Faculty Learning Communities

A faculty learning community (FLC) meets regularly to explore a teaching topic that interests them.  This interdisciplinary group researches the topic, reads together, and supports each other in making positive changes in the classroom.  Since Fall 2013, members of the VU faculty have been involved in multiple FLCs each year.

Small Teaching Online

Coleen Wilder and Melissa Desjarlais

This group will read and discuss the book Small Teaching Online: Applying Learning Science in Online Classes by Flower Darby and James M. Lang. The idea of small teaching is simple: make…

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Inclusive Excellence in STEM

Thomas Goyne and Laurie S. Eberhardt

The goal of this FLC is to create a culture of inclusive excellence in the STEM disciplines.  To do this, we hope to equip STEM faculty with the skills needed…

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Faculty Civility

Christina Cavinder and Brooke Starkoff

This FLC will focus on improving civility among faculty on our campus.  We will use Libby Roderick’s Toxic Friday: Resources for Addressing Faculty Bullying in Higher Education. We will also explore…

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Faculty/Student Mentoring

Nancy Scannell and Zsuzsanna Szaniszlo

According to the Educational Advisory Board, mentoring is a high-impact practice fostering student satisfaction, sense of belonging, and overall success. What does good mentoring look like? How can we serve…

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Teaching by Discussion

John Ruff and John Fantuzzo

We would all like to have great conversations in our classes. But they are not always so easy to bring about.  Students can be shy or tired or disinterested or…

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New Directions in Artificial Intelligence

Paul Nord and Karl Schmitt

Self-driving cars may soon change the world.  But even more world-changing is the revolution taking place in speech and image recognition, predictive analytics, and deep learning.  These new forms of…

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Difficult Dialogues in the Classroom and Beyond

Phillip Powell & Christina Cavinder

Colleges ought to be the place where the free exchange of ideas and civil discourse is modeled and practiced. Instead, campuses have increasingly become places of tension, polarization, and even…

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Small Teaching

Melissa Desjarlais

Have you ever wondered about how to help students in your classes learn better?  Perhaps you would like to make changes to your course design or teaching methods, but you…

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Classroom to Career: Integrating Career-Ready Skills into the Curriculum

Our humanities and liberal arts majors–and their parents–often worry that their chosen field will not lead to satisfactory employment after graduation.  In this FLC we will talk about  how to…

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Mindset: Moving Students from a Fixed to a Growth Mindset

Shannon Dubois and Geoffrey Wetherell

Students sometimes fail because they are convinced that they have a set amount of intelligence that cannot change: “I’m just no good at math” or “I don’t have a way…

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