Faculty+Learning+Communities-What+are+they?


 * "A critical community of learners...(has)specific purposes of facilitating, constructing, and validating understanding, and of developing capabilities that will lead to further learning." **
 * (Garrison, Anderson, and Archer, 2003, p.13) **

**As Organic Facilitators** Facilitators are responsible for providing agendas, resources, and room to share best practices. We see our role as more of "guides" than instructors. What we seem to be very successful at is trusting in the **//organic emergence for capacity building projects//**, another feature of an effective FLC.


 * Our Best Practices**
 * 1) **Meeting biweekly** increases the potential ownership of all members in the community.
 * 2) As time passes facilitators **move** to handing over more of the **planning to the communities**
 * 3) **Facilitating conversation**, encouraging **humor** and **openness,** and trying to allow everyone's voice in the discussion
 * 4) **Diverse professional features** in leadership and content knowledge make for good community members
 * 5) **Keep remembering**//**...** //because side trips come from the direction the community wants to take and are cruicial to keeping the sessions community focused.

The Research and The Reality
Even though we are a loose fitting, not over structured, we carry some of the essential qualities that other research based FLC's are built on.

//**Respect**// - valued and respected for speaking up, questioning and sharing //**Collaborative** -// for achieving community learning outcomes, responding and presenting to each other //**Relevance** -// we chose topics that reflect things we need as a group
 * //Openness//** - freedom to share thoughts and feelings

Room for Improvement
What ** we lack ** is //**a formal structure and assessment techniques,**// Yet, we are not necessarily experienced enough in forming community to be plan for these types of elements. In fact, this session is basically our first attempt as facilitators for reflective practice - it's a start.