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Bob Mathieu

July 2008

Jen Schoepke is a graduate student in Industrial and Systems Engineering, focusing on human factors. She’s recently worked at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory on the Cassini-Huygens mission, which sent an unmanned craft to Saturn and one of its moons. Jen has already developed credibility as a researcher and knows that she will teach as part of her career. She wants her teaching to be as effective as her research.

In many cases, unfortunately, doctoral education and postdoctoral training programs fail to prepare future faculty to be effective teachers. The programs just have traditionally not been set up to do that.

But a good researcher can be a good teacher. And it will happen a lot more often because of a learning community called the Delta Program in Research, Teaching, and Learning.

The name is no accident. As you may remember from high school chemistry, the Delta symbol Δ indicates a difference or a change. The graduate students participating in Delta undergo change in the way they think about research and teaching—in particular, that those activities are not separate.

The Pillars of Delta
Three ideas underlie all DELTA activities. Learning Communities, the focus of this article, bring together groups of people for shared learning, discovery, and generation of knowledge. Teaching as Research is the deliberate, systematic, and reflective use of research methods by STEM instructors to develop and implement teaching practices that advance the learning experiences and outcomes of both students and teachers. Learning through Diversity capitalizes on the rich array of experiences, backgrounds, and skills among undergraduates and graduates-through-faculty to enhance the learning of all. It recognizes that excellence and diversity are necessarily intertwined. (Note that Teaching as Research and Learning through Diversity will be explored in a subsequent cover story.)

For the past 5 years, the Delta Program at UW-Madison has brought together students from many disciplines for teaching-related professional development. Three pillars anchor the program: Learning Communities, Teaching-as-Research, and Learning-through-Diversity (see sidebar). Delta models the interactions that comprise a comprehensive and rewarding faculty life, says Associate Director Chris Carlson-Dakes.

Learning communities bring people together in intentional ways to accomplish shared learning objectives. Learning communities like Delta support the development of teaching ability that coexists with, builds upon, and integrates with research.

Delta is part of the National Science Foundation–funded Center for the Integration of Research, Teaching, and Learning (CIRTL; www.cirtl.net/). CIRTL aims to develop a national faculty in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) who are committed to implementing and advancing effective teaching practices for diverse student audiences as part of their professional careers.

Why learning communities?
“A learning community supports its members as they collectively strive towards common learning goals and objectives,” says Co-Faculty Director Bob Mathieu. “It encourages a diversity of viewpoints and opinions. When we say a learning community is an intentional environment we mean that each program, activity, and interaction within the community is intended to further the primary learning goals.”

In learning communities, experts help novices succeed in the face of pressures and expectations. Learning communities engender feelings of belonging, feelings that can be so strong that members report changes in identity as a result of membership.

In forming Delta, Mathieu says, “we specifically applied learning community principles to professional development in graduate education. We wanted a conceptually driven and intentionally designed community working together to develop their teaching skills.”

That the Delta teaching and learning community was established at a research-intensive institution like UW-Madison shows that teaching and research can indeed go hand in hand. The program has lived beyond the term of the original National Science Foundation grant and is now supported almost entirely by the university.

Over the long term, the program should enhance the learning experiences of future undergraduates across the nation. Current and future faculty are learning how to change the landscape of higher education in the sciences, engineering, and math.

Four core elements of a learning community

• Shared learning and discovery. Shared learning can take many forms, but common to all is the decentering of the teacher as the sole source of knowledge. The “teacher” becomes a facilitator who structures experiences that enable students to learn from and with one another. A graduate student who participated in several Delta offerings reflected on the role of shared learning and discovery: “The atmosphere in the classroom or wherever we are still comes out to be more of a community atmosphere with people working together for a common cause, rather than everyone being competitive and doing it on their own.”
• Functional relationships. Learning communities develop when the interactions among learners are meaningful, functional, and necessary to accomplish the work of the learning community. Interactions should lead to meaningful connections that extend throughout the learning community and not limit themselves to specific cohorts or role-related peers. Members continue to interact because their interactions produce something of value to them and to the learning community itself.
• Inclusive learning environment. Research demonstrates that groups produce higher quality output when diverse perspectives are represented. Learning community leaders monitor activities to ensure a sufficient variety and quantity of opportunities to attract a diverse participant base. Delta’s 54% participation rate for women exceeds that in UW-Madison STEM fields, in which 38% of doctoral students and 30% of postdoctoral researchers are women. Of the Delta participants whose race/ethnicity is known, more than 11% are from underrepresented groups, which is above the institutional average. (This figure does not include Asian Americans, who are not under-represented in STEM fields.) Across disciplines, 43% of Delta participants are from the biological sciences; 19%, from engineering; and 22%, from the physical sciences.
• Connections to other learning experiences. Learning communities flourish when participants can make implicit and explicit connections to experiences and activities outside the course or program. These connections help situate and embed learning in a larger context. They reduce isolation, increase diversity in people and programming, and help create a campus-wide momentum for educational and curricular reform. Connectivity is a vehicle for the sharing of resources, delegation of responsibilities, and reduced redundancy of opportunities across campus.

Learning community outcomes
Participants have observed that Delta gives them the vocabulary to talk about teaching and learning. For example, one participant said that the language she learned from Delta enables her to articulate what she knows about teaching in an intelligent way, a skill that proved immensely valuable at an interview for a position at a community college.

Members share responsibility for, and contribute to, the products of the community. They assume roles that are important to the running of programs and activities or take responsibility for the “care and feeding” of the community, including helping new members acclimate and accomplish their learning goals.

Members share responsibility for Delta’s operations in many ways. Veteran student members have developed ways to “buddy up” with new members in classes and through monthly roundtable dinners, and faculty participants have become a second generation of course and program instructors. A Delta participant who graduated and found a teaching position at a local liberal arts college now serves on the Delta Internship Committee, offering internships at her institution to Delta participants.

Successful implementation of learning communities such as Delta ultimately results in cohorts of peers who benefit from a shared identity. They belong to a community for which they feel ownership and commitment. Feelings of membership manifest themselves as participants collectively contribute to, and take responsibility for, sustaining the community.

For more information, see the Delta site: http://www.delta.wisc.edu/index.html
and the CIRTL site: http://www.cirtl.net/

These programs are funded by the National Science Foundation and the University of Wisconsin–Madison.