Learner-centered teaching and effective faculty professional development

At the 2008 Joint Conference POD/NCSPOD conference (Reno, Nevada, October 22-25, 2008) learner-centered teaching and effective FPD were central topics. Let me share with you how this relationship was explored from different perspectives .

Learner-centered teaching and the scholarship of teaching and learning. Dennis C Jacobs shared in a plenary his ideas about "learning as a community endeavor". He illustrated how he has exploited collaborative learning and the use of clicker technology to simultaneously engage 200 students in making scientific predictions and defending their ideas; he shared research findings demonstrating that collaborative learning pedagogy led to greater student success and engagement among students at risk. He also shared his experience concerning learner-centered scholarship of teaching and learning, which has fine tuned tenure track requirements with effective teaching initiatives.

Learner-centered new faculty orientation. Networking is an outstanding resource, as you know; at the POD conference I was able to meet with different people interested in new faculty orientation. My conversations with Bonnie Mullinix from The TLT Group helped me realizing that the POD innovation award 2006 was given to Edward Nuhfer for his "Interactive Engagement Model for New Faculty Orientation" initiative which contrasts with content-centered new faculty orientation programs.

Learner-centered preparation of TA--teaching assistants. A Topical Interest Group on "Graduate Student Professional Development"--GSPD--at the POD conference brought my attention to the importance of helping TA assume their role having students' learning as the focus of their efforts. Based on feedback from TA and faculty members attending to open forums about their participation in their GSPD program, one higher education institution reported that efforts focused on helping TA acquire instructional skills were considered less effective to prepare prospective faculty members as learning facilitators than their active participation in reflective communities of practice among TA and mentors around student-centered learning problems. In the first case TA were required to attend to at least 70% of periodic teaching and learning sessions where they reflected on the topic of the day; in the second case TA were immersed in the preparation, implementation and evaluation of learning activities in collaboration with their mentors, as well as in the documentation of their learning process with a teaching portfolio. This institution considered that moving from a preservice content-centered to an inservice learner-centered GSPD model produced a significant change in TA preparation for teaching and that is worth doing, regardless it is demanding and difficult to sustain.

Learner-centered academic development. Tom Angelo shared his ideas about seven key concepts that he considers powerful "levers" to transform our thinking and practice to improve student learning. It is interesting his advocacy of "academic development" (AD), which includes both organizational development and FPD, since it recognizes the importance of aligning institutional strategies with FPD strategies; also it is interesting his focus on becoming scholarly learning communities both at the organizational level and at the classroom level. Reviewing his contributions I found two previous papers that will help exploring in more detail his thoughts: Angelo_1999, and Angelo_2000.

How do we know a Faculty Professional Development program is effective?

Lessons learned from a one-day workshop, by Alvaro H Galvis, director CETL at WSSU.

I had the opportunity to participate in a NCSPOD/POD 2008 pre-conference workshop on evaluation of professional development efforts, co-facilitated by Dr. Cindra Smith and Michelle DeVol, coauthors of the Evaluating Staff and Organizational Development (2003, retrieved October 24, 2008) handbook. I got the following three key ideas:

1. Not every professional development program requires the same level of evaluation. Using Kickpatrick’s Four Levels of Evaluation model (1994, retrieved October 24, 2008) Smith and DeVol suggested to collect always data on reactions to the program (level 1) and to move into deeper levels of evaluation (level 2 = learning, level 3 = transfer, level 4 = results) when the professional development effort merits that. For instance, a brownbag lunch is worth knowing who came and whether s/he liked what s/he heard, but a summer institute with fall and spring follow up merits knowing also what people learned, how are they applying it, and what is the impact on students’ learning.
2. Professional development program evaluation should start with its design (“start with the end in mind” they say), as long as a clear understanding of why it is convenient / necessary to offer the program will lead to a clear definition of outcomes and strategies to evaluate whether they have been achieved.
3. Evaluation reports serve several purposes, being the most usual to demonstrate or justify what was done. Smith and DeVol have found “portraits of engagement”, i.e., one-page executive summaries are the most important dissemination piece of evaluation reports, since in many cases that is what people read from a report and what motivates (or not) further reading.
   

Workshop facilitators suggested complementary resources for professional development program evaluators, such as the following:

• E-Lead. Evaluating professional development programs (retrieved October 24, 2008)
• Guskey, Thomas R. "Does it Make a Difference? Evaluating Professional Development." Educational Leadership v. 59 no6 (Mar. 2002) p. 45–51.
• Michigan State University, Faculty and Organizational Development Office (2005). Instructional development needs assessment. Executive summary and instrument. (retrieved October 24, 2008)
• Walvoord, Barbara (2004). Assessment Clear and Simple: A Practical Guide for Institutions, Departments, and General Education. Jossey-Bass.

Helping faculty create their own online courses

I had the opportunity to participate in a Faculty Development in Blended and Online Learning Institute (Academic Impressions, Atlanta GA March 5-7, 2008) that allowed me reflection on key aspects of our own faculty professional development strategy, and getting in touch with many other faculty development leaders and online course developers.

In this posting I want to share ideas that emerged contrasting our faculty development and course creation strategy with the Jump Start strategy, from Indiana University - Purdue University at Indianapolis—IUPUI. Anastasia S. Morrone, PhD, Associate Dean of Learning Technologies at IUPUI, shared this strategy. In both cases, the challenge is the same, to support faculty in the development of online and blended learning courses. Both cases demand a full immersion in the process, with consultation and production support.

The first great difference is who sponsors the effort: while at WSSU faculty development and course production is sponsored either by Distance Learning (for online courses) or by the Center for Excellence in Teaching and Learning—CETL—(for blended courses), at IUPUI, Jump Start participation demands investment from both Learning Technologies and the faculty’s member department or school, they share stipends to be paid to faculty.

Our approach is to help our faculty members redesign their courses growing professionally both in active learning pedagogy and in the use of web 2.0 technologies through the GOAL—Getting Online Active Learning—netcourse. After that, WSSU support faculty in the course creation process, by coaching them both pedagogically (CETL) and technologically (ITG—Information Technologies group); there are benchmarks that help controlling the quality of the process. We have learned that it is not easy to move faculty from conventional to active learning pedagogy, while they appropriate Web 2.0 tools, but it is viable. Time management has become an issue with faculty members that do not have enough support from their academic unit or that have not organized their agenda for effective participation.

At UIPUI there is a team approach for the design and production of online and blended courses: for each course there is a team including an instructional design consultant, an instructional technology consultant, a subject specialist librarian, a media production staff, and a copyright management consultant, in addition to the course author. UIPUI experience is that there is great commitment from the part of academic units to support their faculty when they are co-paying for the process and assuming the production process as an integral part of the academic load of course authors. They have also learned that the team approach is not easy to implement but it is worth following; it demands a change in organizational culture. They have learned that faculty should participate under a voluntary base and with continued departmental support; that faculty selection becomes a critical process, since faculty should understand time commitment, should feel comfortable and open to working as part of a team, and must be committed to developing appropriate documentation for courses being developed.

Let’s reflect on these issues and find out what might work for our case.

Alvaro H Galvis
Director CETL
Center for Excellence in Teaching and Learning