COPPER
Communities Of Practice: Pooling Educational Resources to Foster Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL)
1. Project Title: Your kingdom for a few words?
2. Project Overview: Tell the world what you’re doing (75 Words or less).
3. Case Recorder(s): Identify the person(s) preparing the case record on behalf of the COPPER Project. Who are you?
4. Community of Practice Members, units, roles:
List your community members, their units or disciplines, and roles in the COPPER Project. Who are core members and associates (key people involved in the COPPER Project other than core members)? What experience do each bring to the community and project?
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Other comments about community members and supporters:
5. Background & Context:
Briefly describe your COPPER Project and the context within which you undertake it. What do you hope to achieve? How will this contribute to learning at your institution? What desired ending(s) would you like for the story of your project? What types of institutional support do you have or would like?
6. Description of your early work, planning and preparations.
Describe the preliminary work of the COPPER Project over this last year as you prepare for the COPPER Summer Institute. What were the key components in your planning and preparation for your project (Roles? Methods? Timelines? Coordinating schedules?)? What were key issues and concerns, and, how did you sort them out? What were the key successes and what impact have they had? Are there any vignettes that illustrate these?
7. Description and learning about your community building and project development.
Describe early phases of building your community and developing the project. What key challenges, problems, solutions, struggles, and failures do you have and how do you handle them? What did they – or will they - lead to? What successes have you enjoyed to date? Are there any vignettes of potential consequence or impacts that you can share?
7. Description and reflections on implementation.
Describe the test or trial and interactive phases of your project including impact on learning. Use critical incidents and vignettes to illustrate the action of your community’s project. What are key challenges, problems, solutions, struggles, and failures, and how do you handle them? What have been your key successes? How have you leveraged these to your advantage?
8. Key Resources: Who and what are the people, organizations, materials, websites, and other resources you utilized? What types of support did you receive from your departments, colleges, administration? Of all resources, which were essential?
9. Discussion: This is your opportunity to capture the conversations among COPPER Project members as all of you reflect critically on the community and your project. As you reflect back on the preliminary stages of your community and its focus area and how it has evolved and developed over time, what are critical incidents, key questions and junctures that made a difference in how the community and your project evolved? What worked and why do you think it worked? What didn’t work and why do you think it didn’t work? What are your overall conclusions?
PART II: Collaboration Within the COPPER Cluster.
10. COPPER Cluster Resources: Please review the following list of COPPER Resources and describe how you are utilizing them. How useful have they been to your project’s development?
• Communication: project newsletter, brown-bag lunch conversations, home campus professional days, use of the Web Center to showcase accomplishments of each campus, a publication showcasing faculty accomplishments, a “yellow pages-style” directory of faculty expertise, an expertise/knowledge matrix; support for faculty to give presentations of their work, funding incentives for those who present, e-mail and other electronic communication tools, inclusion of cluster work in national publications.
• Resources: access to best practices disseminated through the AAHE Web Center; resources from the professional disciplinary organizations; grant funding for cluster work dissemination, faculty showcases and publications.
• Time: recommendations for ways campuses can make use of “reassigned time” as well as a system of faculty stipends; examples of potential support include sending faculty to CASTL colloquium for professional networking, allowing for “banked” overload, and considering SoTL as “college service” or potential sabbatical research.
• Assessment: sharing what has been done regarding assessment rather than reinventing the wheel; encourage campuses to make a clear distinction between assessment for learning and program evaluation by making clear who and what is being assessed.
Project Performance Measure 1: Identify our institutions’ baseline data elements on student outcomes and faculty development by establishing a cluster database.
Project Performance Measure 2: Establish internal and cluster-wide networks, including communities of practice. Have you developed a community of practice around SoTL? (This is your COPPER Project described in Part I of the Case Record.) Have you introduced members of your campus communities of practice to the AAHE Web Center? Have members of your campus communities of practice contributed to the COPPER Cluster newsletter? Are faculty from your institution listed in the directory of cluster-wide faculty willing to share their expertise within and among institutions?
Project Performance Measure 3: Design and implement programs to support faculty in SoTL. Have you inventoried SoTL resources at your own institution and identified “ visiting scholars” among your faculty who are willing to conduct workshops, attend meetings, and consult with faculty at member institutions? Have you identified and shared resources/opportunities for “going public,” e.g., publication resources and presentation venues, with other COPPER institutions? Have you identified policy makers from your own institution willing to discuss and review COPPER cluster activities?
Project Performance Measure 4: Establish a benchmark for types of faculty conversations with regard to SoTL. Have you identified a way to track and document faculty conversations regarding SoTL?
12. FOLLOW-UP: What are the next steps in the cycle of reflective practice? How might your Case Record be used as a resource for other individuals and communities in the COPPER Cluster? What questions/issues might you pose to the reader of your Case Record to help in their efforts?
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Take your completed “Developing Communities of Practice: Case Record,” including Part 1 and Part 2, to the COPPER Summer Institute and post it on the AAHE Webcenter COPPER Cluster site by June 1, 2004.
*Adapted from: Learning From Experience: “Developing Portraits of Practice: Case Records.” Learning Communities Initiative, Ohio Learning Network, 02-03.