Table of Contents
Title page
Copyright page
FROM THE SERIES EDITOR
About This Publication
About This Volume
EDITORS’ NOTES
Chapter 1: Setting the Stage for Teaching and Learning in American Higher Education: Making the Case for Faculty Development
Introduction
From “Chalk and Talk” to “Point and Click”
From the Trivium to Career Preparation
From In Loco Parentis to Living and Learning Communities
From Ivy-Covered Walls to Corporate America
Conclusion
Chapter 2: Professional Development of the Faculty: Past and Present
Introduction
Past Research
Comparison of Selected Research Findings
Conclusion
Chapter 3: Cocreating Value in Teaching and Learning Centers
Introduction
The Notion of Value and How It Can Be Cocreated
Describing Cocreation of Value Applied to Faculty Development Work
Creating a Value-Centered TLC
A Future Look at Cocreation of Value through TLCs
Conclusion
Chapter 4: Creating a Culture of Appreciation for Faculty Development
Introduction
From the Governing Board: A Board/Trustee’s View for Fostering a Campus-wide Culture of Faculty Development
From the President: A Chief Executive’s View for Fostering a Campus-wide Culture of Faculty Development
From the Chief Financial Officer: A Business Manager’s View for Fostering a Campus-wide Culture of Faculty Development
Conclusion
Chapter 5: Innovative Ways of Assessing Faculty Development
Introduction
Theoretical Perspective on Assessment
Why Is the Assessment Necessary?
What Is the Scope of the Assessment?
What Information Needs to Be Collected?
How Can the Desired Information Be Collected?
An Alternative Assumption and Strategy
What Is the Best Way to Present the Results?
General Issues about the Overall Assessment Process
Closing Comment
Chapter 6: Virtual Space (E-Learning) Faculty Development
Introduction
Forming Your Constituent Group—Above All, Establish Trust
Overcoming Challenges: Choose Trust, Persistence, and Openness as Your Guiding Principles
Diversifying Assessment Methods: Model Best Practices of Online Learning through Diversifying Assessment Types
Requiring (and Acting On) Feedback: If You Do Not Know Where You Have Been, How Do You Know Where You Are Going?
The Holy Grail: Metrics—Is There a More Sound Method to Gauge the Program’s Effectiveness?
Conclusion
Chapter 7: Clarifying the Differences between Training, Development, and Enrichment: The Role of Institutional Belief Constructs in Creating the Purpose of Faculty Learning Initiatives
Introduction
Belief Constructs
Core Reflection
Conclusion
Chapter 8: The Future of Faculty Development: Where Are We Going?
The Context for the Future of Faculty Development
Implications of the Changing Environment for Faculty Development
Managing Multiple Roles and New Responsibilities
Integrating Technology into Teaching, Learning, and Research
Implications for Structures and Processes of Faculty Development
Implications for the Profession of Faculty Development
INDEX
THE BREADTH OF CURRENT FACULTY DEVELOPMENT: PRACTITIONERS’ PERSPECTIVES
C. William McKee, Mitzy Johnson, William F. Ritchie, W. Mark Tew (eds.)
New Directions for Teaching and Learning, no. 133
Catherine M. Wehlburg, Editor-in-Chief
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FROM THE SERIES EDITOR
About This Publication
Since 1980, New Directions for Teaching and Learning (NDTL) has brought a unique blend of theory, research, and practice to leaders in postsecondary education. NDTL sourcebooks strive not only for solid substance but also for timeliness, compactness, and accessibility.
The series has four goals: to inform readers about current and future directions in teaching and learning in postsecondary education, to illuminate the context that shapes these new directions, to illustrate these new directions through examples from real settings, and to propose ways in which these new directions can be incorporated into still other settings.
This publication reflects the view that teaching deserves respect as a high form of scholarship. We believe that significant scholarship is conducted not only by researchers who report results of empirical investigations but also by practitioners who share disciplinary reflections about teaching. Contributors to NDTL approach questions of teaching and learning as seriously as they approach substantive questions in their own disciplines, and they deal not only with pedagogical issues but also with the intellectual and social context in which these issues arise. Authors deal, on the one hand, with theory and research, and on the other with practice, and they translate from research and theory to practice and back again.
About This Volume
Effective teaching usually precedes effective learning and if higher education is going to continue to improve, there must be a focus on continuous enhancement of the teaching process. This is often called faculty development, and it is becoming an essential part of any college or university. The authors of this volume come from a wide variety of institutions and disciplines. Thus, this volume focuses on the various perspectives of faculty development practitioners who are working to improve student learning by working directly with faculty and their teaching. Readers of this volume will find particular areas of opportunity to enhance the development of their own teaching and that of their fellow faculty.
Catherine Wehlburg
Editor-in-Chief
EDITORS’ NOTES
Working Definition: Faculty development entails many forms of organized support to help faculty members mature as teachers, scholars, and citizens of their campuses, professions, and broader communities, especially as these processes pertain to enhancing student learning outcomes.
Adapted from the landmark publication Creating the Future of Faculty Development: Learning from the Past, Understanding the Present by Sorcinelli, Austin, Eddy, and Beach (2006, xiii), the preceding working definition was used as the underlying theme of each of the chapters of this publication of New Directions in Teaching and Learning. By allowing an appropriate breadth to those events that are designed to achieve professional development of the faculty, and by placing particular emphasis on those practices that enhance the learning event for students, the editors of this volume seek to provide resources that higher education practitioners can use to improve their institutions and the educational services they render. Furthermore, each chapter has been selected to identify particular areas of opportunities for institutions. The authors recognize not every initiative suggested in this volume can be implemented by all. Circumstances—for example, institutional mission, available resources, governance issues—vary greatly within the scope of American higher education. Yet it is their hope that every reader will be able to glean from these pages particular applicable details that will prove productive in providing a spark or fanning a flame on his or her respective campuses. As fellow educators themselves, McKee, Johnson, Ritchie, and Tew invite you to join the journey.
C. William McKee
Mitzy Johnson
William F. Ritchie
W. Mark Tew
Reference
Sorcinelli, M. D., A. E. Austin, P. L. Eddy, and A. L. Beach. 2006. Creating the Future of Faculty Development: Learning from the Past, Understanding the Present. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.
C. WILLIAM MCKEE is professor of education and public service management, Cumberland University, Lebanon, Tennessee.
MITZY JOHNSON is associate director of institutional research and effectiveness at Mississippi State University, Starkville, Mississippi.
WILLIAM F. RITCHIE is vice chancellor of academic affairs at Keiser University, headquartered in Fort Lauderdale, Florida.
W. MARK TEW is professor of New Testament and provost at Howard Payne University, Brownwood, Texas.
1
Setting the Stage for Teaching and Learning in American Higher Education: Making the Case for Faculty Development
C. William McKee, W. Mark Tew
This chapter identifies five major shifts in American higher education that are reshaping the necessity of effective, ongoing professional development of the faculty.
Introduction
In American higher education, past history and current practice are often foundational to future innovations. Through the past several decades, the academy has experienced numerous adjustments or institutional shifts as societal needs and student expectations have changed. Many institutions have embraced these shifts voluntarily and welcomed new operational paradigms while other colleges and universities have struggled to maintain time-honored patterns of educational structure and procedure. To be sure, the manner in which scholars and practitioners in the field of teaching and learning have led their institutions to respond to these challenges has marked the difference between a thriving organization and one that is struggling simply to survive.
Because the faculty is crucial to a dynamic and growing educational enterprise, faculty development should be viewed as a necessity, not a nicety. For higher education to manage societal shifts of near epoch proportion, faculty must be fully prepared and fully engaged. The faculty must be ready through ongoing enhancement of their abilities and intellect to answer the call to lead their prospective institutions through the morass of uncertainty brought about by cultural, national, and even worldwide current and future realities.
To that end, it seems appropriate at the beginning of a monograph dedicated to enhancing faculty development to review at least a few of the major shifts facing higher education today. These forces, along with others both unmentioned and to this point unknown, have shaped and will continue to transform the practice of teaching and learning. To understand these issues is to be better prepared to address them in a manner befitting the dignity of the teaching profession and indicative of the innovative spirit of American higher education.
From “Chalk and Talk” to “Point and Click”
In 1997 business management mogul Peter Drucker said, “Thirty years from now, the big university campuses will be relics.” Citing the rising cost of higher education that rivaled the rising cost of health care, Drucker told interviewers Robert Lenzner and Stephen Johnson “such totally uncontrollable expenditures, without any visible improvement in either the content or the quality of education, means that the system is rapidly becoming untenable. Already we are beginning to deliver more lectures and classes off campus via satellite or two-way video at a fraction of the cost. The college won’t survive as a residential institution. Today’s buildings are hopelessly unsuited and totally unneeded” (Drucker 1997, 127).
Over a decade later, at least one aspect of Drucker’s prognostication has come to reality: A digital divide now exists in the academy. The chasm is not between socioeconomic levels within the college-going public. It is not necessarily even generational. The digital divide now present in the academy is pedagogical. The lecture system, developed as a primary delivery tool of the seventeenth century forward, where the instructor is the major provider of information, may not be the best medium for reaching students of the twenty-first century. New student populations of digital natives have created challenges for college professors who may or may not have experience and/or training in educating these new higher education clienteles. Faculty members tend to teach as they were taught and accordingly have little experience with new instructional pedagogies and delivery systems.
Yet presenting what was presented, teaching what was taught, is a luxury higher education purveyors no longer can afford. Addressing the nature of this cultural shift, authors Douglas Thomas and John Seely Brown said, “For most of the twentieth century our educational system has been built on the assumption that teaching is necessary for learning to occur. Accordingly, education has been seen as a process of transferring information from a higher authority (the teacher) down to the student. This model, however, just can’t keep up with the rapid rate of change in the twenty-first century” (Thomas and Brown 2011, 34). Thomas and Brown argued convincingly the traditional teaching model that transfers information “presumes the existence of knowledge that both is worth communicating and doesn’t change very much over time” (Thomas and Brown 2011, 40), a presumption the every changing world reality has begun to question. Rather than teaching “about the world,” Thomas and Brown advocated systems that “focus on learning through engagement within the world” (Thomas and Brown 2011, 38). In this new culture of learning that relies on constant connectivity and utilizes unlimited data via digital access, even the approach to student assessment changes. Instead of requiring students to “prove that they have received the information transferred to them,” for example, grading, students are encouraged “to embrace what [they] don’t know, come up with better questions about it, and continue asking those questions in order to learn more and more, both incrementally and exponentially” (Thomas and Brown 2011, 38).
This view of the changing nature of higher education is enjoying increased acceptance. In describing digital natives, individuals born after 1980, authors John Palfrey and Urs Gasser said, “One thing you know for sure: these kids are different. They study, work, write, and interact with each other in ways that are very different from the ways that you did growing up. They read blogs rather than newspapers. They often meet each other online before they meet in person. They probably don’t even know what a library card looks like, much less have one; and if they do, they probably never used it. They download their music, legally or illegally, rather than buying it in record stores. They’re more likely to send an instant message (IM) than to pick up the telephone to arrange a date later in the afternoon. They adopt and pal around with virtual Neopets online instead of pound puppies. And they’re connected to one another by a common culture. Major aspects of their lives—social interactions, friendships, and civic activities—are mediated by digital technologies. And they’ve never known any other way of life” (Palfrey and Gasser 2008, 2).
Furthermore, the repercussions of this societal shift are felt far beyond the ivory-covered walls of higher education. Don Tapscott, author of Growing Up Digital (Tapscott 1999) and Wikinomics (Tapscott and Williams 2008) has now published a sequel to his earlier works. Grown Up Digital was the result of a $4 million research project, not sponsored by higher education but by corporate leaders who recognized the nature of the workforce has changed due to these shifts and who understood their future productivity, if not very existence as ongoing business concerns, was dependent on coming to terms with the distinctively new behavioral patterns and work habits of the Net Generation (Tapscott 2009, xi).
Yet the sobering truth of the matter is many faculty members do not have the expertise or auxiliary clerical assistance to make a transition to these twenty-first-century skills. What is even more troubling about this reality is that the simultaneous explosion of students attending higher education has exacerbated this situation. Practices regarding open-door admission policies, focused recruitment of nontraditional students, guaranteed governmental financial aid programs, a focus on gender and race equity in enrollment, as well as the rise of the “near-to-home” community colleges, and online educational programs and institutions have swollen the ranks of those seeking higher education, many of whom are underprepared for the academic rigor of university life.
Students who are underprepared academically are at particular peril in the current digital divide between traditional and emerging pedagogical methods. In their case, they neither understand the subject, algebra for example, nor do they understand the means by which the faculty member is explaining algebra. These students are adrift with respect to the factors of a polynomial and are frustrated because their instructors are not “tweeting” the answer. These students may need more faculty “hand holding” and mentoring to be successful, and sheer numbers of such students may make this an impossible faculty task.
Given this overwhelming shift, the academy must embrace new student populations and participate in faculty development activities that develop and enhance Net Generation–specific teaching and learning methodologies.
From the Trivium to Career Preparation
While the comparative in this second major shift admittedly spans a large segment of history, basically the whole of Western thought to be exact, the intent in doing so is to call attention to the inevitability of the curriculum to change. What started as trivium (“three core studies”) and quadrivium (“the four ways”) has become an academic smorgasbord that Barry Schwartz has termed the Tyranny of Choice. Where the Greeks studied grammar, dialect, and rhetoric followed by advanced studies in arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy, “the modern university has become a kind of intellectual shopping mall. Universities offer a wide array of different ‘goods’ and allow, even encourage, students—the ‘customers’—to shop around until they find what they like. Individual customers are free to ‘purchase’ whatever bundles of knowledge they want, and the university provides whatever its customers demand” (Schwartz 2004, B6).
The reality of this transition has been hastened during the last few decades by a growing public dissatisfaction with higher education. Legislatures insist on greater accountability, lower cost, and enhanced access while parents express their perennial concern, “Will little Johnny be able to get a job?” Higher education and the curriculum that drives it certainly have come a long way from the time Milton described the purpose of education as “to fit a man to perform … all the offices, both of private and public, of peace and war” (Milton 2003, 632). Today’s career-focused, highly specialized curriculum may have inadvertently robbed society of John Newman’s educated person “who has learned to think and to reason and to compare and to discriminate and to analyze, who has refined his (or her) taste, and formed his judgment, and sharpened his mental vision … ” and can take up any occupation or vocation “with an ease, a grace, a versatility, and a success, to which another is a stranger” (Newman 1982, 125). What follows is a discussion of specific educational issues higher education must now face as a result of this shift in educational purpose.
In many colleges and universities, the broad course of study that emphasized the information base every educated man and woman should know is fading away or is perhaps already a distant image. Common throughout the academy has been the reduction of the general education core in favor of courses whose intended outcome is the preparation of students for specific careers in the world of work. In keeping with this change, career-focused majors have been instituted, many times simultaneously with alternative delivery systems leaving faculty members, many of whom are steeped in traditional teaching methods and educational programs, to decide if these trends are lessening the value and prestige of the degree or if they represent an opportunity to meet the needs of a new generation of learners.
These shifts in what constitutes the curriculum not only question what will be taught but also by whom it will be taught. To be sure, not all faculty members have the same skill sets. Some teach lower-division survey classes well while others excel in the delivery of upper-division and graduate classes, and still others in research and public service. Should only “junior” faculty be relegated to teaching general education or core classes? Is it important that students be challenged by material gleaned from faculty thesis and dissertation projects or should undergraduate and graduate material be clearly distinguished and segregated? Would not the learning environments on many college campuses be enhanced by matching faculty with such teaching strengths, and courses-of-study with material that is relevant and broad-based within the discipline? For this system to work, good teaching matched to student learning needs to become a primary focus in the academic assignment procedures and encouraged by inclusion in the tenure and promotion process.
In a good-faith effort to address the aforementioned learning styles of digital natives and the growing number of adult learners returning to higher education, alternative delivery systems are being developed and implemented that largely eliminate the in-class student-teacher experience. Many of these blended or totally online classes and/or degree programs can be and are student friendly, financially enhancing for the sponsoring institution, and focused on increasing higher education opportunities to additional populations. Unfortunately, many of these educational endeavors have been developed without ensuring student learning outcomes are equal to or greater than those in a traditional delivery system, that faculty members are appropriately prepared and supported to deliver the content to this population, and that students have the ability to access the Internet both on and off the campus.
These and other curricular issues are complicated when institutions remain inexorably entrenched in a traditional academic calendar. Courses must fit a fall, spring, and summer delivery model. Because federal financial aid is distributed on a per-year basis rather than a per-degree basis, students dependent on aid are forced to spread out their education over four-plus years rather than concentrate their learning into a shorter period. In a similar fashion, many institutional scholarships are paid based on two payments during a twelve-month period. Such regulations have the consequence of rendering most university faculties and campus facilities underutilized or even idle for one-third of the calendar year.
Furthermore, each class must fit a three- or four-credit-hour delivery unit. One might believe the Carnegie unit (the underlying definition of 800 in-class minutes of instruction per one hour of academic credit) was included in Hammurabi’s law code or came down the mountain with Moses on a stone tablet! Defining what constitutes the faculty’s per-term, full-time load may discourage an institution from allowing and encouraging such educational enhancement experiences as yearlong faculty-student research projects, self-paced learning activities, directed studies/focused learning not offered in the prescribed curriculum, or civic involvement and engagement experiences.
In the face of these dichotomizing or polarizing issues, higher education would be well advised to remember “a liberal education is not job training, although it will of course have career outcomes. It is not just broad learning across various arts and sciences. Nor is it just an introduction to the heritage of our past: great events, great people, and great ideas. Education helps shape people, cultivating abilities that last throughout life and transfer to a myriad of tasks” (Holmes 1991, 4). Such a balance, in the face of so many competing forces and factors, will only be accomplished as the faculty is at its best. Faculty development must assist in preparing faculty to accomplish just such a task.
From In Loco Parentis to Living and Learning Communities
When higher education in America was young, those who entered the academy looked to university officials as surrogate parents, a responsibility bequeathed to officials by trusting parents. It is no wonder that Charles William Eliot, president of Harvard from 1869 to 1909, said in his inaugural address, “There is no place so safe as a good college during the critical passage from boyhood to manhood” (Eliot 1969, 44). How troubled indeed would Eliot have been to hear Stanford University professor Lewis Mayhew say only a century later, “Colleges are not churches, clinics, or even parents. Whether or not a student burns a draft card, participates in a civil-rights march, engages in premarital or extramarital sexual activity, becomes pregnant, attends church, sleeps all day or drinks all night, is not really the concern of an educational institution” (Mayhew 1968, 40).
On almost all campuses, the death of in loco parentis