Using Faculty Learning Communities to help part-time faculty improve Developmental and Gateway Math Courses.

Community colleges are currently faced with the challenge of improving student success in math courses. While the need for post-secondary education grows, students continue to enter college underprepared. Many students are required to take as
many as three semesters of review prior to enrolling in a credit bearing math course. The time involved and frustration with the math itself often results in students’ failure to complete their courses of study.
Many colleges meet this challenge by addressing math placement procedures, adding additional support services, and reforming curriculum. When addressing curriculum and instruction, colleges face an additional challenge. Most decisions about changes in curriculum and instruction are made by full-time faculty, yet it is not
uncommon for as many as 75% of those courses to be taught by part-time faculty. These faculty need training and support if they are to be successful in implementing new courses or instructional strategies.
The product created for this dissertation is intended to assist institutions as they create appropriate training and support for these faculty. Based on current literature, insights from faculty, and feedback from a pilot Faculty Learning Community (FLC) the author designed a guide to help institutions develop training and support for parttime
faculty who have been asked to implement innovative instruction.
The guide includes rationale for the use of FLCs to train and support part-time faculty and describes the steps necessary to develop and sustain an FLC for the specific context of part-time developmental and general education math faculty who have been asked to implement innovation in their classrooms. The guide is designed to be used as a workbook. In addition to describing the steps needed to create an FLC,
it provides a list of specific resources to help with both the process and content of an FLC for part-time developmental math faculty.