>> JIM COOPER: I'm Jim Cooper, Professor of Graduate Education at California State University, Dominguez Hills. We're on the campus of CAL State, Dominguez Hills today talking with Jean MacGregor. Jean is Senior Scholar at the Washington Center for Improving the Quality of Undergraduate Education at Evergreen State College. She and her colleague, Barbara Leigh Smith, are considered the founders of the learning communities movement in higher education. In 1998, Jean was named by Change magazine as one of eleven national 'agenda setters' selected from a group of eighty past, present and future leaders in higher education. In 2003 Jean was given the Virginia B. Smith Innovative Leadership Award for her "demonstrated ability to foster changes in higher education that resulted in substantial improvement. Jean is published extensively in the areas of teaching large classes, student evaluations, and most prominently the area of learning communities. Jean, let's begin today by talking about some issues of definition. What are learning communities? >> JEAN MACGREGOR: Well first of all, it's a pleasure to be here >> JIM: Thank you. >> JEAN: Learning communities is a term that's now used very, very widely in K through twelve educational settings, as well as higher education. And in colleges and universities, the idea of a community of learners has certainly expanded over the past twenty-five and thirty years around the values of students learning collaboratively; and building a quality of community with one another, with their faculty members, with student affairs professionals, and with their campus. So, often the term is used to refer to any class where there's a community of learners in the class. It's also used with online teaching. The idea of a community of learners working together with discussion boards and interaction online, and so forth. There's also the idea of residential learning communities, where residence halls are built around themes, and there's programming in the residence hall for students. So there's a quality of academic community in the residence hall, as well as living together socially. But, over the past twenty-five, thirty years, a group of us in higher education have used the term, 'learning community' very intentionally around a restructuring of the curriculum. So our definition of learning communities is an intentional restructuring of the curriculum to link classes together during a given term; a given quarter or semester. To have a common cohort of students in those classes that are intentionally linked, with the explicit idea of building coherence in the curriculum. And a community of learners of students and students, and students and their teachers. So if we could go to figure number one, just a quick visual of how learning communities work, that would be helpful. So Warren, could we have the first figure? Thank you. The idea here is that students often experience their university life in fragments and in pieces. And in commuting schools, it's even more dramatically tough for students, because they have full-time lives out of the institution. So they come to us in the institution and they experience their courses often in fragments. Because the courses have nothing do with each other, often the faculty members do not know each other, who are teaching those classes. There's a different sea of strangers at first in each class, and so when students go to those multiple classes it just represents another fragment in one's fragmented life. So the idea is to put classes together around a coherent set of learning experiences that are all focused on the same group of students and the same curricular idea. So it often works well for building community, and also building the idea of--building skills in a larger context that has a coherence. >> JIM: You've said that you're using the term quite intentionally, and I know that there's a whole history and tradition that went into the learning communities movement. Can you talk a little bit about, in this case, about the theoretical and empirical basis for learning communities? >> JEAN: Sure. The learning community idea is not a new one. We are very subject to fads in education and things come and go. But one can actually trace the learning community idea back to the 1920s, to the work of a political philosopher Alexander Meiklejohn, who was a Professor at Williams College in the northeast and wrote very compellingly about the problems in higher education in the ‘20s. In the first two decades of the last century, the idea of study in the majors suddenly grew up and gathered its own importance. And at the same time, Gen Ed course work or Liberal Arts course work grew up also. It wasn't quite as coherent back then as it is now, although some would argue that even today it's pretty incoherent for students. But then, Alexander Meiklejohn actually railed against two things. One was sort of the willy-nilly proliferation of Gen Ed courses. So students could just shop around a curriculum and just get a pile of courses that amounted to nothing coherent. And then the second thing he was arguing against and this is a real theoretical thing, was that the course was the problem. That it was too short and too brief to have a meaningful impact on student's lives. Meiklejohn thought it was very important not to just prepare students for jobs and vocations in their lives. But he felt that it was important to prepare students for a larger vocation. The larger vocation being citizenship in the world. And so he designed a dream college where students would read the texts of democracy, and then go home and study their hometowns and understand the idea of political entities and community. And learn together with their faculty around that. He was invited to the University of Wisconsin to create that dream college. It was a two-year program with twelve credits of study in a learning community for the whole two years, and it was built around the idea of American democracy. That program seeded another program in the 1960s, with another political philosopher at the lead, Joe Tussman at Berkeley. And he didn't pick up a two-year program, but rather a one-year program. Again, built around the study of original texts, exploration of the idea of democracy. Then, fast forward to the creation of Evergreen a few years later. The faculty members there didn't pick up the content or the subject matter of American political democracy. But they did pick up the structure, the idea of a collection of course work full-time for students around a larger idea. So in the seventies, Evergreen grew up and a series of learning community experiments began to occur. Mainly in eastern seaboard states because of the leadership of yet another philosopher, Patrick Hill, who was very enamored of the work of John Dewey. And he also was asking the big questions about how do we form citizens in colleges and universities. So the early work around learning communities was around a critique of general education, and the idea of citizenship. But then you've said, what's some empirical evidence? What immediately began to be discovered with all of these learning community projects was that students in learning community programs were being retained at much higher rates than students in random classes. And faculty teaching in learning communities were reporting how revitalizing and exciting it was to work with another faculty member around a coherent curriculum, around a common group of students. And that led to the entrance of, not a political philosopher but an educator, and an educational researcher, Vincent Tinto, who's work, who's life-long work had been around the problem of student attrition and strategies to increase student retention in college. And so, Vince decided to devote a major portion of his research career to collaborative learning and learning community approaches. Why was it? It was no question that students were being retained, at a higher level than in other courses, but the question is how and why. And so, his dissemination of that research began then to inform the wider, higher ed world about the learning community idea. And now a proliferation of designs of learning communities and types of learning communities. >> JIM: Speaking of that, you sort of suggested that there are various configurations that learning communities can take from perhaps relatively less effortful and expensive sorts of things, to more formal procedures. >> JEAN: Right. >> JIM: Could you talk a little bit about the various forms or configurations that learning communities could take? >> JEAN: Yes. And let's go now to visual number two, which is data that's about three years old now. But it points out where learning communities are now being offered to students. And this was done, this research was gathered through a survey of first year academic practices by the Policy Center in the first year of college. I know you all watching this can't read the bottom line, but the highest bar in the histogram on the left refers to Research Extensive Institutions. With nearly sixty percent of them reporting that they're doing learning communities, for ten percent or more of their entering students. The next bar is Research Intensive; next bar, Masters Institutions; next one, Liberal Arts institutions; the second from the far right, Bachelors Degree general institutions; and then finally Community Colleges, which is the smallest percentage. So learning communities have really proliferated in loads of institutions now. Our best guess is somewhere between six or seven hundred to a thousand colleges and universities are doing some sort of linked course or university offerings. So let's now go to the next set of visuals, and let's go to three A. And I'm going to talk about three different types of learning community structures. And the variable here is the degree to which faculty members are collaborating with the curriculum. So the first model is a very low-cost model in that--or this is called a Colloquy Model or the Freshman Interest Group Model--and in this model, students are enrolled in a set of classes, but the faculty members know they're teaching in a learning community; that their classes have learning communities in them, but they're not asked to coordinate learning in any way. So to give you an example of this first model, and let's leave it on the screen a little bit longer. Let's imagine that the top course is a writing class. And maybe there isn't any blue section of that class, it's just a small Writing class with twenty-five students or thirty students in it. The second class is a larger class that maybe seventy-five students or sixty students, but those twenty-five students are in this larger class that's a Sociology class. And then the third class is an Environmental Science class. That's also a large class, but this little community of twenty- five students, that are all together alone in the Writing class, or in the larger Sociology class, and the larger Science class. But then they're in a fourth experience together that might be only one credit, or it might be up to three credits of academic work. And that's the Integrative Seminar. So there's no real sense of community maybe, in the three classes other than this is something that fulfills Gen Ed requirements. But the writing assignments may be built around reading that relates to sociology and the environment. And the Integrative Seminar also might build study groups, it might be something like a University 101 class, or getting oriented to the campus, it may be a reading seminar. It could go in any number of directions. But the locus of curriculum integration and community might be the writing class and that seminar. So let's go to the second model now, which is a link or a clustered classes model. And this model is pure enrollment. So this might be just twenty-five or thirty students. Let's use the same classes though. A Writing class, a Sociology class, and a Science class. And this maybe asks the question, citizens in science or citizens in their bio-region, for example. And here the faculty have collaborated, so there may be some joint assignments. There may be a joint class field trip. But there's something that builds the community, but also builds the curricular connections. If the Writing class is here, the three faculty members might collaborate on writing assignments or a term paper that is for all three classes. So this takes a little more planning and a little more work, but it's not intensively planned, but students do get a real sense of community. Often these classes are scheduled back-to-back, like Monday, Wednesday or Monday, Wednesday, Friday, so when they go for breaks between classes they form a sense of community. And there's a sense of curricular coherence. The third and last model is a much more radical model and a much more dramatic one. And that is a fully team-taught community of two classes or three classes. Where the two teachers are in the class together with the students the whole time. So the syllabus now becomes one syllabus, but the credit might be for two different classes. So let's still use Writing in Sociology. It's fully team-taught, there might be an equivalent of two classes in this large class, and but the credit will go for a writing component and a sociology component. So different institutions have built these different models in different ways. And there are some universities that actually are offering two different types of learning communities at the same time. Some of them smaller chunks of time, like two courses; and then others larger bites, like three or four courses at once. Let me also say, who teaches in these communities? Is it entirely faculty? And the answer is no. Faculty of course, carry a lot of the classes in learning communities. But sometimes they're adjuncts, sometimes there's graduate students. Sometimes librarians teach one component. And in other instances, student affairs professionals do. So it's really quite variable who's the teacher in a learning community program. >> JIM: The configurations have a lot of intuitive appeal. You've already suggested that in terms of retaining students, these approaches can be very beneficial. So the pragmatists out there who count on tuition would be very impressed by your argument. I’m guessing that there are a variety of sort of a cognitive and affect of outcomes among students that are also derived from this approach, is that a fair statement? >>JEAN: Um-humm >>JIM: Okay >> JEAN: A few years ago we looked into our file cabinets at the Washington Center because as we were on the phone with a lot of learning community programs, we would say to leaders, 'If you have any assessment studies, just please send them to us.' Because when we looked in the actual literature of higher education journals and so forth, not a lot was being published in the early years about learning community impact. So we began to discover that we had a fugitive literature in our own file cabinets of learning community studies and assessment reports. So we got a little more intentional in about the year 2000, and we spent the better part of two years working off and on, asking on listservs and asking these learning communities leaders whom we'd gotten to know, 'If you have a study of your learning community work would you send it to us?' And we want the bad and the good. We want results that are mystifying, we want results that are disappointing. We also would like to know if any masters or doctoral students have done any studies on your learning community programs, send us that. So, by about 2002, we had about a hundred and twenty single institution studies. We had a few multi-institution comparative studies, mostly from Vincent Tinto's work, and we had about thirty dissertations. So a team of us sat down and looked at all of these results to say, 'What can we say with confidence about learning community outcomes?' And here's what we learned. In terms of student outcomes, the most looked for result because of all the buzz of the 19--early 1990s, was student course completion. In other words, turning courses around from courses in which students are dropping before the end of the term, into students -- courses where students are completing with a C or better. And then secondly, retention to the next term. And then thirdly, persistence, and then even graduation rates. That's looked at the most. It's also the easiest to gather. So we discovered that across the board, the general pattern was that in learning community programs, students do better at course completion, and do better at persisting to the subsequent classes. So that's just a wide, wide, wide finding again and again. The second major finding, of course, in all programs, are end of course evaluations. How did you like this? The second finding that we just found again and again, was not only students but faculty enjoy these programs. They rate them as positive and they suggest that other students take them. Would you recommend these to other students? Would you recommend that other faculty teach in them? So satisfaction rates very, very high. After that, the studies and the assessment work becomes so variable, we can't just with confidence say it always happens. But in learning communities that are designed for developmental learners who are remediating or in classes that are high-risk classes where the flunk rates generally are higher, the drop out rates tend to be high, we found that when learning communities were intentionally designed to improve completion rates, or improve students’ grade point averages, or improve course completion, they're very, very strong results. In other learning communities where we want to look for student intellectual development or cognitive complexity, the results are interesting and variable. And when we try to discern from reading these studies, what kind of learning communities those students were in, we began to see a relationship between learning community designs, which were really about interdisciplinary studies and cognitive complexity, sure enough we saw it. But when students were just in course clusters like the first example that I gave you, with no attempt to build connections between classes, and no evidence of collaborative learning, a colleague of mine calls these learning coincidences instead of learning communities, we didn't see much intellectual development. So, you know, it's sort of obvious, you feed students salad and say, 'What did you eat?' And they say, 'Ah-ha, I ate salad.' You know, but if you don't feed them that and say, 'What did you eat?' And they'll just name anything. So, I think that the lesson here for us is we have to think about what our goals are for learning communities. Is it a retention strategy? Is it a student's success strategy? Is it about improving student's expository writing? You know, what's the goal? Learning communities are not an end, they're a strategy. So, one has to be very clear about goals. I'll add just one more thing that we saw in terms of results, and that is the faculty development piece of this is quite powerful. When faculty are asked to collaborate. Of course, in they're not asked to collaborate, nothing happens for them. But when they work in teams, and time is set aside intentionally for curricular planning to occur, and for faculty to learn pedagogical moves from one another, that can be very, very exciting for faculty. And faculty talk about how revitalizing and fun it is and that they have a sense, a new sense of community or a new sense of connection to their university around collaborating with colleagues from other departments. So that's a positive thing as well. >> JIM: CAL State Dominguez Hills is a highly diverse campus, over seventy percent minority population. A large percentage of our students are first generation. Many of them have significant work commitments and commitments to take care of other significant others. In a campus like ours, could a learning community work? And are there examples of campuses like ours where it has worked? >> JEAN: Yeah, and I'll give you some examples of--I'll mention the schools and then I'll mention kind of their analysis. University of Texas, El Paso has a student population with a demography somewhat parallel to this university. Sixty-five, seventy percent of the student body is Hispanic. And when studies have been done of the language spoken at home, fifty-five to sixty percent of households in El Paso speak Spanish at home. So when students go to UTEP, they're going to school, essentially many of them, in a second language environment. That institution is a former School of Mines and has a very, very large Science program--Engineering and Science program. Learning communities have begun there. A second example is Texas A & M, Corpus Christi. That's an institution that was mainly an upper division institution that had to grow down. So in admitting its very first freshman class of six hundred students a few years ago, they decided to have all the incoming full-time enrolled students in learning communities. And a third example is CAL State University, East Bay, formerly Hayward. They have a large transfer population and then a much smaller freshman entering population. But all three institutions have very, very high rates of commuting students. High rates of working--students who care for either their children or their parents at home, often attending part-time not full-time enrolled, like enrolling for six or nine credits. Often paying for their own college education, and see paying for college as a challenge. And all of those are risk factors, but then when you add to the risk factor of developmental, you add a whole new stripe to the risk factor. Which has to do with maybe didn't get the right course work in high school, maybe has issues of low self-esteem, or issues of lack of focus. So the idea of studying in a focused way is a new thing for many of these students. So think of what we're asking of these students. So, the learning community idea provides some of the support structure for students. In the sense of a community that often has a student affairs professional involved, who can support students around focused studying, around solving problems, about helping students not to blame others but to take more responsibility, about creating places on campus for studying. I think at Hayward East Bay, the library is the place where students gather to study. And the library's really appreciated as a place to study. At UTEP, it’s actual study centers that have been created for students particularly in the sciences. So it's a place away from home in the daytime, in the early evening where students can get their homework done. And a quiet place. So students hang around on campus a great deal. To have study time, they come in early to study, they stay into the evening, or come back from their jobs to study. So, these little interventions create some coherence and focus, reduce the fragmentation for students, but up the focus and up the support system. So this is not about easy courses, this is just as challenging courses. But it's about creating the support system that goes with the challenge of being in college. >> JIM: This configuration has a lot of sort of intuitive appeal, at the same time it's a rather different approach from many college campuses where you sort of have a cafeteria style of the course selection. >> JEAN: Right. >> JIM: In terms of bringing about change and sort of giving advice to faculty and administrators, who would be interested in moving in the direction of learning communities but for whom it seems a rather daunting task, what kind of advice would you have? >> JEAN: Well first of all, I would gather up the people who want to saddle up the horses and ride. Find those people on the campus who are oriented towards academic success for all students. And those folks are faculty but they're also student affairs professionals. And they may be people in technology who are helping people get online with courses or do hybrid courses that are both online and at home. And also, they may be administrators who would like to be part of inventing something new. So first of all, it's a matter of seeing the impetus for change and then finding that group of people who are interested in doing something collaboratively and inventing something together. The second piece of this is around data. And it's acknowledged, I'm sure, that you have a high-risk student population here. But then I would go after the high-risk places in the curriculum. Those places that are important gateways to majors or platform courses. Or courses that are considered graveyards, that fifty percent of the students either drop in the first few weeks or don't complete. To look for the transition points where students are moving out of developmental courses and into the college level courses. So looking with data at those places. And then, invent workable learning communities in those places. And make them ones where there are strong support systems. So this invites a real partnership with student affairs and faculty. So that inclusive planning, student focused goals, data driven decisions, about which courses so it's really the bread and butter, make it or break it courses. And then, building some energy around it with both publicity, attractive places to do this kind of work, this kind of teaching and learning, taking advantage of the new building under construction, the student center I think would be a natural. To kind of create a quality of community here. And that this place could become very special around, you know--other campuses may have their special things, but we have something special around student community. And the student community that takes advantage of the diversity, that's here. That actually builds on it, that that's a quality of the community that's here. >> JIM: All right, so once you have the posse saddled up, are there resources that you could talk about that might be useful, websites? I know you have a number of books in the area, including your 2004 book on learning communities. But could you talk a little bit about books, websites, other ways that folks who are interested in this topic could become more informed. >> JEAN: The literature is now fairly strong and on our Washington Center Learning Commons web site, you can find much longer bibliographies of all the other kinds of resources that are out there. Now the literature I think is very, very robust. The work of Nancy Shapiro and Jodi Levine Laufgraben at Temple University and University of Maryland system, respectively have a couple of very good books that are very nuts and bolts how to do it, as well as our books. There are a number of conferences that are now held annually around learning community practice. There's one that occurs in the midwest and central states every fall, and it's on our web site. So why don't we go to our web site address that I think we can put up. But if you just do a search on learning commons, you'll get to our web site at the Washington Center. Learning communities is one initiative. Also, we, at the Washington Center at the Evergreen State College hold an annual summer institute for campus teams. And campus teams, minimum five, maximum twelve people come for six days of intensive learning community planning with other campuses. And that institute is very focused on the same kind of goals as the BEAMS Project here. It's about access equity, and academics success for under-represented or under-prepared students. So it's about targeting learning communities toward the very explicit goal of fostering a greater sense of student success. So that's another opportunity. But there are conferences also that are very appropriate. The Freshman Year Conferences now that The Center on Freshman Year, University of South Carolina holds. There are many, many learning community practitioners at those meetings, and so there's lots of practice out there to learn from, build upon, take advantage of. >> JIM: We've covered quite a lot of territory in twenty-five or so minutes, but I want to give you an opportunity perhaps to address any issues that we haven't covered, or any final observations that you'd like to make before we finish. >> JEAN: I think that learning communities are invisibly already here at Dominguez Hills. And that there are numbers of terrific faculty members with practices that just need to be scaled up and lifted up beyond their individual class rooms. And that there are student affairs professionals here who have put into place very good practices that are already here. So part of learning community development is indeed meshing together classes that go together well. But also, it's about discovering practices that are already here, that are just naturals to weave into learning community practice and good work. So it's just a matter of finding those and scaling them up so they're more robust and powerful and can be shared by more students. >> JIM: Jean MacGregor, thank you for being with us. >> JEAN: Thank you.