This post replicates the content on the CITL’s grants page. We are reproducing it here while our website is down so we can continue to recruit participants for this fall’s learning communities.
Faculty Learning Communities
As part of the CITL’s mission to promote transformative learning experiences for IUB instructors, the CITL sponsors multiple Learning Communities each year. Learning Communities at Indiana University Bloomington are cohorts of instructors, often from different disciplines or fields of study, who ask questions about teaching and learning, try out teaching innovations, assess student learning, create new models of practice, and share their work with colleagues. Each community shares a question, a set of problems, or an interest in a topic, as members deepen their knowledge and expertise in this area by interacting on an ongoing basis. Members engage in scholarly teaching and student-centered learning, collaborating within a collegial framework that offers peer review and support.
Learning Communities meet once or twice a month for the academic year (sometimes for just a semester), and each community has two types of outcomes—individual changes to one’s own practice, and a group “give back” to the larger IUB teaching community. All full-time IUB faculty members, both tenure track and non-tenure track, are eligible to participate in Faculty Learning Communities; all graduate students are eligible to participate in Graduate Student Learning Communities.
Participants in some of the FLCs below are eligible for an honorarium upon their completion of the FLC, payable into their IU research accounts. Amounts vary by FLC, and your facilitator can provide details. Note that until 2025-26 budgets are released, we are uncertain of the funding of this year’s FLCs.
Work of the 2025-26 FLCs will begin early in the fall semester, although we are trying to recruit participants now to allow them more time to work in the fall.
2025-26 FLCs
Designing Online Courses for Student Success
Facilitator: Maggie Gilchrist
Are you looking to (re)design your online course to foster a stronger sense of student belonging and engagement? This FLC is dedicated to implementing best practices for creating accessible and engaging online courses. Participants will discuss strategies for utilizing instructional technologies to enhance student interaction, even in a virtual environment. Through collaborative discussions and hands-on activities, faculty members will share insights, challenges, and successes in online course design and delivery. For more information, please contact Maggie Gilchrist (magilch@iu.edu).
Peer Review Training
Facilitator: Greg Siering
The peer review of teaching is becoming more important for IU faculty as the university moves away from evaluating teaching solely on the basis of quantitative evidence of teaching quality. To meet the demand for well-trained faculty peer reviewers, CITL will again offer Peer Review Training for faculty interested in becoming peer reviewers of their colleagues’ teaching. Participants in the training will attend five meetings during the fall semester, in which they learn how to conduct summative and formative peer reviews, including class observations (either face to face or online), syllabus review, and writing a summative memo. In the spring semester, participants will observe and be observed by their peers in the program. Upon successful completion of the program, participants will be certified as FACET peer reviewers.
This FLC will accept applications in August 2025.
Why They Hate “Academic” Writing & Reading—and How to Change That
Facilitator: Layli Miron
Students have always faced challenges with academic writing, and decreased practice during the COVID-19 pandemic may have increased those difficulties. What are the roots of this widely observed issue? Our community’s first undertaking will be to identify the causes of antipathy and apathy toward academic writing and reading. We will then discern which roadblocks to intrinsic motivation we can mitigate. Our final collective step will be to revise an activity or assignment for spring semester to align with our latest understanding of reading and writing that are worth doing. The facilitator will follow up with each participant in spring to reflect on how the teaching intervention went and how to move forward. If you have sufficient time in fall to attend meetings, which will be scheduled when most prospective participants are available, and to do our independent work—and an interest in questioning traditional practices around literacy—then please consider applying.
This FLC meets only in the fall semester.
Introduction to the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL)
Facilitator: Shannon Sipes
For many faculty members, the classroom can be a source of interesting questions about students’ learning. For example: What is the impact of a specific active learning technique on my students’ understanding of course material? How do my students prepare for exams and how does that correlate with their performance? Does my students’ prior coursework or academic background correlate with their performance in my class? In seeking answers to these kinds of questions, faculty can use the research methods of their own discipline to examine their teaching and their students’ learning. This is the premise underlying the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL), a program that helps faculty members take a scholarly approach to their teaching and share the results of their inquiry with their colleagues. In this FLC, participants will learn about SoTL by developing a proposal for their own SoTL project.
Enhancing Student Belonging
Facilitators: Chase McCoy (Informatics), Kim Arnold (Chemistry), and Vicka Bell-Robinson (Office of Student Life)
When students feel a sense of belonging on campus and in the classroom, they perform better academically, have increased retention rates, and are more likely to stay on track to graduate. This is semester-long faculty-led FLC in partnership with the Office of Student Life is designed to help faculty strengthen their teaching practices and student relationships to improve belonging in the classroom.
Together, we will explore what belonging is and why it is important, strategies for course design and classroom practices, and how to create partnerships with campus units dedicated to student success. Whether you teach a small course or a large lecture, this FLC offers evidence-based approaches, opportunities for faculty collaboration, and connections to campus resources—all aimed at helping every student feel seen, supported, and set up for success.
Bringing Civic Learning to Life through Community-Engaged Teaching
Facilitator: Michael Valliant (CITL)
How can our teaching prepare students not only to succeed academically but also to participate meaningfully in civic life? This two-semester Faculty Learning Community (FLC) invites instructors from across disciplines to explore how Civic Learning and Democratic Engagement (CLDE) can be meaningfully integrated into Community-Engaged Learning (CEL) courses. Participants will examine civic learning frameworks, share teaching practices, and design strategies to help students develop civic knowledge, skills, and agency through community-engaged experiences.
The FLC will provide a collaborative space to reflect on teaching, adapt course goals, and contribute to campus-wide efforts to deepen civic learning. Open to faculty currently teaching or planning to teach CEL courses, the FLC includes monthly meetings, peer exchange, and individualized support. Participants will also contribute to a public-facing resource or showcase.
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