High-Impact Practices Faculty Fellows 2019-21

Faculty Fellows are full-time faculty members who have demonstrated sustained, outstanding teaching and are committed to the highest principles of Ignatian pedagogy and sound learning theory. Fellows deepen the Loyola faculty's commitment to teaching through individual and small group activity, reflection, and writing. Fellows form a professional learning community who share their expertise with the broader Loyola community by:

• Meeting once a month as a professional learning community to discuss effective teaching, high-impact practices, and collaboratively selected readings on teaching.
• Serving as models by opening their classrooms to faculty colleagues.
• Observing colleagues' teaching and offering suggestions for enhanced instruction and student engagement, as invited by faculty colleagues.
• Planning roundtable or brown bag discussions on elements of Ignatian pedagogy, student engagement, or high-impact practices.

In 2019, Academic Affairs adopted a High Impact Practices Action Plan with the goal of increasing awareness and effective use of high-impact practices across all the academic disciplines at Loyola. Also in 2019, Loyola participated in a Mission Priority Examen, which reaffirmed the university’s continuing commitment to Ignatian Pedagogy. Our Faculty Fellows group saw the potential for demonstrating the overlaps between our Jesuit identity and our new emphasis on HIPs. Therefore, one of our central projects was exploring the connections between Jesuit pedagogy and various high-impact practices.

Activities and Outcomes

Ignatian Pedagogy and High-Impact Practices

As part of our on-going conversation about teaching, we developed the graphic below to help faculty think about the ways in which high-impact practices can be mapped onto Ignatian pedagogy. A more exhaustive exploration of how these two systems overlap can be found in this additional chart on Ignatian Pedagogy and Learning Aims Framework.

High-Impact Practices Workshop

In October 2020, our group led a workshop as part of the “High-Impact Teaching in the Ignatian Tradition” series. Our session, “Collaborative Learning at a Distance,” presented strategies for adapting established high-impact practices to the realities of remote instruction.

Teaching Examen

We have also developed  a tool, the Teaching Examen, which faculty can use in peer-coaching situations. Based on the Examen of St. Ignatius, this document guides a pair of instructors through a set of questions and asks them to reflect on one another’s current teaching practice.

High-Impact Practices Peer Coaching