2023 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

The focus of this work-in-progress (WIP) paper is on the creation and evaluation of a faculty
development activity to improve teaching through reflection and empathy. Our intervention takes
the form of a Faculty Learning Community (FLC) where staff and faculty participants have
frequent opportunities to experience role reversal through being a learner again. Participants
become active learners by playing modern board games that help them remember the experience
of being a learner once again. By choosing different types and styles of games we are able to
provide a space for the participants to discuss broader teaching practices such as the importance
of technical vocabulary, scaffolding ideas as we teach them, and the benefits of student-centered
learning approaches. Another critical aspect of this intervention is that we hope to use role
reversal to remind teachers how hard it is to learn by giving the teacher more empathy for the
learner.

In this paper, we describe our FLC organization, which we are conducting over the 2022-23
academic year with 9 participants and 2 facilitators. We begin by briefly describing the FLC
meetings completed and planned for this time frame, followed by a detailed description of how
we are investigating the impacts of this intervention. We will present the design of our qualitative
study which includes evaluating participant feedback. We are collecting feedback within each
session, as well as over the complete experience. Additionally, we plan to collect data from our
participants’ students in their Spring semester classes to examine potential impacts made by our
members’ application of concepts gained through the experiences of the FLC. We conclude by
describing our hypothesized expectations for this work and look forward to feedback from the
community on these efforts.

This work is a - Work-in-Progress (WIP) Paper, Poster Presentation (Noting, we believe that this
would be an excellent Mini-demonstration if the organizers would like this, in that we could have
a mini-session so that the audience could experience a short board game to understand the
experience and we could as a group discuss it.)