Teacher Education and Professional Development Commons^™

The New Demand For Heterogeneity In College Teaching, George Keller

To Improve the Academy: A Journal of Educational Development

The past half century has brought an astounding increase in U.S. college and university enrollments. The rapid rise of mass higher education has forced major changes at every institution and is reshaping the U.S. higher education enterprise. Each college needs to ask itself what the huge expansion means for future faculty hires, programs, and modes of teaching.

Not Making Or Shaping: Finding Authenticity In Faculty Development, Patricia Cranton

To Improve the Academy: A Journal of Educational Development

Authenticity is defined as a multifaceted concept that includes self-awareness, awareness of others, genuine relationships, awareness of contextual constraints, and living a critical life. Authenticity develops over time and with experience; a developmental continuum for authenticity is discussed. Drawing on a three-year research project on authenticity in teaching in higher education, this chapter suggests ways in which faculty developers can help foster authentic practice.

Perceptions Of Faculty Developers About The Present And Future Of Faculty Development At Historically Black Colleges And Universities, Phyllis Worthy Dawkins, Andrea L. Beach, Stephen L. Rozman

To Improve the Academy: A Journal of Educational Development

The development of faculty at Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) has been a challenge and commitment since their inception before and after the civil war. Historically, faculty have assumed many roles, but they primarily sought to address the needs of black students. The HBCU Faculty Development Network, founded in 1994, has been instrumental in providing a platform to showcase accomplishments and challenges in education at this unique group of colleges and universities. To address future needs, we surveyed the membership to explore current program goals and influences, practices, and new directions. The results are compared with data for the …

Preparing Faculty For Pedagogical Change: Helping Faculty Deal With Fear, Linda C. Hodges

To Improve the Academy: A Journal of Educational Development

How receptive faculty are to changing their pedagogical approach is a complex issue, but one factor that impedes change is the fear of taking a risk. Underlying this fear may be the fear of loss, fear of embarrassment, or fear of failure. Addressing these issues can empower faculty to be more innovative in their teaching. Drawing on research literature, personal teaching narratives, and my own work in faculty development, I discuss some of these underlying fears. I then offer concrete strategies for working with faculty to enable them to overcome these emotional barriers and embrace change.

Tailoring Faculty Development Programs To Faculty Career Stages, Peter Seldin

To Improve the Academy: A Journal of Educational Development

College faculty progress through a series of sequential career stages. Each is characterized by different motivations and professional development needs. Yet, too often, faculty developers rely on hunches rather than empirical data to guide programming decisions. This chapter describes the important research findings of a just completed national study to determine the different programming interests and needs of more than 500 beginning, mid-career, and senior-level faculty in the United States.

Creating Engaged Departments: A Program For Organizational And Faculty Development, Kevin J. Kecskes, Sherril B. Gelmon, Amy Spring

To Improve the Academy: A Journal of Educational Development

Portland State University encourages faculty participation in service-learning by providing faculty with individual incentives to support and reward them. Now, in recognition of this central role of the department in higher education, administrators interested in creating sustained civic engagement initiatives on campus are looking to the department as a strategic leverage point for change. This chapter investigates a yearlong engaged department initiative and finds that a collective approach can (re)connect individual faculty to their initial motivations for engaging in the profession, to a community of scholars, to their students, and also to their surrounding community.

Promoting Intellectual Community And Professional Growth For A Diverse Faculty, Dorothe J. Bach, Marva A. Barnett, José D. Fuentes, Sherwood C. Frey

To Improve the Academy: A Journal of Educational Development

Minority faculty retention is key to increasing faculty diversity at most colleges and universities. Because retention depends on individual faculty choice and administrative tenure decisions, institutions need to help junior faculty develop a tenurable profile and enhance their desire to remain at their institution. This chapter examines a fellows program that supports beginning faculty in developing successful long-term careers, taking into account research on helping diverse faculty members thrive. It also presents strategies for establishing viable peer support networks and partnerships with senior consultants and for creating programming that ensures new faculty successfully transition into teaching, research, and the university …

An Electronic Advice Column To Foster Teaching Culture Change, Donna M. Qualters, Thomas C. Sheahan, Jacqueline A. Isaacs

To Improve the Academy: A Journal of Educational Development

First-year engineering students receive most of their teaching from instructors outside of engineering. As a result, these instructors are typically not a teaching community with a shared commitment to engineering student learning. Retention of engineering students is strongly tied to the quality of teaching, thus addressing collective teaching quality is important. This chapter describes the development of a carefully crafted, electronically distributed advice column on teaching developed by an interdisciplinary editorial team, written under the pseudonym Jonas Chalk. Surveys of Chalk Talk readers indicate that this is an effective means to promote teaching culture change.

Helping Faculty Learn To Teach Better And “Smarter” Through Sequenced Activities, Barbara J. Millis

To Improve the Academy: A Journal of Educational Development

Faculty developers can help faculty learn to intentionally sequence assignments and activities to promote greater learning when they understand the convergent research—with its practical implications for teaching—on how people learn, on deep learning, and on cooperative learning. Such a sequence includes a motivating out-of-class assignment (homework), in-class “processing” that includes active learning and student interactions, and feedback and assessment, often given in multiple ways. This approach is modeled through two examples using graphic organizers.

Practicing What We Preach: Transforming The Ta Orientation, Patricia Armstrong, Peter Felten, Jeffrey Johnston, Allison Pingree

To Improve the Academy: A Journal of Educational Development

Brookfield (1995), Schön (1983), and others articulate the necessity and complexity of being critically reflective in our work. Indeed, the value of critical reflection is inherent to educational development as a field in that we frequently encourage such thinking in our consultations with instructors. But practicing what we preach can be difficult. This chapter reflects on an experiment in the transformation of a teaching assistant orientation, a central event of our teaching center. We not only describe and assess the process of revising this orientation, but we also reflect on the implicatiom of this case for broader programming issues in …

Exploring The Application Of Best Practices To Ta Awards: One University's Approach, Laurel Willingham-Mclain, Deborah L. Pollack

To Improve the Academy: A Journal of Educational Development

This chapter explores how to adapt best practices from the general literature on teaching awards in higher education to graduate student teaching assistant (TA) awards. Although most criteria apply, they must be fitted to the career stage and aspirations of TAs. The Duquesne University Graduate Student Award for Excellence in Teaching serves as a case study demonstrating how these practices can be modified to both recognize excellent teaching and promote the professional development of graduate student instructors.

Expeditionary Learning: A Low–Risk, Low–Cost, High–Impact Professional Development Model, Chris Carlson-Dakes, Alice Pawley

To Improve the Academy: A Journal of Educational Development

We describe a low-risk, low-cost, high-impact professional development program to help faculty, instructional staff, postdoctoral fellows, and graduate students create space in their lives to explore the diversity of their campus community and reflect on beliefs about teaching and learning in higher education. Along with small group discussions, participants have “expeditions” onto campus to explore learning situations and academic life in ways that they have never before experienced. We describe our theoretical model, programmatic and evaluation structure, and some participants’ insights into why they participated and what they learned from our first implementation.

Learning Communities For First–Year Faculty: Transition, Acculturation, And Transformation, Harriet Fayne, Alice Ortquist-Ahrens

To Improve the Academy: A Journal of Educational Development

To enhance new faculty members’ chances for teaching and career success, Otterbein College piloted a yearlong learning community program and encouraged first-year faculty to participate. Four new faculty members took part in opportunities designed to enhance their teaching, to orient them more fully to a new institution and student body, to foster collegial community, to encourage reflective practice, and to introduce them to the scholarship of teaching and learning. This qualitative case study tracks their developmental trajectory, which led them from an initial concern with self and survival to an eventual focus on student learning.

Faculty Competency By Design: A Model For Institutional Transformation, Helen M. Clarke, Philip E. Bishop

To Improve the Academy: A Journal of Educational Development

For a decade, Valencia Community College has striven for a faculty development program with direct impact on student learning. The college succeeded by designing faculty learning with the same logic we apply to student learning. Valencia’s program for new tenure-track faculty focuses on significant faculty learning outcomes, a learning-centered pedagogy, high standards of scholarship, and continuous program assessment. The college’s Teaching/Learning Academy and a coordinated tenure process have cultivated new learning leaders and created a fresh partnership among deans and faculty members. This developing process of new-hire faculty development has been pivotal to Valencia’s learning-centered transformation.

About The Authors, Volume 24 (2006)

To Improve the Academy: A Journal of Educational Development

About the editors and authors of volume 24 (2006) of To Improve the Academy: A Journal of Educational Development.

Building It For Them: Faculty–Centered Program Development And Emanagement, Bonnie B. Mullinix

To Improve the Academy: A Journal of Educational Development

This article documents the effectiveness of a responsive, multilevel, web-based system for identifying and responding to faculty interest and needs for training and development. A case-based description illustrates the advantages of using a web-facilitated approach to schedule sessions according to faculty interest and availability. From needs assessment survey, to session design and scheduling, to registration, communication, and monitoring of participation, to evaluation and feedback, this integrated system has proven effective in engaging faculty. Data collected over two years of program implementation is shared and implications for the design, facilitation, and evaluation of such approaches are considered.

Bibliography, Volume 24 (2006)

To Improve the Academy: A Journal of Educational Development

Bibliography for volume 24 (2006) of To Improve the Academy: A Journal of Educational Development.

Introduction. Volume 24 (2006), Sandra Chadwick Blossey

To Improve the Academy: A Journal of Educational Development

Introduction to volume 24 (2006) of To Improve the Academy: A Journal of Educational Development, by Sandra Chadwick Blossey of Rollins College.

A Theory–Based Integrative Model For Learning And Motivation In Higher Education, Chantal S. Levesque, G. Roger Sell, James A. Zimmerman

To Improve the Academy: A Journal of Educational Development

The shared mission of higher education institutions is to develop educated persons who are able to make connections and build on knowledge acquired across disciplines and fields and through various life experiences. This chapter offers a theory-based model that can be used by researchers and practitioners to enhance academic learning and motivation. Educators can create learning environments that move students from external regulation to self-determined forms of motivation. This model is used to describe conditions that enhance/restrict learning. It also has the potential to be used to interpret research on teaching and learning in higher education.

Identifying Content For An Open Courseware Pre-Service Agricultural Education Program Planning Course, Elizabeth B. Wilson, William G. Camp, Mark Balschweid

Department of Agricultural Leadership, Education, and Communication: Faculty Publications

This study focused on the development of a pre-service agricultural education “Program Planning” course that could be utilized nationally for preparing high school agricultural science and business teachers. The researchers created a course that would meet the needs of agricultural education students, teachers, and faculty across the United States in the form of open courseware. Using the Tyler Rationale, the subjects of the study were teachers (learners), teacher educators (subject specialists), and 22 university program planning course syllabi collected from agricultural education teacher preparation programs. A collective list of content items was derived from the course syllabi. Outstanding high school …

The Teaching Of Research In A Teacher Education Programme, Iffat Farah, Nelofer Halai

Book Chapters / Conference Papers

No abstract provided.

Ied And The University Partnership: The Oxford Experience, Richard Pring

Book Chapters / Conference Papers

No abstract provided.

Reconceptualising The Professional Development Of In-Service Science Teachers In Pakistan, Nelofer Halai

Book Chapters / Conference Papers

Pakistan is a society in transition in more ways than one: politically it is still trying to find its place in the democratic nations of the world; economically it is taking steps to move closer to a market-based economy; and socially it is nurturing a more liberal and just society by reining in the religious extremists. In the aftermath of 9/11 stress has been on educational reform in a number of areas including – updating curriculum, improving access to schooling and developing teacher education. Teacher as the agent of reform is slowly gaining currency in Pakistan. The Institute for Educational …

Key Themes And Issues In Educational Development: A Critical Perspective On The Ied Model, Iffat Farah, Barbara Jaworski

Book Chapters / Conference Papers

No abstract provided.

Subject Studies In Teacher Education, Barbara Jaworski, Bernadette L. Dean, Rana Hussain

Book Chapters / Conference Papers

No abstract provided.

Partnerships In Educational Development, Iffat Farah, Barbara Jawrski

Books

This book is about the development of one institution and its developmental work in education in South and Central Asia and in East Africa: The Institute for Educational Development (IED) at the Aga Khan University (AKU) in Karachi, Pakistan.

It's a product of the 10 years of development. It had been hoped to complete it for the 10-year celebrations, but as with other aspects of the IED, it kept on growing. This volume tries to provide an account of development from a number of perspectives, such as historical, chronological, issues-based and honestly critical.

Practice Tests: A Practical Teaching Method, Margaret K. Snooks

Professional and Organizational Development Network in Higher Education: Archives

Learn about the development, implementation and evaluation of short daily practice tests. Student response is overwhelmingly positive, and learning improvement is evidenced by higher semester averages.

The Establishment Of Aga Khan University-Institute For Educational Development, Sadrudin Pardhan, Dennish Thiessen

Book Chapters / Conference Papers

No abstract provided.

Continuing Professional Development And The Relevance Of The Ied Model In East Africa, Jane Rarieya, Fred Tukahirwa

Book Chapters / Conference Papers

No abstract provided.

Engineering Education Through Service-Learning In Developing Communities: Two Case Studies, Evan A. Thomas, Andrew Azman

Mechanical and Materials Engineering Faculty Publications and Presentations

This paper provides case studies of two service learning projects that University of Colorado at Boulder (CU-Boulder) students are integrating into their academic experience. The projects focus on developing communities and are managed under the auspices of Engineers Without Borders-USA (EWB-USA), a group founded by Dr. Bernard Amadei, Professor of Civil Engineering at CU-Boulder. These projects expand students? understanding of the social value of their chosen profession, and expose them to a type of engineering significantly different than what is presented in most of their classes. Specifically, focusing on developing communities provides students with the opportunity to design solutions to …