Building a Community of Teachers

Tara Gray

As a faculty developer, my vision is to build a community of teachers. I see isolation as a key problem in the academy. Faculty members are so tied up in their day-to-day workloads that they rarely collaborate to improve student learning. I want to help solve the problem of isolation by cultivating a vibrant community. A teaching and learning center is an ideal place to build community because collaboration, not competition, is the driving force behind a center. This collaboration can ensure we successfully pursue our highest goal: student learning. Building a community of teachers is a means to this end, and by focusing on the community, we ensure that the end is attained.

Our center puts the teacher at the center of what we do because without the teacher, we cannot improve student learning. So we start with the teachers, and address their full range of needs, including “deal-breaker” issues like time management, publishing, writing grants, and negotiating the promotion and tenure process. Some of these topics attract audience members who would not otherwise come to our center, and some of them come back for teaching workshops. Therefore, addressing these topics is critical to creating a community of teachers.

Our center also builds community by offering numerous teaching workshops. Many workshops are offered by faculty members on campus. This builds community in three ways: the faculty member who presents the workshop draws to the center colleagues who would not otherwise come, feels more a part of the center for having presented the workshop, and becomes a better teacher-scholar. Also, I teach workshops myself. My workshops are practical, applied, and collaborative. I concentrate on having a high proportion of “take homes” (practical applications) in each workshop. Therefore, I teach workshops in steps, with each step being a take-home. For example: “Ten Ways to Engage Your Students” or “Five Ways to Teach for Retention.” Finally, we invite experts from around the country to present topics of interest to our teaching community. In all of these workshops, participants have a lot of time to work together: about thirty percent of the time is spent collaborating and building community.

Collaborative programs build community, especially if they last a number of weeks. Working together over the course of a semester breaks down walls and builds community. To that end, I have established four semester-long collaborative programs. In Peer Coaching, participants observe each other’s classes, using an established protocol, and then exchange observations. In Publish and Flourish, participants are trained how to give meaningful feedback to each other on rough drafts. In Team Mentoring, participants join the facilitator in mentoring each other as they work through various career challenges. In the Teaching Scholars course, participants exchange and comment on each other’s learning objectives, syllabi, classroom visits, and teaching philosophies.

Yet another way we build community is by sponsoring faculty to attend national teaching conferences. To ensure that each trip offers the full benefits of community, we advertise the events as “field trip style” and require shared transportation and meals. By traveling and eating together, a sense of community develops. After each conference, participants are required to share what they have gained so that we can post it on our website for other teachers to see.

Because all the aforementioned programs are expensive, and the operating budget is small, I raise money from both administrators and participants; raising money is another way to build community and develop a broad-based sense of ownership in the center. I tell deans that I can help with faculty development, but that I cannot be solely responsible for it: it is a duty we share. Because deans contribute to our teaching and learning center, they are more invested in it. This is also true of participants who are donors. There is no surer way to feel invested in a center than to invest in it financially. Although most of our teacher-donors give only five dollars a month, they feel more a part of our community of teachers.

The culmination of our yearly programs is awarding membership to all those who participate for more than ten hours per year. Our center uses a database to keep track of participants’ hours, and each year more than 200 faculty, staff and graduate students earn a membership in the center. More than 100 of them come to the gala to be honored. The President and Provost preside over the gala, which includes an awards ceremony and reception, Champagne and Chocolate. The gala has proved to be a wonderful way to celebrate teaching and our community of teachers.

Our center measures our success by the response of the community of teachers: how many come to our workshops, how they evaluate the workshops, and how often they return for more workshops. Most importantly, we celebrate our success when teachers report that the center has positively affected student learning.