A Professional Learning Community (PLC) is a cross-disciplinary group of 8-12 faculty and academic staff who engage in a collaborative semester-long program to ask questions about innovations in teaching and learning, explore teaching innovations, and generate products of value to the campus community (e.g., surveys, policy papers, teaching tools, presentations, and manuscripts).

A PLC usually consists of several basic traits:

• Cross-disciplinary (often combining faculty and professional staff)
• 8-12 members (plus 1-2 facilitators)
• Active, collaborative learning experience
• Regular structured scholarly activities and discussions
• Semester-length (though some run one year)
• Often creates an end product (e.g., scholarship, conference, presentation, syllabus revision).