A Community of Practice Encourages Digitally-Enabled, Evidence-Based Teaching Practices

This summer, higher ed math instructors are invited to participate in a form of peer learning to understand and implement digital learning technologies in ways that align with evidence-based teaching.

Considering Equity-Minded Teaching Through the Lens of Digitally Enabled, Evidence-Based Teaching Practices is an eight-week community of practice presented by Transform Learning in partnership with Every Learner Everywhere. Transform Learning is an online resource for educators to learn about digitally enabled evidence-based teaching practices (DE-EBTs).

The community of practice will run from May 27 through July 27, with a break the week of June 30. A similar community of practice will be available in fall 2025.

Christine Latulippe, Community Manager for Transform Learning, is facilitating the community of practice and says instructors participating in it are motivated to share their own DE-EBTs and to learn more innovative practices from others.

“Many faculty get pulled by other responsibilities, and they don’t have a lot of time to think about teaching,” says Latulippe, who is also a visiting associate professor of education at Linfield University.

“Something great can happen when we share ideas as a community. You can realize, ‘Oh, this is a cool thing that I’m doing already, and maybe I need to do more of it,’ or, maybe, ‘I need to take the next step and share it.’ I, myself, am excited to be learning from the community.”

Building the DE-EBT community

Research has demonstrated that digitally-enabled, evidence-based teaching practices are effective strategies for student learning. The eight DE-EBTs featured on Transform Learning include:

• Active learning, such as simulations and animations
• Assessing and activating prior knowledge, to incorporate students’ interests and current levels of understanding
• Data-informed instruction, such as using data dashboards
• Formative practice and assessment, such as timely, targeted, and ungraded feedback
• Fostering a sense of belonging through an inclusive learning environment, such as culturally responsive pedagogy
• Instructional transparency, such as mapping assignments to course goals
• Meta-cognition and self-regulation such as student self-assessment
• Peer collaboration, to encourage students to support one another’s learning

Through weekly readings, prompts, and asynchronous online discussion, participants in Transform Learning’s community of practice will be sharing their experience implementing technology for more effective teaching and learning. The community of practice also includes drop-in sessions for synchronous dialogue, as well as a live webinar on June 24. Each participant is eligible for a $250 stipend upon completion of deliverables for contributing to the community and reflecting on their own use of the DE-EBTs.

The structured discussions have the benefit of being more in depth and nuanced than a listserv experience. Latulippe’s facilitation encourages participants, who come from many different types of postsecondary institutions, to reflect on the research surrounding DE-EBTs and to describe the practices they use or hope to use in their classrooms.

One hope is that many of the teaching ideas shared during the community of practice will become part of the Instructional Example Library on Transform Learning, a collection of short outlines of how instructors use specific tools and EBTs for focused parts of their courses.

Latulippe says, “When a teaching idea a participant shares in discussion gets refined to be an example in the instructional example library, the learning will keep going. I want to encourage this community around good teaching.”

Submissions accepted for the example library are eligible for an additional $500 stipend.

Using evidence-based teaching in STEM

Because the Transform Learning community of practice is aimed primarily at math instructors and others in STEM disciplines, it provides an opportunity to learn how these instructional ideas can be effective in subject areas where evidence-based practices are sometimes thought to be less applicable.

“Faculty might not realize there are other ways to teach — other ways to emphasize student engagement, for example,” says Latulippe.

“Sometimes in STEM we get very content-focused, so when we are interested in teaching, we might feel alone in our particular departments or school,” she explains. “We may want to foster a sense of belonging in our classroom, or we may want to engage our students in active learning. But if you don’t see something, you don’t know there are other ways or that it’s okay to teach differently. A community of practice is a powerful way for faculty to discover what’s possible.”