Faculty Development for Teaching Innovation
By Nancy Van Note Chism, Liberal Education, (2002)
UNTIL VERY RECENTLY, many faculty told similar stories about their induction to teaching. Fresh from doctoral studies (or perhaps during their studies if they were a teaching assistant), they were given a textbook and directions to a classroom and simply told to teach a given topic. Some also recount that they were given instructions about using the photocopier and an introduction to the department secretary. In the really supportive versions, faculty say that they were given an old syllabus to get them started.
Fortunately, perceptions of the importance of faculty development have changed dramatically over the past few decades. Teaching centers, faculty development committees, or some form of teaching support service exist at most institutions. Within academic units, mentoring, orientations, workshops, or other faculty development activities are quite commonplace. Graduate students increasingly have programs available to them on preparing for faculty roles.
Focus on Learning
It is no accident that this movement has accompanied national calls for the nation's postsecondary institutions to focus more directly on learning than merely on the act of teaching itself. As this shift occurred and the basic model of teaching changed from teaching as transmission of content to teaching as the facilitation of learning, the need to support faculty as they move toward focusing more directly on student learning has been recognized as essential, rather than optional.
As institutions of higher education have embraced this shift in focus to student learning, the conceptualization and practice of faculty development has been articulated more clearly. In the same way that institutions view working with underprepared students as a matter of helping them to become intentional learners rather than "fixing" them, those entrusted with faculty development have increasingly drawn upon ideas from Donald Schon (1983) and others who contributed to the conceptualization of teaching as reflective practice. Cultivating reflective practice does not mean bringing a particular prescription or remedy to a faculty member who is identified as needing or who requests assistance. Instead of relying primarily on "tips" and workshops that model effective techniques, those involved in the work of faculty development have come to operate on the principle that cultivating intentionality in teaching is at the heart of their work. Thoughtful mentoring, teaching portfolios, and other methods have been used to promote intentional practice. In this way, the work of faculty development has become more in harmony with the learner-centered education being promoted for students.
Similarly, faculty development is now recognized as necessary for all faculty. Former stereotypes portraying those using faculty development services as either excessively needy or a group of "the converted" have been replaced by the notion of faculty development as an expected part of healthy career development (Chism and Szabo 1996). For example, the stigma previously attached to teaching development recommendations resulting from post-tenure review is giving way to expectations
Greater Expectations:
The Commitment to Quality as a Nation Goes to College Liberal Education is featuring a series of articles responding to the variety of issues raised in the Greater Expectations initiative about the future of undergraduate education in America. Launched by the Association of American Colleges and Universities in 2000, Greater Expectations is a multipart initiative designed to encourage innovations that support success in learning, disseminate best practices from secondary and higher education, and help campuses sustain learning centered education. The initiative expands AAC&U's long-standing commitment to educational excellence and meaningful inclusion and addresses the strong national need to raise levels of college achievement and graduation rates.
At the center of this initiative is a national panel of leaders in education, government, business, and community action that is issuing a national report, Greater Expectations: A New Vision for Learning as a Nation Goes to College, articulating the aims, purposes, and practices of a twenty-first century liberal education. This report and its recommendations provide the conceptual framework for the Greater Expectations initiative and can be found at
The initiative also comprises the following other projects: a Consortium on Quality Education including sixteen leadership institutions; a Forum on 21 st Century Liberal Arts Education Practice working on such issues as inquiry-based learning, global awareness, civic engagement, and integrative learning; an Institute on Campus Leadership for Sustainable Innovation; a Project on Accreditation and Assessment, and a project on Greater Expectations for Student Transfer. that growth should be pursued by all faculty, even senior faculty.
In addition, just as the growing understanding of student learning has emphasized the importance of the social context of learning, faculty development is no longer being envisioned as an individual and private activity. The potential for improving teaching practice by engaging a community of teachers who are seeking student success in a particular context is increasingly recognized. This approach involves faculty working in groups to develop, implement, assess, and retool the process of enhancing student learning.
The concept of faculty development that emerges is based on community activity that depends on constant reflection to assess results and reconceptualize strategies. The concepts of reflective practice and communities of practice are described below, along with an extended example from a campus program.
Reflective Practice
The foundation for the reflective practitioner model is that teaching is a complex activity requiring continual examination and refinement. This work takes place in the action context and is at the heart of thoughtful practice. Faculty are viewed as intentional actors who settle into patterns of routines, but who adapt and sometimes radically change their practice, based on both internal and external stimuli. This occurs through a process that Stevens (1988) has called professional "tinkering," and others (Chism 1994, Zuber-Skerritt 1993) have compared to models of experiential learning and action research.
The action research model describes cycles of change with four "moments": planning, acting, observing, and reflecting. Applied to teaching, this suggests that an instance of teaching change involves four stages:
* selecting a new practice,
* experimenting with it,
* collecting information on what kind of learning the practice produced, and
* reflecting on the desirability of the change as well as whether the practice should be continued, modified, or discarded under specific sets of conditions. These cycles are usually stimulated by dissatisfaction with the results of current practice (such as, students aren't learning well), dissatisfaction with current approaches (such as, they are too time-consuming or have become boring), or unfavorable feedback (such as, poor teaching evaluations or peer review).
Within this framework, faculty development provides support for these four moments of change. For example, promoting the selection of new practices involves enriching the faculty member's world of ideas with possible practices from which to choose. Usual ways of doing this include organizing workshops on innovative practices, providing readings or reports on new or interesting teaching approaches, or encouraging colleagues who are using such practices to share their ideas or to demonstrate them. These traditional approaches to faculty development are not used as the only means, but as support for one moment of teaching change. Other approaches are needed to increase the likelihood that change will happen.
To facilitate experimentation, the second moment of change, faculty development relies on the notion of challenge and support. Usually, on the challenge side, a consultant or a colleague helps faculty members to realize that their routine ways of teaching are not entirely adequate within a particular context-- helping them see the need for change. Normally, this involves working with the original dissatisfaction or idea that prompted the faculty member to see the need for change-poor student evaluations, poor student performance, or exposure to a promising new practice. On the support side, it means encouraging experimentation by providing psychological support for risk-taking and information needed on how to apply a new practice.
The third moment, observation, is based on the systematic collection of information. Promoting development during this phase involves helping faculty to devise and use ways of collecting data on the effects of practice. These may range from brief, informal methods such as examining assignments for patterns of error or gain, to more formal methods of inquiry associated with the scholarship of teaching and learning. Helping faculty learn to assess change, giving them resources to complete data collection, and encouraging faculty to study their teaching are all helpful development methods during this phase.
Finally, reflection as the fourth moment consists of analyzing the data and the experience in terms of desirable effects. During this phase, an interested colleague or instructional consultant can help the faculty member to examine the information and draw conclusions about the reasons for the effects that were produced, as well as to decide about future uses of the practice in question. Figure 1 depicts the stages and faculty development implications at each stage of the model.
Some version of the model of change described above often provides the conceptual basis for faculty development efforts at many of our campuses. It appears to describe the way in which most faculty learn "on the job" and grow as teachers. Though faculty often refer to this process as "trial and error" learning, it is far more intentional when pursued systematically.
Communities of Practice
Over the years, faculty development units, committees, or departmental colleagues have realized that promoting growth in individual faculty members does not in itself lead to institutional transformation. Indeed, it often results in regression, as faculty members pursuing new teaching approaches are dissuaded, by the constraints in their environment, from continuing their experimentation and innovation. Emphasis has been placed on organizational development for teaching-improving the climate for innovation through the reward system, administrative leadership, professional development leaves, and other opportunities. Under the banner of ideas such as total quality improvement, organizational learning, or transformational change, colleges and universities have sought to build more supportive environments for good teaching.
A fairly new term has been introduced into the discussion by Wenger (1999) and Wenger, McDermott, and Snyder (2002), who refer to "communities of practice." By promoting the value of common dialogue and activity as a route to innovation and good practice, this idea builds on previous models that focus on individual reflective practice. The authors define communities of practice as "groups of people who share a concern, a set of problems, or a passion about a topic, and who deepen their knowledge and expertise in this area by interacting on an ongoing basis" (4).
The authors indicate that three essential features of a community of practice are a set of issues, a group of people who care about these issues, and an interest in arriving at a shared approach to being effective actors within the context of these issues. Communities consist of a core group of people who help to identify and define the dimensions of the issues, an active group that participates in the dialogue initiated by the core group, and a peripheral group that sits on the outside but, despite limited direct participation, may gain from the discussion.
How do those promoting faculty development for student-centered learning support transformation through communities of practice? Wenger and colleagues (24) comment:
Communities of Practice are a natural part of organizational life. They will develop on their own, and many will flourish, whether or not the organization recognizes them. Their health depends primarily on the voluntary engagement of their members and on the emergence of internal leadership. Moreover, their ability to steward knowledge as a living process depends on some measure of informality and autonomy. Once designated as the keepers of expertise, communities should not be second-guessed or overmanaged. These observations may lead some to argue that there is nothing one can do to cultivate communities of practice, or worse, that anything organizations do will merely get in the way. We disagree. In fact, this book is born of our experience that organizations need to cultivate communities of practice actively and systematically, for their benefit as well as the benefit of the members and communities themselves.
They recommend that those who want to promote communities of practice must help potential members to identify a crucial set of issues they have in common, bring together colleagues with a shared interest in these issues, and provide resources for the group to use in learning what it needs to know to generate and share effective practices.
The community of practice model, as well as other approaches that aim for transformative change on a broader level than individual change, builds on the notion of the reflective practitioner, but situates faculty development in a communal context. The tasks of faculty development, then, turn from an emphasis on individual change to promoting experimentation, inquiry, and reflection in collegial fashion. A given instance of this approach to faculty development is the Gateway Group.
The Gateway Group:
A Model Application As Indiana University Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI) mounted a major initiative to improve retention in first year courses, a key focus area was faculty development. While student support through learning communities, tutoring, and advising was escalated, the necessity for changing the ways in which instruction was taking place was also apparent. From the start, the oversight for improving retention was considered a dual responsibility of UniversityCollege, where all new IUPUI students begin their formal academic appointments and receive support services, and the Center for Teaching and Learning, charged with campus-wide responsibility for faculty development. UniversityCollege defines itself as an "experimenting place," where faculty, staff, and students have a context and resources for intentional and reflective work with entering students. The Center for Teaching and Learning bases its work on reflective practice within communities of practice. The approach to improving retention was thus intentional in coupling teaching and learning. The campus for many years had independent attention to teaching and to learning-this new effort brought them together.
At a town meeting called to focus attention on poor first-year student retention, faculty, students, and administrators gathered to explore the nature of the student attrition problem. They heard about findings from the literature on retention and received information about the extent of the problem at IUPUI, as well as comparisons with peer institutions. Faculty gave their views on factors constraining the success of their students. Students talked about their perceptions and needs. Administrators stressed the importance of the issue and pledged their support. Through this large, public gathering of the major actors involved, the first step toward stimulating the formation of a community of practice took place. The issue of first-year student success was a natural organizing point across disciplinary lines. The work was also central to UniversityCollege and the Center for Teaching and Learning.
Next, the Center for Teaching and Learning established a series, Dialogues on First Year Student Success, designed to bring together groups of faculty teaching first-year courses, to examine basic teaching topics such as course design and active learning, from the point of view of effective practice. Full- and part-time faculty from across disciplines enrolled in a series of eight discussions lasting three hours each. These sessions resulted in tip sheets and exchange of strategies that were made available to all instructors of first-year students. This phase represented the initial attempt to identify specific practice issues and to codify existing wisdom.
In the next phase, a summer team was assembled to explore how to make significant progress during the next academic year. This group, identifying itself as the Gateway Group, went to a summer institute in Utah sponsored by the American Association for Higher Education to plan strategies for both student support and faculty development designed to improve student retention. The team consisted of faculty from the two largest undergraduate schools on campus, liberal arts and science; the vice chancellor for professional development; the dean of UniversityCollege; and an undergraduate student. The Gateway Group defined itself as a coordinating body, and identified faculty forums, department meetings, and a grants program as the primary vehicles for change. In the conceptualization by Wenger and colleagues (2002), they became the "core" group that would convene and nurture the community.
Forums.
The Gateway forums are held twice each semester. Topics identified by the Gateway Group consist of articulating perceptions regarding what the courses should be about, problem areas, and effective practices. One highly-charged first topic that packed the meeting rooms was attendance-its importance, practices that promote it, and policies that might better support it. At these meetings, faculty exchanged insights and results of their own explorations, such as the presentation by a psychology professor on the correlation between attendance and grades in an introductory psychology course. Students talked about the pressures on their time and the temptation to skip class when they felt that it would not add information they could obtain from simply reading the textbook. An institutional researcher described IUPUI's student profile and the ways in which students spend their time. The forum ended with many recommendations on attendance, including a policy change that is now the subject of an experiment in action.