Potholes in the Path of Faculty Development Associate Professor Robert Miller Community College of Baltimore County CADE 2015

Educational development is a unique professional field in that it is not defined by content taught in a single degree that qualifies individuals to be in it (DiPietro 2014).

K-12, while behind in many areas, focuses strongly on professional development.

Why is it difficult? “…long-held professional norms, such as faculty autonomy, coupled with increased reliance on adjuncts, and weak instructional leadership, serve as barriers to meaningful or sustained professional development on teaching. Moreover, faculty have an array of responsibilities that extend beyond classroom teaching” (Bickerstaff and Cormier).

Many colleges have a hodgepodge – each discipline has its own. And even within a discipline there are sometimes quite a few. English ALP CRT ACLT ABC DEF GHI

Add to this the difficulty of new programs that not all faculty understand or even accept. Ask some of the early faculty of ALP and CAP to verify if this is true. And this doesn’t seem to matter if it’s top down or bottom up.

We focus so much on how to develop the instructional programs, but “we know little about faculty members’ questions, concerns, and needs” (Bickerstaff and Cornier).

The 3 major components 1) Incentive 2) Structure 3) Assessment

Incentive How do we get folks to buy in?

For example, adjuncts: …campus to campus to campus to…

We can’t afford to pay them (can we)?

There are schools that pay - but how much?

How can we “incentivize”? Aduncts often report that there is importance to feeling a closer connection to the school (just like our caring about students). 1.Being paid for training 2.Being recognized for training - transcript/diploma that MEANS something 3.Other methods of payment. For example, tiers 4.Being given preference for scheduling. (Dailey-Herbert)

Full time 1) Discover and acknowledge their needs 2) More collegial interaction 3) Promote opportunities to give back (Strange and Merdinger)

Structure

Research has shown that extending over a period of time is most important. Making sure there is time for reflection that ties to the classroom practice.

Much of professional development is concerned with explaining and selling “innovation” and less on authentic classroom work.

Often too many ideas are given.

“in a meeting of faculty teaching the co-requisite model an agenda item was strategies for teaching grammar. These conversations tended to be unstructured with many ideas discussed simultaneously. In the conversation about grammar, participants toggled between sharing specific techniques (e.g., showing students sample incorrect sentences), describing obstacles to teaching the topic (e.g., students make the same mistakes, even with repeated instruction), and discussing their instructional goals (e.g., “I don’t want them to be able to recite the rules, but I want them to be able to edit their work”). If participants gleaned new strategies from conversations like this, they did not receive guidance on how these strategies might be employed within a purposeful instructional design” (Bickerstaff and Marnier).

Building Leaders Teaching faculty how to: -Lead -mentor -Understand faculty development

Train the trainers

Some key concepts Faculty inquiry groups Coaching (Knight) Teaching squares (Roemer) Forum Theater(Takayama) Community of Practice (Wenger) Faculty learning communities Peer Review: “As one faculty member put it: “When someone criticizes my scholarship, they are criticizing my ideas; when they criticize my teaching, they're criticizing me!” (Smith).

CAP CCBC – ALP CUNY Start Patrick Henry Cooperative Learning

Time for Reflection One problem with many is there is not enough time to critically reflect. And what exactly is “critical reflection”?

Give them what they can use! Share assignments Share curriculum Share prompts Share Share Share Share Share Video

Assessment

Quantitative It seems like it should be easy. After all, are more students passing? But perhaps the first folks are more energized or have a greater buy in. (ALP)

More rigorous: randomly select and compare sections, but the numbers will be very small.

Qualitative Talk to students Talk to faculty (are they actually buying in) Normative Assessment

Problem Difficult to focus leading to results you want

How do we solve ALL the problems?

US Most powerful is when faculty become….

- Collaborators - Don’t count on others just to give them new skills. - And most powerful: researchers (of their own problems)