From Reflection to Research to Campus Impact: The Growth of a Community of Practice

Through the University of Kansas Center for Teaching Excellence, what started as a Faculty Learning Community (FLC) called the Teaching Scholarship Collaborative (TSC) has met for eight years with a focus on supporting improvement of teaching. The participants are mostly teaching-track faculty, but the group is open to any interested participants. Initially, the group functioned as a space for shared learning, reading, and discussing the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SOTL). Over time, the group has evolved into a Community of Practice (CoP), where faculty not only engage in reflective discussions but also collaborate on applied research and contribute to campus-wide conversations about student learning and institutional practices.

The evolution of TSC over recent years provides a unique model for other learning communities. TSC has moved through each lifecycle stage of a CoP: 1) potential, as faculty recognized shared interests in improving teaching 2) coalescing, as the group formed structured process discussions 3) maturing, as members began collaborative research on teaching and learning 4) stewardship, as findings were disseminated to the broader campus community and 5) transformation, as TSC shifted into an advocacy role for institutional change.

A key example of this transformation is our collaborative research project studying student attendance behavior decisions. What began as a reflective discussion about student attendance evolved into a structured research project. With results in hand, our group has transformed in other ways. We shifted towards dissemination and towards the collective role as a change leader on campus. We have disseminated our study's results on campus in a variety of venues and are now using these results to advocate for campus policy changes and in workshops to support fellow faculty in their teaching. This shift from reflective discussions to collaborative research and active dissemination has positioned TSC as a change leader on campus.