From Industry Expert to Expert Teacher (IE2ET):

Building Instructional Capabilities for Successful Workforce Development Faculty

Scenario: Sara Smith is known as an expert in advanced manufacturing of airplane hydraulic systems at Boeing and she has been invited to be a faculty at Washington State Technical College. She accepts the invitation and looks forward to transferring her expertise to students she hopes will become Boeing employees in her department. She spends two weekends crafting her course syllabus and is walks into her first class to find student arriving late, not paying attending or responding to her questions during the class and leaving early. The second class she assigns some homework and as she works out some basic problems on calibrating equipment, students start complaining that she is going too fast. She decides not to slow down because the information is really basics and she won’t get to the good stuff if she slows down. She tells the students that if they don’t know the basics, they should go home and relearn what they should have been taught before. After reviewing the homework assignment and assigning mostly poor grades, she gets a “gang of students” at her office hours asking her to explain her grading rubric and why she assigned different points for work that they say is the same. After office hours, Sara goes to her department chair to complain about the students and to ask for some advice but the department chair says don’t worry about the complaint and just stay with her strengths. The first time is always tough but it gets better with practice. Sara leaves frustrated and decides to put some extra time in the next lesson and have students work in groups. The next class is a disaster; student complain about the groups they are in, that some of them are just goofing off and why should their grades be affected by other students. Sara is getting more frustrated and angry with the students’ attitudes, behaviors, and performance and wonders why she decided to teach for $20/hr when she can make $45/hr at work. At the end of the 6 week course, Sara turns in grades that the whole class of students go to the department chair to complain how unfair Sara’s grading is and Sara decides never to teach again.

The ESSENTIAL NEED: Industry experts need to learn basic strategies that will provide students good opportunities to learn successfully, to complete the course and program in preparation for improved employability.

The ESSENTIAL SOLUTION: SkillsCommons and the TAACCT community will design, deliver, and maintain an online new faculty orientation program specifically designed to prepareindustry experts to become effective instructors the first time they are teach their first college course. The new faculty orientation must be delivered in efficient, effective, convenient, easy, and enjoyable ways if the industry experts are to benefit from the program.

The NON-SUBSTITUABLE SOLUTION: Significant portions of the curriculum for the new faculty orientation is already available but there is no “one-stop shop” for convenient access to an easy to use professional development program for industry experts making the transition to college teachers and the portions of the curriculum that do exist are not organized or contextualized for ready adoption and adaptation by TAACCCT programs.

Goals of SkillsCommons Industry Expert to Expert Teacher Program (IE2ET)

Industry Experts learn and successfully apply:

  1. Effective pedagogical strategies that are aligned with the teaching of job-driven skills and enable students learning successfully.
  2. Effective classroom management strategies for delivering instruction successfully
  3. Effective student assessment and evaluation to provide students trusted, valid, and reliable feedback on their performances
  4. Effective communication and motivational strategies to inspire students to learn and succeed.
  5. Effective curriculum planning to ensure students are being taught the broader context of the specific content area of the expert’s knowledge.

Delivery Strategy:

SkillsCommons will provide an open, online library of modular curriculum that TAACCCT programs can use and customize for their new faculty orientation program. The curriculum will include:

  1. Videos of exemplary practices and collegial advices on a variety of topics
  2. Templates for syllabi, lesson plans, assessment tools, evaluation rubrics, and more
  3. Self-assessments for new faculty to reflect and document their range and competency levels for the skills and knowledge needed to be an effective baseline teacher for their first class
  4. An online community forum where TAACCCT program staff can engage the TAACCCT community with questions, observations, requests for help, assessments, and case stories.

Delivery Methods:

  1. CBE Method: Industry experts can complete self-assessments to identify their profile of teaching strengths and areas for improvement. The self-improvement areas will be aligned with specific industry examples. The SkillsCommons library would include resources for department chairs/deans to use and support the CBE strategy for professional development
  2. Certificate Program Method: SkillsCommons would provide a mini-course that provides the scope and sequence of professional development modules within a LMS-like environment. The curriculum would include:
  3. Intro to being a college teacher
  4. Understanding your students’ readiness, learning styles, and needs. Begin with where they are so you can get them where you want them to be.
  5. Defining your courses goals
  6. What are SLO’s – Student learning outcomes
  7. How you teach affects what they learn: Pedagogies, universal design for learning, managing collaborative projects and project based learning strategies.
  8. Building resilient students through your teaching
  9. Classroom management strategies
  10. Teaching students with disabilities
  11. Assessment and Evaluation - how to give feedback on students’ performance
  12. Glossary of academic speak – how to translate what I know into academic terms
  13. Time management strategies so you can survive your first course
  14. Motivating students – why do I need to do it and how can I do it better

Forming the IT2ET Community: 3 Critical Component to Achieve Success

For the IT2ET Community to become a successful, scalable, and sustained community of practice and innovation, they must:

  1. Define, communicate, and collaboratively develop a communication about the strategic plan for the community, including the vision, mission, and values/principles of the community that will guide its activities.
  2. Implement a project that will create valuable products and services that its community members will use and enable their success.
  3. Define and manage the collaborative process for managing the project design through implementation and maintenance.

Project Schedule

Activity / Date
INNOVATE subcommittee create and approve v1.0 of strategic plan and project plan / May 15
SkillsCommons to create a discussion forum in IMPACT VOICES to post the plans / May 15
SkillsCommons to distribute the strategic and project plan to the TAACCCT project directors and request responses including: a) feedback on the plans, b) recommend and submit materials to SkillsCommons that would be included in the IE2ET program, c) volunteer to be a contributing member of the IE2ET community / June 15
SkillCommons to modify the repository to enable the collection building process for the curriculum and explore the implementation of an open LMS service / June 15
SkillsCommons deliver a prototype of the IE2ET program / July 15
TAACCCT project directors voluntarily commit to implement the IE2ET program within their projects / August 1
SkillsCommons deliver a v1.0 of the IE2ET program / August 15

1