Center for Teaching and Learning Excellence

Faculty Learning Communities: Fall 2026

Faculty Learning Communities CTLE

About Faculty Learning Communities

Faculty Learning Communities (FLCs) are small, year-long cohorts where PCC faculty meet regularly to explore a focused teaching theme, apply new approaches in their classes, and share what works. Programming is coordinated by the Center for Teaching and Learning Excellence (CTLE), and each group is led by a peer-facilitator instructor. Part-time faculty are eligible for stipend compensation.

Faculty Learning Communities use the lens of teaching and learning in their programming, but are open to all PCC Staff. Everyone is welcome. 

Cohort enrollment cap: Each FLC cohort is limited to approximately 15–20 participants. Please register only for sessions you plan on attending.

What is the time commitment?

Each term, there will be two sessions, each roughly requiring three hours of your time, for a total of six hours across. This applies to the  Fall, Winter, and Spring terms.

Registration instructions and FAQs

General registration instructions are below (expand each section to see more).

To register for events, click on the “Register for this session” link under each session you want to attend, which will take you to Workday. Once in Workday, click on “Select Offering, ” which appears under the Teaching Week logo. In the new window that opens, select the session, then hit submit. You will be registered for the session. Please watch the video walking you through registration.

You can always check which sessions you registered for by going to Workday and clicking on Learning Trainer from the main menu on the left-hand side.
If you register for a session less than 24 hours in advance, you will not receive a Google Calendar invite and will need to use Workday to access your sessions.

You can also contact CTLE if you encounter issues getting your Zoom link. On the day of the event, you can access sessions through Workday or use the
Zoom link from the calendar invite that you received to start your session. For step-by-step directions, please refer to the Registering and Accessing CTLE sessions document. 

 

How do I register?
  1. Pick your FLC from the list below (expand each header to see details)
  2. Select FLC sessions you would like to attend. Note that some FLCs are cumulative; check description
  3. Register with your PCC email (an active PCC Zoom account is required).  You must register for all FLCs – even if in-person or Hybrid
Where do I submit accommodation requests?

In alignment with PCC, the CTLE is committed to providing reasonable accommodations for all our programming. Please email the CTLE program coordinators at ctle@pcc.edu as early as possible with any requests.

Will I be eligible for a stipend? 

Attendance for FLCs will be recorded in Workday as professional development. Part-time faculty who participate are eligible to receive a stipend for each session attended; they must complete one evaluation form per session. Please refer to the document Payment for Participation for more information about stipends.

I need additional assistance

Fall 2026 FLCs and registration links

Expand each section to see the full overview and meeting registration links.

Enhancing Accessible Learning Across Disciplines: Building Accessible Video Practices

Did you know that PCC has an ADA Comprehensive Transition Plan that includes efforts to remove barriers in the digital learning environment? Video accessibility is one part of that work.

Many of us want to make the videos in our courses more accessible, but may not know where to begin or how to manage the work on our own. This Faculty Learning Community brings instructors from across disciplines together to revise course videos, share knowledge, and develop accessibility practices that we can continue to use and share with colleagues.

Over three-quarters, we will work with videos we create, select, embed, and share with students. Our focus will include captioning, audio description, sign language access, accessible video players, and accessibility of embedded and externally produced videos.

During the first quarter, we will focus on creating and editing captions to ensure accuracy, timing, readability, speaker identification, and meaningful sound. We will revise captions and transcripts for videos we’ve uploaded to platforms such as YouTube and Vimeo and use Kaltura within D2L to import videos, generate captions, and correct them for accessibility. In later quarters, we will explore audio description and ways to incorporate sign language video alongside original content, using accessible video players.

By the end of the year, we will have revised course materials, practical video accessibility workflows, and a collective of instructors who can continue supporting one another across PCC.

Connection before Correction: A masterclass/workshop in student relationships

This workshop is a guide for higher education faculty focused on the “Connect Before You Correct” philosophy—a mindset in which building trust and emotional safety with students precedes academic or behavioral feedback. By prioritizing rapport, faculty can transform classroom management from power struggles into collaborative partnerships. Goal: To equip faculty with actionable rapport-building strategies that increase student engagement and lower defensiveness. Core Principle: When students feel safe and seen, they move from a “reactive” (survival) brain to a “receptive” (learning) brain. Key Outcomes: Improved student motivation, higher attendance, and increased comfort in participating in difficult classroom dialogues.

Bridging the Divide: Adapting Rhetoric, Supporting Distressed Students, and De-escalating Conflict

Navigating the modern higher education classroom requires balancing empathetic crisis response with rigorous academic discourse. During times of uncertainty, it can be difficult to communicate with and connect with students across all generations in the classroom while still meeting daily and course outcomes. This session explores practical strategies for bridging generational communication gaps and helps educators evaluate their rhetorical approach during periods of institutional and societal unrest. We will discuss techniques for supporting students, de-escalating classroom tension, and constructively managing political and ideological dissent.

Survival to Sustainability: Refueling the “First Responders” of Academia

In the high-stakes world of community college education, you are more than just an instructor—you are an academic first responder. Between navigating heavy teaching loads and supporting students through the complex realities of their lives, you are constantly pouring from your own reservoir to keep others afloat.

But who is looking out for your reservoir?

It’s time to stop simply “making it through the term” and start building a career that fuels you instead of draining you. Join our new 6-session FLC, a space specifically designed for the unique challenges of the community college landscape.

Together, we will:
Identify the “Survival Loop”: Recognize the burnout triggers unique to our diverse student demographics and workload.
Build Sustainable Systems: Shift from reactive crisis management to proactive, healthy instructional mindsets.
Cultivate Community: Connect with peers who truly understand the “front-line” experience.
Refill the Tank: Practical, evidence-based strategies to protect your energy and rediscover your passion for teaching.

The Goal: To move beyond the grind and create a professional and personal life that is as resilient and vibrant as the students we serve.

Reading Apprenticeship: Better Reading for Better Learning

At a time when critical, independent reading is under threat, Reading Apprenticeship (RA) is an approach to teaching that takes reading seriously, as both central and essential to students gaining insight into the subjects they study. It is an approach with strategies that can be used in any discipline to promote disciplinary ways of thinking (i.e., how to read/think/work like an engineer/anthropologist/economist/mathematician, etc.). This Faculty Learning Community will invite participants to learn about the four domains that provide a framework for RA: social, personal, cognitive, and knowledge-building. We’ll explore different strategies for engaging students in each of these domains and tackle important questions about how RA can shift our teaching to support students in reading to learn in our reading and writing courses and beyond.

Reflective Practice for Teaching

Work on any aspect of your teaching (lesson planning, learning activities, course structure, talking to students about issues, you name it) through the practice of learning to reflect. We will learn by doing and use our meeting to explore reflective practice outside of meetings. We shape the work throughout the year based on the input and interests of the group members, and explore our teaching and the aspects we want to develop in our meetings.

Creating Inclusive Learning Environments to Support Adult Learner Retention and Engagement

This interactive series of workshops will explore how to support adult learners in the classroom. Our learners come to the classroom with various experiences. These experiences can impact learner retention and engagement. As instructors, we have an opportunity to create Inclusive Learning Environments (ILE’s) to support learner success. In this faculty learning community, we will explore the following areas: Fall Sessions: Explore Adult Learning Theory (Andragogy and Transformative Learning) and Trauma-Informed Instruction. Winter Sessions: Research/Application: Research various instructional strategies to support adult learner success and share how it “looks” in the classroom. We collaborate to share our classroom experiences and support our fellow instructors in creating an Inclusive Learning Environment. Spring Sessions: Create Inclusive Learning Environment action plans. The final phase will be to commit to one change to try next academic year.

Seeing The World Through a Deaf Lens

The two sessions will be on October 9 and Oct 30th from 10:00 am to 12:00 pm

The October 9, Friday Session — Seeing the World Through a Deaf Lens: Deaf Space and Visual Learning Environments
This session invites faculty to explore how learning environments look and function through a Deaf lens. We will examine how lighting, seating arrangements, visual attention, eye gaze, classroom design, and virtual spaces can affect communication and learning for Deaf students. Through discussion and interactive activities, participants will consider how environments designed around hearing norms can create unintended barriers and how Deaf-centered visual practices can benefit everyone. Faculty will leave with practical ideas for creating more visually accessible and inclusive learning environments.

Pre-Readings for Oct 9th Presentation are:

The October 30, Friday Session — Seeing the World Through a Deaf Lens: The Hidden Curriculum in Higher Education
Not everything students need to know in higher education is written in the syllabus. The hidden curriculum includes unwritten expectations, social and cultural rules, informal communication, and incidental learning that students are often expected to simply “pick up.”
This interactive session examines the hidden curriculum through a Deaf and hard-of-hearing lens. Faculty will explore how unequal access to incidental learning, differences between ASL and English, visual communication needs, and assumptions about accommodations can affect a student’s access to the full learning experience. Through realistic faculty scenarios and discussion, participants will identify hidden barriers in their own teaching practices and consider how Universal Design for Learning (UDL), accommodations, and intentional communication can make the invisible more visible.

Pre-Readings for Oct 30th Presentation are:

 

AI as a Feedback Assistant: Using Generative AI to Support Grading, Revision, and Student Learning

This hands-on workshop explores how instructors can use generative AI to support grading and feedback while keeping instructor judgment, course outcomes, and student learning at the center of the process. Rather than treating AI as an automated grader, we will focus on practical ways to use AI as a feedback assistant: clarifying rubric language, identifying common patterns in student work, drafting formative comments, creating revision guidance, and improving feedback consistency across a class. We will also discuss privacy, bias, academic integrity, and the limits of AI-generated feedback. Participants will leave with sample prompts, a workflow they can adapt to their own courses, and a clearer sense of where AI can help, where it should not be used, and where human expertise remains non-negotiable.

You don’t learn the language in order to use it; you use the language in order to learn it

This series of in-person workshops at the SE campus will focus on making learning interactive. While our expertise is in second-language acquisition, the principles of using a skill to learn that skill have applications beyond ESOL.

Fall – PLANNING & PRACTICE – Participants will read a short article about interactive learning. We will meet to process the research and work in small groups to transform a lesson (from a reading or writing textbook/OER) into an interactive lesson that gives students the opportunity to use the language orally to meet a reading or writing objective. Participants will then implement this strategy into a lesson or textbook they are currently teaching. We will meet again to share and reflect on our experiences.

Winter – PEER OBSERVATION – Participants will continue to explore the practice of using a skill to learn a skill by observing each other in the classroom. We will meet to discuss the parameters and interactive instructional focus of our peer observations and to schedule our observations of each other teaching on-campus classes. We will meet again to share our positive feedback and takeaways with the teachers we observed.

Spring – MAYBE THIS, MAYBE THAT – Depending on the feedback from the winter peer observations, we will continue with peer observations or will focus on bringing examples of interactive lessons into the session to share as mini-lesson demos.

Being More Creative in the Classroom

Creativity is what many of us treasure about teaching, regardless of the field. Yet many institutional and cultural factors have led to the de-emphasis of creativity in the classroom, even though it makes teaching more enriching and learning more engaging. What does creativity look like now, especially in multiple modalities? In this in-person FLC, participants will pursue these questions, explore answers, and workshop strategies, scenarios, assignments, and activities that promote and sustain creative pedagogical practices. We will read some scholarship on the matter, review past practices, experiment, and plan for new avenues of creativity in our work.

The philosophy and use of modern AI (Advanced discussion)

This conversation is for people who have heard the basic story of AI many a time and are looking for a year of deeper reading, discussion, and experimentation. We’ll be discussing the real capabilities of AI — what it can actually do and where it seems to be going — philosophical frameworks for understanding how to relate to and use this technology, and how agents are going to impact knowledge work broadly and higher education specifically.

Fall term: This first term will focus on reading and discussing papers and book excerpts on cognition, metacognition, epistemology, and human-computer interaction to help ground the rest of the year’s discussion.

Winter term: This second term will involve digging into the actual limits and capabilities of current AI, specifically teaching practical skills to understand the world of benchmarking and evaluate AI-related claims. How do you understand the METR log plot? Why are people hoping to see ARC-AGI-3 get saturated? What on Earth is a GDPVal? You’ll understand the answer to these questions and many more wonky, confusing things by the end of the term. You’ll be the life of the party.

Spring term: In this final term, we will (hopefully) experiment with agents in our own work, learn how they fit into our respective fields, and report back. The goal of this term is to really draw on everything we discussed in previous terms and start trying strange and ambitious things that we can all take back to our peers.

OER Level Up: Let’s build an OER community, learn about innovative OERs, and then help each other get funded

This fun and low-key OER building community is for every faculty and staff that want to further their OER work (or begin it), who wants to learn about what others are doing with OER at PCC, and for those who want to get funded for taking their work to the next level (or a starting level or for doing maintenance in a new way. It is also for those just interested in sharing what they are doing with OER (you don’t have to create anything new, but we promise we will all learn something!). Each term, we will learn about new and innovative OERs, share with each other what we’re doing or want to do, and then help each other fill in the gaps. There will also be time to write our PCC OER grants (optional!). Come for a term or for the whole year; each session will be unique.

For planning purposes, the Fall term may be a little more learning-focused, the Winter term might be about collaboration and idea generation, and the Spring term might be a little more implementation-focused. This is all subject to change based on what we learn together. All levels welcome (new and experienced!) in this low-stress, fun space. Come join us!