The Faculty Learning Communities Showcase held this past Monday was a great event mainly because of the outcomes each group presented. The effort from each FLC was evident as we heard one terrific idea after another. The top picture includes President Jimmy Simmons and Provost Steve Doblin talking with members of the Sustainability Across the Curriculum FLC. They offered up four unique ideas including creating an undergraduate minor on the field of sustainability, enhancement of the recycling program at LU, a plan to encourage the use of alternative energy vehicles, and proposing that LEED certification guidelines be used for all renovations or new-builds on the LU campus. If you would like to view the poster created by this FLC that outline their proposals, you can find them adjacent to the CT+LE suite on the sixth floor of the Mary and John Gray Library. The Active Research and Scholarship of Teaching and Learning FLC was much more individually focused on classroom teaching. FLC members have been implementing active learning into their courses and several of them have captured their student's reactions using surveys and classroom assessment. The High School to College Transition FLC is planning a full-scale survey to be collected

over the coming months. They are focusing on two specific groups: incoming high school students and LU freshman. The plan is to use the results of the survey to help guide several new initiatives at LU including the University Undergraduate Advising Center and the University Success Seminar also known as LMAR 1101. The main focus of the FLC was uncovering impediments to retention. Look for results from their survey later this year. The Creating an Online Course of Substance FLC dazzled us with examples of templates for courses using technology to deliver content. They also emphasized how effective online course can be for student learning. Here is good news for all of us who devote our lives to student learning every day. A new report by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's National Center for Health Statistics finds that education may not only improve a person's finances, it is also linked to better health habits and a longer life. For instance, people who have a bachelor's degree or higher live about nine years longer than those who don't graduate from high school. "Highly educated people tend to have healthier behaviors, avoid unhealthy ones and have more access to medical care when they need it," says the report's lead author, Amy Bernstein, a health services researcher for the National Center for Health Statistics. "All of these factors are associated with better health." The report also found that in 2010 24% of boys and 22% of girls were obese in households where the heads of the family had less than a high school education; the figures are 11% of boys and 7% of girls where the head of the household had a bachelor's degree or higher. Poor people sometimes live in less healthy communities with less access to healthy foods and places to be physically active, Bernstein says. "It's all interconnected." For those of you who are about to start teaching in the mini-session, here is a tip to get you started right from the first day of class. You should do three things that first period including presenting the syllabus to your students, introducing the course topic with the expected outcomes and at least some initial material, and require at least some students to participate. James M. Lang in his book On Course: A week-by-week guide to your first semester of college teaching, suggests that "determining how students can participate in the course, and can make their voices heard in and outside of the classroom, should factor into every decision you make in your pedagogy, including decisions you make about the first day of the semester." Building on the "Flipping the Classroom" concept, we would suggest that you create a video of yourself reading the syllabus and send it to your students as a reading assignment for the first day. You can even give a quiz, a low stakes formative assessment that will not only set the tone but allows them to see what your tests will look like from the first day.