Why faculty development matters assessing impact

The individuals we asked were members of the Professional and Organizational Development POD Network in Higher Education, the oldest and largest professional association of faculty development scholars and practitioners in higher education. Five hundred directors of teaching and learning centers, faculty members, department chairs, academic deans, and other senior administrators completed our survey.

They came from research and doctoral universities, comprehensive universities, liberal arts colleges, community colleges, Canadian universities, and other institutions such as medical and professional schools Sorcinelli et al. What, then, are the issues that faculty development programs, services, and resources will likely need to address in the next five or ten years?

Faculty developers in our study identified a constellation of issues that coalesced around three primary challenges and forces of change:. Professors today are facing a growing array of changing roles and responsibilities that will require them to engage in ongoing professional growth. Faculty developers in our study described faculty members as being in the midst of transformational changes to their traditional roles and tasks, and identified several fundamental challenges facing faculty and their campuses.

Expanding Faculty Roles Faculty developers at liberal arts colleges and research and comprehensive universities identified expanding faculty roles as one of the most important issues facing faculty on their campuses. The set of tasks expected of faculty is intensifying under increasing pressure to keep up with new directions in teaching and research.

Thus, for example, new faculty members may need to develop skills in grant-writing or in designing and offering online courses. Seasoned faculty members may need to keep up with emerging specialties in their fields as well as to engage in more interdisciplinary work. All faculty will continuously need to learn new skills in the face of an increasingly technological workplace. Providing opportunities for faculty to consider new ways to organize their courses and learning materials and work collaboratively across disciplinary fields will be essential.

Finding Balance Closely related to the challenge of managing new and expanding faculty roles is the challenge of achieving balance in work and life. In our research, faculty developers identified balancing and finding time for multiple work responsibilities as a significant issue of concern for faculty at all career stages. New faculty, especially, find it a daunting challenge to simultaneously achieve distinction as a scholar, teacher, and campus citizen.

Faculty members also are concerned about how to achieve balance as they handle personal as well as professional commitments. Not surprisingly, concerns about balancing work and family are especially intense among women faculty who often face the press of biological clocks for childbearing at the same time as they are trying to start their careers and, in many instances, earn tenure.

Faculty development services would be well served to include programming and coaching for managing time and work—family issues as well as the more traditional emphasis on teaching and learning.

Needs of New Faculty Significant numbers of experienced faculty will retire in the coming decade, and our study identified new faculty development as a critically important area to address. Non-tenure-track and Part-time Faculty Addressing the needs of part-time and adjunct faculty was identified as a critically needed new direction for faculty development.

Many institutions are hiring more non-tenure track or part-time faculty to achieve fiscal savings, respond to changing student interests, or help students connect their academic studies to the workplace. As the faculty ranks become more diverse in terms of appointment types, faculty development should ensure that each faculty member, regardless of appointment type, feels supported.

Initiatives might include orientations or seminars for part-time faculty in which departmental colleagues address common teaching issues e. With each year, the student body has become larger and more diverse across several variables—educational background, gender, race and ethnicity, class, age, and preparation. This growing diversity of students is an admired aspect of American higher education; at the same time, it places considerable demands on faculty members.

Faculty developers in our study highlighted two key challenges: the challenge presented by increased multiculturalism and diversity and the challenge presented by underprepared students. Increasing Multiculturalism and Diversity An emphasis on increasing diversity requires an expanded focus on how we can foster learning environments in which diversity becomes one of the resources that stimulates learning—and on how to support faculty with students who learn most effectively in different ways.

Faculty developers identified the issue of multiculturalism as it relates to teaching and learning as one of the most important issues that needs to be addressed through faculty development services, but there was great disparity between perceptions of the need to address these issues and the extent of relevant faculty development services being offered Sorcinelli et.

Traditionally, campuses have tended to focus diversity efforts in student affairs, suggesting that diversity concerns are a student development rather than a faculty development issue.

Faculty members themselves may be reticent about addressing issues of diversity in and outside of the classroom because of a lack of training. For faculty members to be able to meet the learning needs of a diverse student body, they will need to stay abreast not only of new developments in their fields, but also of the characteristics of their students, the various strategies for teaching to multiple learning styles, and the possibilities for facilitating learning offered by technology.

Further, they can provide guidance for engaging all students, particularly in the classroom, about the sensitive issues surrounding gender, religion, race, and ethnicity. Investing in such programs offers a means of ensuring that we cultivate teachers and students who value diverse ideas, beliefs, and worldviews, and promote more inclusive student learning. In these contexts, faculty development programs can help build faculty capacity both for meeting the needs of students and incorporating new disciplinary content about issues of diversity across the curriculum.

As a faculty member embarks on a course and the underprepared student engages in the coursework, there is often a substantial mismatch between student and faculty expectations for academic work, especially in terms of time devoted to study outside of class.

As well, faculty may be unprepared to recalibrate the course or teaching of it for students who may need additional support in college-level reading, writing, and computational work. For these reasons, the responsibility for underprepared students often falls to academic staff in a student learning center and may be seen as a burden to individual faculty. Here faculty development programs can remind teachers to emphasize their expectations for students, help familiarize new instructors with student resources offered by the college or university e.

The changing environment for teaching, learning, and scholarship was identified as the third pressing challenge for faculty and institutions, a challenge resonant with implications for faculty development. Emphasizing Learner-Centered Teaching The need to engage in student-centered teaching was identified as one of the top three challenges confronting faculty members and the most important issue to address through faculty development services and activities.

For many faculty members who are accustomed to lecturing while students listen, learner-centered teaching may require new and unfamiliar teaching skills and raise fears about lack of coverage of content or less control over assessment activities. Learner-centered teaching, however, allows students to do more of the learning tasks, such as organizing content or summarizing discussions, and encourages them to learn more from and with each other.

Teachers, on the other hand, can do more of the design work and provide more frequent feedback to students Weimer There is a large repertoire of active learning strategies from which faculty can draw, including student-led discussions, team learning, peer learning, oral presentations, writing-to-learn activities, case studies, and study groups. Faculty development programs can convene successful teachers to share these approaches with their colleagues through campus-wide seminars or forums.

They can also provide course development funds to recognize faculty members who develop learner-centered activities. Integrating Technology into Teaching and Learning Participants in our study from liberal arts, research, and comprehensive institutions named the integration of technology into traditional teaching and learning settings as one of the top three challenges facing their faculty colleagues.

Respondents expressed a strong desire that institutions focus on ways to use technology to help students to acquire content knowledge, develop problem-solving skills, participate in learning communities, and use digital information sources. When considering technology in teaching and learning, one immediate issue faculty members face is what tools—PowerPoint, e-mail, the Internet, course management system —might best serve their student-learning goals.

Faculty development programs can offer the kinds of support and training required to thoughtfully integrate technology into the classroom. Emphasizing Assessment of Student Learning Outcomes Assessment is an ongoing process aimed at understanding and improving student learning. It involves deciding what students should be learning, making expectations for learning explicit, systematically gathering and analyzing student assignments to determine what students actually are learning, and using the resulting evidence to decide what to do to improve learning.

In our findings, assessing student learning outcomes was perceived as one of the top three challenges facing faculty and their institutions , and important to address through faculty development. There are a number of teaching resources that can help faculty members develop a better understanding of the learning process in their own classrooms and assess the impact of their teaching on it.

They feature classroom assessment techniques and advice on how to adapt and administer these techniques, analyze the data, and implement improvements in teaching and learning practices Angelo and Cross In our study, developers from all types of institutions agreed that expanding the definition of scholarship to include the scholarship of teaching is an important issue to address through faculty development services.

In recent years, the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching has greatly advanced this form of scholarship through work with faculty, campuses, and disciplinary associations. Several lines of work at Carnegie have contributed to the understanding of the scholarship of teaching, notably projects exploring the peer review of teaching, the use of teaching and course portfolios, and how teaching and learning differ among the disciplines.

Faculty development programs have been part of this conversation by, for example, offering seed grants, and campus conversations about course-focused research projects centered on teaching and learning.

Interdisciplinary collaboration may involve a variety of types of connections, such as working on a research or teaching project from a multidisciplinary perspective or incorporating service learning into academic experiences. Interdisciplinary work is often the result of individual faculty members deciding to engage in team teaching across departments or to pursue new areas in the course of their research.

Faculty development programs, then, can support interdisciplinary connections by encouraging team-teaching, the development of interdisciplinary courses, and the development of learning communities for students. They can also host campus-wide cross-disciplinary learning communities around teaching and scholarship. As we enter the twenty-first century, faculty developers have identified three areas that are driving change and shaping the future of faculty development. The impact of the changing professoriate is a major influence.

How do we develop and sustain the vitality of our entire faculty—newcomers, midcareer, senior, and part-timers—as faculty roles change? A second factor is the increasingly diverse student body. How can we invest in faculty development as a means of ensuring that we cultivate more inclusive student learning environments and provide our best educational practices to all students, including those traditionally underserved by higher education?

The third shaping influence is the impact of a changing paradigm for teaching, learning, and scholarly pursuits. Faculty development will require a larger investment of imagination and resources in order to strategically plan for and address new developments e. Angelo, T. Classroom assessment techniques: A handbook for college teachers 2nd Ed. Association of American Colleges and Universities.

Greater expectations: A new vision for learning as a nation goes to college. Boyer, E. Scholarship reconsidered: Priorities of the professoriate. Sorcinelli, M. Austin, P. Eddy, and A. C reating the future of faculty development: Learning from the past, understanding the present. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass. Weimer, M. Learner-centered teaching: Five key changes to practice. Zhu, E. Technology and teaching. McKeachie Ed. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin.

Mary Deane Sorcinelli is the associate provost for faculty development; associate professor in the department of Educational Policy, Research, and Administration; and founding director of the Center for Teaching at the University of Massachusetts—Amherst.

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From the Editor. Faculty Work in a Changing World. Faculty Collaboration as Faculty Development. Professional Development Issues for Community Colleges. Collaborating to Learn, Learning to Collaborate. Dreaming of a New Semester. Peer Review. By: Mary Deane Sorcinelli. Faculty developers in our study identified a constellation of issues that coalesced around three primary challenges and forces of change: The changing professoriate The changing nature of the student body The changing nature of teaching, learning, and scholarship The Changing Professoriate Professors today are facing a growing array of changing roles and responsibilities that will require them to engage in ongoing professional growth.

The Changing Nature of the Student Body With each year, the student body has become larger and more diverse across several variables—educational background, gender, race and ethnicity, class, age, and preparation. The Changing Nature of Teaching, Learning, and Scholarship The changing environment for teaching, learning, and scholarship was identified as the third pressing challenge for faculty and institutions, a challenge resonant with implications for faculty development.

Conclusion As we enter the twenty-first century, faculty developers have identified three areas that are driving change and shaping the future of faculty development. References Angelo, T. Previous Issues. See All. Faculty Development for Self-Renewal.

This issue of Peer Review presents unique approaches and practical strategies for reinvigorating Iverson, Cathryn A. Manduca, Carol Rutz, and Gudrun Willett. All rights reserved. Reprinted with permission. This study began with the realization that faculty development is at risk because of a lack of data demonstrating its effectiveness or its value to an institution.

Like colleagues at many institutions, the researchers on the Tracer Project are themselves faculty developers, in WAC Writing Across the Curriculum , critical thinking, quantitative reasoning, portfolio evaluation, and the sciences. As such, faculty developers are continually called upon to document the usefulness of our programming.

Like so many others, the research team focused on changes in faculty practice, assuming that as faculty improved their teaching, students would benefit. That assumption is grounded in the widespread practice among faculty developers of measuring effectiveness by the impact on faculty, and the evidence for such impact is clear and widespread.

When faculty attend formal development opportunities, engage in self-directed improvement processes, or even undergo routine evaluations, faculty practices do change. The evidence is also clear that even in the absence of formal faculty development, faculty spend a great deal of time working on their teaching.

These studies formed the foundation for the Tracer Project. However, knowing that faculty development impacts teaching is not enough. At the end of the Tracer study, the answer could not be clearer. When faculty improve their teaching, students learn more and their performance on course work improves. As greater members of faculty make common cause of improving teaching, the goals of that improvement tend to spread throughout the institution, and the likelihood of incorporating those goals as common values in routine administration processes increases.

The conclusive piece in such work is devising ongoing means of measuring the effects of faculty development as they appear in student work products. Such a systematic approach demonstrates that faculty development adds value in measurable ways to the institution that invests in sound practices to help teachers address the challenges they face in their classrooms. This work is made easier when we realize that many, most, if not all faculty care about their teaching. Tracer Project investigations indicate that large numbers of faculty are engaged in improving their teaching and participate in formal faculty development of some kind within their institution.

This finding underscores other research that indicates the extent to which faculty put effort into improving their teaching practices, whether supported by formal faculty development or not. Much of the SoTL research consists of faculty designing and testing new ideas in the classroom, evaluating them with sound research methodologies current in their fields, and reporting on the results.

Tracer results demonstrate the extent to which such work has penetrated the faculty at large, so that even at a large public university, the project could find no faculty who did not participate at all in faculty development, even though the low-participating faculty engaged at a minimal level. This confirmation refutes the widespread belief that college and university faculty care only about research and that they spend little time and effort on teaching.

The Tracer Study found no evidence to support that common perception. The ability of faculty to focus on improving their teaching and their ability to bring new ideas and knowledge into practice depends on the institutional context.

Thus, what many perceive as a failing of individual faculty to value teaching may in fact reflect the absence of a culture that supports teaching and learning. Service work is often designed to support improved teaching, or does so implicitly; it therefore offers a plethora of under-utilized opportunities to support faculty efforts to improve their teaching. Portfolio rating sessions at both institutions, whether designed as faculty development opportunities or not, were powerful opportunities for learning about teaching.

Furthermore, interviews at both institutions revealed the presence of many more possible opportunities for routine faculty development. The data support the recommendation that institutions pay careful attention to such events as hiring practices, faculty orientations, performance evaluations, curriculum planning, and many others as sites for conversations about good teaching practices.

As strong as the conclusions are, they represent data from only two institutions: a large state-assisted land grant university and a small, elite, private liberal arts college.

Would similar results emerge at other such institutions or at institutions of different types, including smaller state-assisted regional colleges, two-year colleges, or other kinds of institutions of higher education? Nothing in the results suggests that the results would differ, but nothing provides evidence that they would not.

Another limitation is that the bulk of published research to date applies to formal faculty development activities — to intentionally designed opportunities.

The Tracer Project has gone one step further by looking at the results of those events, rather than merely at the often-contested value of the events themselves. Faculty professed to like events that had their priorities straight — meaning events that faculty perceived as focused on important aspects of teaching.

They tended to dislike events that were required or that they perceived as addressing more trivial topics, such as learning to use the new course management software. Faculty valued initiatives that provided support and that were iterative in nature. The data from WSU and Carleton demonstrate that the more that faculty value the events offered, the more likely they are to attend and to apply what they have learned to their course syllabi and assignments.

This study does not fully explore the pathways of information into or out of a campus. Faculty live within both an institutional culture and a disciplinary culture. What role does the culture of the discipline, embodied in its professional societies and publication practices, play?

When and how do institutional cultures and disciplinary cultures reinforce, contradict, or complement each other? How do ideas travel among institutions?

What are the effects of those ideas? Such questions need answers, and answers can come from a national conversation about effective teaching in higher education. Local data can address local concerns and contribute to a national conversation, and, in an era of widespread budget cuts, straitened circumstances, and attacks from both inside and outside higher education, such conversations are more necessary than ever. As institutions look to join that conversation, or merely to provide evidence of teaching effectiveness on their own campuses, this research provides guidance in several ways:.

To build a productive culture of teaching and learning within an institution is to maximize the ability of faculty to learn and students to learn.