Collaborative Learning Communities

Introduction Education is a key fundamental source for learning from primary school all the way through graduate school. Many students upon completing high school enroll and start in a community college, but many do not finish. This is a problem that needs to be addressed. In high school the students have their hands held and upon finishing are left with little or no direction when starting college. Many are still immature and without additional support and guidance they get lost in the system of education. There needs to be a change to keep these students engaged and one way is by getting them involved in learning communities. Learning communities are “the purposeful restructuring of the curriculum by linking or clustering courses that …show more content…
Learning communities are used as a basis for structuring students’ time, credit and learning experiences to build community and a connection. These communities provide a greater student-to-student and student-to faculty interaction. Collaborative learning has shown to have an increased success rate in both GPA as well as graduation rates. Learning communities can help to build community for the students. Commuter colleges face challenges since many students attend part time and many of the faulty are part time. The learning communities can help develop engaged communities of learners by altering classroom structures and practices. They help to build more collaboration among the students and faculty. The faculty and students learn from one another and value the differences that they bring into the classroom. The relationships and cross-fertilization of content and pedagogy among the students and faculty, continue even after the students are no longer involved in the community …show more content…
One report looked at the long-term effects of a learning community at one college and the other looked at short-term impacts of programs at six community colleges. These reports showed that one-semester learning community can have a long-term impact and increase graduation rates. One area that the learning community demonstrated was that on average the learning communities for developmental education students only produced a small impact on the subjects of math and English (MDRC, 2012.) Overall, these students, did support a need for learning communities, but did demonstrate the challenge of implementing them. They needed to have involvement from all the