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What Does "Learning Innovations" Mean?

The Evergreen State College has put together the National Learning Communities Project to strengthen curricular learning community efforts on individual campuses, as well as to foster more robust communities of learning community practice. The project includes an extensive summary of the most current practices in teaching and learning.

Learning communities are a prime example of innovations in teaching and learning. Instructors involved in these communities restructure their curriculum to thematically link courses with an instructor from another discipline. These classes foster community, coherence and connections among courses. They are stimulating to faculty as well as students.

Research on learning communities shows that they increase student engagement and motivation, increase intellectual development, increase course completion rates (especially on commuter campuses), and contribute to faculty and staff development.

Here are examples of strategies for building active learning in the classroom:

  • Service learning is the growing use in college courses of a combination of community service and opportunities for reflection on the learning that occurs through that service. Service opportunities are carefully selected to align with the learning goals of the course or learning community experience.

  • Collaborative and cooperative learning provide teams of students the opportunity to learn actively through shared discovery of knowledge. Collaborative learning allows students to create new knowledge together, while students involved in cooperative learning search together for pre-set "right" answers to problems or questions.

  • Peer teaching is the increasingly popular practice of employing undergraduate students to serve as co-instructors with faculty members. Peer teachers are assigned to serve as mentors, tutors, and/or intellectual and social supports for students in learning community courses, often in first-year seminars.

  • Discussion groups and seminars are generally used in learning communities throughout a term as opportunities for faculty and students to integrate concepts introduced in their learning community courses. Groups may or may not be offered for academic credit, while seminars generally carry at least one hour of credit. These discussion groups and seminars offer a particularly useful block of time in which to share experiences at interdisciplinary events on and off campus. They are generally followed by an opportunity to reflect and write on the learning that occurred and its relationship to the concepts introduced in the learning communities.

  • Experiential learning is any of a variety of approaches for allowing students opportunities outside the classroom to enact the concepts learned through in-class discussions, reading, writing, or other activities. Experiential learning includes activities such as service learning, study abroad, community service, and internships and are intentionally linked to the academic goals of a course or cluster of courses.

  • Labs and field trips offer additional methods for allowing students to enact the intellectual concepts learned in class. Labs can be used as the arena for conversations about implications of concepts learned in linked course/s. Field trips are less complex, costly, and difficult to integrate than other experiential learning experiences, while still providing some up-close exposure to intellectual concepts in action.

  • Problem-based learning allows students to work through real or simulated issues related to the learning goals of a course to strengthen their ability to collect and analyze data about those issues, propose alternatives, and arrive at solutions. Problem-based learning underscores the trans-disciplinary nature of most problems and is often employed in conjunction with group learning.

  • Demonstrations are delivered by students, peer or primary instructors, or guest presenters to bring to life concepts learned in the course or learning community. Ideally, as with problem-based learning, demonstrations highlight the trans-disciplinary action or thinking inherent in most situations.

  • Writing and speaking across the curriculum are fundamental components of most learning communities because these interdisciplinary experiences allow instructors to demonstrate the critical nature of communication skills across courses and situations outside the academic experience. Learning communities, particularly for first-year students, are writing- and/or speaking-intensive in keeping with the primary goals of most undergraduate curricula.

  • Ongoing reflection is an essential component of most successful learning communities because these experiences allow the time, space, instruction, and encouragement students often need to examine what they have learned, how they have learned it, and how that learning might be applied in other situations. Reflective learners who are consciously able to draw on past experiences are more efficient, confident, and effective learners.

  • Metacognitive activities combine the thoughtful self-evaluation of reflective learning with active learning approaches, such as service learning, study abroad, or internships. Metacognition allows students to examine what they have learned and to draw inferences about that learning's applications elsewhere. Metacognitive activities are experiential opportunities to bring students to this adaptive mode of thinking.

  • Self-evaluation places the onus for determining levels of success or failure in a particular activity on the student engagement in that activity. Self-evaluation activities can be as simple as a one-minute paper that asks, "what worked, what didn't, what next" to a multi-term, student-created electronic portfolio that houses academic work selected by the student for its demonstration of learning over time.

 

 Last Updated On: 3/14/06