Valerie Bystrom

         College faculty who work in collaborative, cross-disciplinary teaching and learning communities take a lot of time planning their programs. At Seattle Central Community College we also take time ending our programs, reflecting on how our plans worked out, consolidating the important lessons and innovations, so that we not forget what we have learned about teaching in these challenging, complex curricular organizations.

         Seattle Central launched its first coordinated studies program in the fall of 1984 with the combined expertise of two Seattle Central faculty who had spent spring quarter in a learning community at The Evergreen State College, where coordinated studies is a standard curricular structure, and two veteran Evergreen faculty. For each of the next several quarters, at least one faculty member who had already taught in coordinated studies anchored a new team offering a new program. Tentatively, one after another, Seattle Central faculty members let go their usual syllabi and ventured into learning communities, with students and with each other. Like other risks in life, the new teaching was scary and exhilarating.

         After The Washington Center for the Improvement of the Quality of Undergraduate Education was established in 1985, the directors, Barbara Leigh Smith and Jean MacGregor, arrived near the end of each quarter to interview faculty teams in order to support and better understand our work with learning communities. For pioneering teams at Seattle Central and at other colleges in the state, Barbara and Jean appeared like travelling nuns. To them, people confided the stresses, confusions, and sublimities of the new pedagogy. These colleagues reassured us: indeed, other people run into similar difficulties and here are a couple strategies they tried. Of course, people liked telling Barbara and Jean their success stories.

         In these interviews, though, faculty teams really talked to each other, and they often brought up problems or issues that had been left hanging earlier in the term. They explored solutions. Perhaps they thought up a new way to integrate a part of the curriculum more effectively or to help students learn important terms in a workshop instead of a lecture. Perhaps they elaborated to each other ways they resolved crises in seminars. Much of what was discussed would not have been discussed without such an occasion; ideas and insights would not have blinked into being. For everyone, understanding of our work deepened.

         Now, we offer six or more learning communities every quarter at Seattle Central. After ten years, most of our teachers have a rich and varied experience with learning communities: promoting more active learning, integrating the disciplines, sharing responsibility and authority, and at every turn working with others to generate, facilitate and evaluate the teaching and learning. Our store of expertise has grown. And now the Washington Center consortium includes more than forty schools. The extraordinary success of learning communities in our state means that the Center staff cannot and does not visit every team every quarter. However, even at Seattle Central where the work is well developed and more and more teachers are experienced and confident in learning communities, we recognize that we miss something if we do not have post-program interviews.

         Seattle Central faculty members have developed an evaluation model for coordinated studies which reflects our commitment to the principle of assessment for improving not only students' work but our own. From the beginning, our learning community evaluation process has included plenty of reflective time for students; they are routinely asked to evaluate their own work, the program, and the individual teachers in end-of-the-quarter narratives. Initially, the model also included a means for teachers to reflect on and evaluate each student's participation, often in writing, often in conference. When we asked ourselves if this model were comprehensive, we began to see what was lost when the Washington Center interviews ceased. That is, what teachers learn in the course of a program is often never expressed, too often forgotten, and often the richest source of all for improving teaching and learning in coordinated studies programs.

         Because the pedagogy stresses collaborative, active learning, much depends on the participation of students and teachers moment by moment, and what happens cannot be entirely foreseen. The structure actually generates the unforeseen. This puts a premium on improvising, trouble shooting, thinking on your feet, and refining on the spot. The question was, how can we help save insights and inventions quarter to quarter? How can we keep them from sinking under the intensity and demands of the next quarter's teaching? Perhaps we no longer needed the moral support of the Washington Center directors, but we still needed time and space to reflect on our experiences. Post-program interviews became part of our evaluation model.

         At the end of each quarter, therefore, we set a time for each learning community teaching team to meet with a colleague and talk about the program just winding up. The colleague acts as a facilitator, or "debriefer," and serves on the Coordinated Studies Subcommittee for Evaluation. The subcommittee meets twice a quarter to settle logistical questions, to review and perhaps amend the prompts, and to discuss our guidelines-how and why we conduct these post-program conversations.

         Logistics include setting the time and place for the interviews. We usually let each team decide a convenient time during the last two weeks of the quarter. (Occasionally, we have also held all debriefing sessions in one afternoon followed by a informal gathering of interested faculty and administrators to discuss insights and issues-"What we learned and want to share." This proved especially valuable because it made time for faculty teaching in different learning communities to talk with each other about their practices.) We also give each team the option of being audio or video taped. Committee members learn how to operate the equipment and make sure to reserve what is needed for the several interviews.

         Even the most carefully planned learning community will not unfold just as expected. Even experienced faculty, working together, often for the first time, with a new set of books and, no doubt, with some new ideas about how to organize workshops and how to have successful seminars, cannot foresee how the work will unfold. New faculty may be particularly anxious and feel there is some demerit if the syllabus is changed. They need assurance that when students and teachers collaborate in the teaching and learning, no one can wholly control the process. For instance, workshops may not get finished on time, important issues for Tuesday's film may need even more discussion on Wednesday so that the lecture needs to be rescheduled, or the fourth writing assignment must be redesigned to address important questions which did not get discussed in seminar. Assure faculty that excellent preparation does not necessarily prevent goof ups and that there will always be some planning as you go.

         New faculty especially may be concerned about "coverage" and transferability. In stand-alone courses, a teacher's syllabus often represents what s/he believes must be covered in order to get credit for a certain course, like Sociology 110. Since we still give discrete course credit even for courses offered in learning communities, each faculty member must designate wisely just what course will receive credit in the learning community, must decide just what is essential to the course, just what students must learn in order to get credit, and then must take responsibility that the program support that learning. Teachers who offer a course in sequence have discussed with the instructor of the next course, for instance, exactly what the student must learn in order to move on successfully. Be prepared to discuss wisely. It is important to remember that even in stand-alone courses there is a tremendous variety in what might constitute Sociology 110.

         Many faculty feel anxious because the level of control they have in traditional classrooms is not the same as in CSP's. They may feel a loss of control, that things got out of hand. This may be exhilarating or make for panic. Be prepared to reassure new faculty about, for instance, the notorious Fifth Week Rebellion. At schools where learning communities are not the norm, the shift from traditional classrooms to those where students have more responsibility for their own learning and more control over what actually happens in class sometimes produces a moment at about the fifth week when students want to exert that control. A certain faction may demand, even loudly and belligerently, some change in the workload, the reading, the seminar process, or another facet. For a few quarters at SCCC, this outbreak disturbed the faculty teams, who took it as a serious criticism of the program, but now teams recognize and even plan for it. At Seattle Central we encourage all teams to plan for an Small Group Instructional Diagnosis (S.G.I.D.) at about mid-term. This process promotes responsible student discussions and an invaluable way for students to offer suggestions for more effective teaching and learning in a program.

         New faculty especially may be overwhelmed by the complexity of team teaching in an interdisciplinary setting. Assure them we all feel like that.

               There are also a set of don'ts, of traps to avoid:

1.      Don't let conversation boil down to arguments about Learning Community dogma. Don't let the team fall victim to some notion that there is one way to teach in a learning community and that they didn't do it.
2.      Don't let conversations dwell on institutional gripes. Elevate the conversation and turn gripes into constructive steps that might be taken or issues that might be addressed in a more formal institutional arena.
3.      Don't start story telling yourself. This is their "air time."
4.      Don't let one person talk at length for the others. Use body language; give someone else your attention.
5.      Don't let feelings within the team paralyze the discussion. Use discretion in changing the subject, or asking questions, or allowing silence. One useful question is: "Have you said all you need to say about this?"

         Using this process at Seattle Central, we encourage faculty to pause and to reflect in the wake of a program, taking time and making space to discuss where they have been and what they have accomplished. In many schools, learning communities have been adopted because of their reputation for retaining students better than traditional courses. Too often assessment has simply meant gathering data about how many students succeed and how many are retained into the new quarter or the next year. Such measures serve important institutional purposes, but they do not suggest how learning communities differ qualitatively from traditional courses, nor do they offer any help toward understanding how they work or how to improve them. In fact, the new pedagogy puts into question what it means to "take" Sociology 110 or any other course. How do we measure, then, if the student has "got" it? We need to talk together about these questions, about assessment.

         Certainly we plan as if we had a good idea of the answers. However, at the end of a quarter in a learning community, teaching teams arrive at their interviews rich with recent experience. What has it meant to take Sociology 110 in the learning community? How did the structure of the class, the organized interactions among students and teachers become part of the content of the course? What serendipity added new dimensions to student learning? How do we describe what the students learned, encourage it, assess it? In reviewing the quarter's work, we gain perspective on our disciplines, rethink our methods, and discuss those unforeseen dimensions. Ideas for new programs, new techniques, new explorations tumble out. The conversations seem the natural and even necessary end, yet fruition, of work together.

         Several natural follow-up to the interviews have evolved. Most teachers bring what they learned one quarter to bear on their teaching the next, and talking through what happened during one learning community helps plan for the next. Keeping the interview on tape means the conversation stays available to faculty when they plan the same or similar programs in the future.

         Another natural follow-up to these interviews is further talk with other faculty, and it is important to provide these occasions, too. Reporting out may occur in several ways. At Seattle Central teaching teams talk about their work at regular meetings of learning community faculty. Since many teachers change they way they teach stand-alone courses after working in learning communities, they pass the lore on at regular division and department meetings. We have written about our work and spoken at conferences. A post-program interview has often been the moment when an idea, an insight, a perspective gets put into words, to make its way into the knowledge we share with colleagues. The nature of learning communities often makes us feel that we are doing experimental and improvisational work, but serious work nonetheless. At Seattle Central we consciously track what we are doing and what proves useful and effective.

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