13: Teaching Partners: Improving Teaching and Learning by Cultivating a Community of Practice

The Teaching Partners Program and its follow‐up activities demonstrate that a carefully designed faculty development program can shift a campus culture to derive significant, measurable benefits for faculty and students. The program seeks to transform the institutional culture from one in which teaching is sequestered behind closed doors to one that supports substantive conversations about both the learning‐teaching process and the methods by which that process might best be facilitated. Following Shulman's (1993) lead, the program opens the doors of the classroom, reenvisions teaching as community property, and nurtures informed and sustaining discussion of teaching.