty member at UGA? Then this is the FLC for you! This ongoing FLC continues to work on action items supporting faculty in non-tenure-track (NTT) roles (e.g., lecturer, academic professional, clinical faculty, public service, research scientist, librarian, etc.). Building on prior years’ work, the FLC will focus this year on topics including supporting new NTT faculty, building community, supporting a mentoring program, coordinating dossier writing groups, reviewing relevant UGA and USG policies, and providing relevant and up-to-date information at https://nontenuretrack.uga.edu/.

(facilitated by Julie Grainy & Nicole Jones)

Peer coaching offers a collegial way to accelerate the adoption of new instructional strategies and improve the culture toward teaching in a department. In peer coaching, two or more instructors collaborate to navigate the challenges of teaching and learning together. Through this process, instructors explore innovative teaching techniques, observe peers in the classroom, provide constructive feedback to peers, and reflect on their teaching practice. Participants of this FLC will have the opportunity to practice peer coaching in a supportive learning environment with an interdisciplinary group of faculty. Together, we will explore models of peer coaching drawn from various fields (e.g., teacher education, workforce development), develop peer coaching partnerships, conduct peer observations of teaching, engage in dialogic feedback and reflective inquiry, and navigate coaching challenges. Participants will be encouraged to apply the insights gained from this FLC within their department to foster peer coaching relationships with colleagues.

(facilitated by Terri Dunbar & Peggy Brickman)

Reacting to the Past is an award-winning pedagogy for engaged learning based on immersive role-playing. The intended purpose of this FLC is to create a community for instructors from all disciplines who may be interested in using Reacting in their classroom. Led by faculty who have used Reacting games within their disciplines, this FLC will provide a community that shares resources and techniques to support using Reacting games most effectively.

(facilitated by Naomi Norman, Montgomery Wolf, & Andrew Oswiak)

Are you ready to dispose of your grammar-based approaches to world language teaching and assessment and embark in a more communicative way of teaching and assessing language? If so, come join this group of like-minded individuals. During our FLC meetings we will 1) brainstorm communicative approaches to enliven our novice language courses and help learners engage in more meaningful ways with the language, culture, and each other, 2) put them into practice, and 3) share reflections about outcomes observed as a result of implementing these new approaches in our classes. An additional goal of this FLC is to increase the number of students who minor and major in the languages we offer.

This FLC will meet every third Friday at 10:30 AM in 308 Aderhold Hall.

(facilitated by Lou Tolosa-Casadont)

The goal of this FLC is to bring together a group of faculty to design and undertake a scholarship of teaching and learning project focused on academic service-learning pedagogy and related forms of community engagement. Together we will identify a research question and pursue a research project together – submitting the results for presentation at a national service-learning conference. For 2024-25, we will likely be continuing a focus on how service-learning supports student resilience, but may also take on additional research questions.

This FLC will meet on select Tuesdays, in the late afternoon.

(facilitated by Paul Matthews)

This FLC is designed to support science faculty in learning about and promoting inclusive excellence and equity in STEM education. Our learning community will explore key concepts, engage in critical self-reflection, develop critical self-efficacy, and learn practical strategies that will empower members to engage in critical action that leverages students’ assets and supports students from all backgrounds to thrive in science classrooms, labs, and departments.

(facilitated by Tatiane Russo-Tait & Jenn Thompson)

This FLC will bring together interdisciplinary faculty to explore sustainability education including teaching with the Sustainable Development Goals. We will use our own courses as examples and opportunities for curriculum development and piloting new strategies and share lessons learned through the team-taught freshman odyssey course developed the previous year. The group meetings will emphasize the sharing and development of resources, opportunities for collaboration, local application of global challenges, and different ways of learning and knowing.

(facilitated by Tyra Byers & Jason Roberts)

Do you help train TAs in your department? Do you supervise their instruction in some way? Do you just want to support their teaching development??? This FLC will create multi-disciplinary resources to support instructors and departments in fostering the instructional development of TAs. We will discuss the relevant training and support TAs need to become successful teacher-scholars and draft a set of (pedagogical) competencies that can be applied in multiple settings.

(facilitated by Kelly Ford)

Have you been using non traditional assessment tactics (colloquially referred to as “ungrading”)? In this Faculty Learning Community, we will work with faculty already using alternative assessment to help refine, rethink, and document alternative methods of assessing student work in the classroom. Ungrading is an umbrella term that comprises several different methods of student assessment including Self-Assessment, Contract Grading, Specifications Grading, Peer Review, and Labor-Based Grading. FLC members will workshop their syllabi and refine their practices to think through methods of grading that are not A-F or 0-100 and find ways to give students more agency in the classroom. We will also consider opportunities and challenges for integrating ungrading into a higher education system based on grades and quantitative assessment.

(facilitated by Jerry Shannon & John Maerz)