Transformation Through Community in Residential Academic Programs

This poster explains how faculty in Residential Academic Programs (RAPs) at the University of Colorado Boulder have collaborated across disciplines to improve assessment measures gauging instruction within the living-learning environments of the university. At CU, RAPs support first-year students and offer courses in a wide variety of academic disciplines in classrooms located within the residence halls. RAP faculty are drawn from the various academic departments on campus and are specialists in first-year education. By taking classes with other students in their residence hall and with faculty dedicated to their success, students establish trusting relationships and a sense of community early in their academic career. RAPs also help students develop a sense of intellectual purpose, build early connections with faculty and peers, and expand their creative thinking, critical analysis and communication skills.
Historically, the RAPs at CU operated with a fair degree of independence from one another because they were established at different times and have different thematic foci. However, a 2016 program review of RAPs at CU-Boulder highlighted the need for the RAPs to standardize our goals and our assessment of how well those goals are being achieved.
The RAPs then partnered with the Teaching Quality Framework (TQF) initiative (the TeVAL program at CU-Boulder), which are grounded in the scholarship of higher education, to articulate common goals across the RAPs and to transform teaching evaluation so that it would more thoroughly and consistently reflect those goals across the RAPs. Unlike other departments participating in TQF, the internal diversity of RAPs meant that they could not rely on common content goals to unify the programs. Instead, a small Faculty Learning Community (FLC), composed of instructors from each of the seven RAPs in the College of Arts and Sciences, transformed performance evaluations protocols and guidelines, student feedback tools, and teaching assessment protocols.