1. Faculty Connections:
The Role of Learning Assistance Professionals in Helping Faculty Understand Student Learning
Amanda Sinodis,
Associate Professor/Coordinator, ILC
Wake Tech Community College

2. Considerations
What do learning assistance professionals have to offer classroom faculty?
How can we get them to value our contributions?
Possibly but maybe later in presentation: Is it important that classroom faculty know what we are doing and how we are helping students? Why or why not?

3. Learning Objectives Tutor Faculty Student
In this presentation, participants will:
Understand, verify, and communicate what we learn from students
Learn how to connect meaningfully with faculty so that they can better understand learning (in and beyond their content areas)
Tutor
What is the essential role that tutors play in the learning process? Is it for all students or the “lucky few” who come in to our centers?
Our goal is to get faculty to appreciate us beyond just the help that we offer students who are struggling (or who elect to use our services).
Faculty
Student

4. Truths about Learning
Students’ prior knowledge can help or hinder learning.
How students organize knowledge influences how they learn and apply what they know.
Students’ motivation determines, directs, and sustains what they do to learn.
To develop mastery, students must acquire component skills, practice integrating them, and know when to apply what they have learned.
Goal-directed practice coupled with targeted feedback enhances the quality of students’ learning.
Students’ current level of development interacts with the social, emotional, and intellectual climate of the course to impact learning.
To become self-directed learners, students must learn to monitor and adjust their approaches to learning.
Source: Carnegie-Mellon Eberly Center for Teaching Excellence and Innovation, “Principles of Learning”
Can use the principles plus learning styles
Although we eventually get here, it comes after years of work and getting to know our students. What are some ways you have seen these principles laid out? As LAP, how can we lead instructors to these ideas?
LAP bring an interesting perspective to research and learning. For instance, we can look at these principles and see how they function and work out in our students’ academic lives.
Perhaps come up with examples of all of these?
What do we learn from students?
How is what we learn different from what classroom faculty learn?
If we are staffed with peer tutors instead of professional tutors, how does this dynamic change?

5. What We Observe from Students
What they don’t understand
When they are frustrated
Where their thinking comes from
Why they do what they do
How they learn
Who they are
Contrast to what classroom faculty--they learn what students don’t understand on the test (in general)
So...what do we do with this knowledge--turn to research in order to learn how to help them

6. Clarification through Research
We learn about learning through students, but research helps us serve students better
Journals
Books
Teaching and learning centers
Coursework
We “know better” than to trust students completely, so we work on verifying it. Gives words to what we see and know. Perhaps also research can come first.
Good books:
A Mind for Numbers, Barbara Oakley
Ambrose, et al., How Learning Works

7. Developing Faculty Connections
Your “To Do” List:
Key in to campus buzzwords
Find common ground
Reach out and share
Proceed with caution
You have to believe it about yourself
Be able to communicate it

8. Key in to Campus Buzzwords
What is important to the administration
Identify the current initiatives
Create the role that you can play in these initiatives
Under experiment--is the goal earning FTE, keeping students in classes, etc? KNOW this about your institution
Retention, student success, competency-based education

9. Find Common Ground
Daniel Pittaway from Coastline Community College points out the connection that tutors can make between instructors and students. Learning assistance is an essential piece!

10. Reach Out and Share
Clarify the goals you (and those with whom you are working) have
Experiment with innovation
Embedded tutoring
Learning communities
Present!
Advertise your center
Share your knowledge
Share story with Dean--a slow building audience

11. Proceed with Caution Avoid pitting student vs. instructor
Recognize the validity and importance of your role
Do not devalue the classroom faculty member’s role
Remain neutral and focused on the learning assistance domain
Avoid pitting student vs. instructor