23 Practical Strategies to Help New Faculty Thrive

The average college professor knows his or her subject matter very well, but receives very little training on classroom pedagogy. As a result, new faculty may end up developing a few bad habits during their “trial by fire” initiation. Bad habits that can be difficult to break over time.

Contrary to popular practice, the best college teachers are made, not born.

Sitting back and waiting for new faculty members to “figure things out” is not a sound strategy. Many new hires struggle mightily to make the transition from student to professor.

After spending years becoming a subject matter expert, it can be a huge leap for a Ph.D. student to step behind the podium and lead a classroom of eager, and not so eager, learners. The fact of the matter is, most aspiring professors receive few specific instructions on how to teach effectively.

Without guidance and support, new faculty members are apt to become overwhelmed, discouraged, and ineffective in the classroom. Practical, seasoned advice goes a long way in laying the groundwork for teaching success for these beginning lecturers.

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In 23 Practical Strategies to Help New Faculty Thrive, award-winning professor Ike Shibley of Penn State Berks outlines some of the most effective ways to assist new college professors and set them on the path to teaching success.

Drawing upon his 15 years of teaching and mentoring experience, Professor Shibley offers useful and realistic advice on course planning, day-to-day teaching, and improving student learning.

This video online seminar covers:

• Writing a strong syllabus
• Ideal course pacing
• How to open and close each class
• Managing writing assignments and grading
• The best ways to increase active learning
• The benefits of finding a faculty mentor
• Improving and learning from student evaluations
• Staying sane by maintaining work-life balance
• Overcoming day-to-day teaching struggles
• Teaching myths
• And more!

Who will benefit?
This video online seminar is recommended for college professors who are just starting out and for experienced professors needing to recharge. It is also designed for supportive administrators seeking ways to assist new faculty. Others who will benefit from this seminar include:

• Instructors
• Course Developers
• Instructional Designers

New faculty members need assistance to reach their teaching potential. Discover ways to thrive and excel as a college professor with a copy of this practical seminar today.

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Even though the content may be emotionally engaging, the discussion it generates may not be.

“One of the biggest barriers to online learning is our inability to respond in the moment, unless we happen to be on live chat or video, which is really rare in most of the online learning world,” says Rick Van Sant, associate professor of education at Ferris State University.

That moment after viewing some emotionally engaging content passes quickly. In a typical online learning environment, students react and post to a discussion board or blog and wait for a response. “I think it’s one of the downsides of asynchronous learning. You lose that opportunity for the teachable moment,” Van Sant says. “There are many positive aspects to online learning, such as thoughtful reflection. One of the things I see, the students who do not often volunteer or engage in on-the-fly discussion in a face-to-face classroom will turn around in an online environment and become significant discussants. Not that they’re lazy in the classroom; they just don’t process information on the fly quite like somebody else.”

Despite the limitations of asynchronous communication, it still can create an emotional connection that supports learning. For example, collaborating on a wiki can be just the thing to motivate and engage students.

“If we’re working on a wiki together and you edit something of mine, chances are there’s a mild emotional expression associated with that—I don’t like the edit, I’m sensitive about the edit, or I’m thrilled with the edit. But it’s personal because I wrote it and you changed it. Can I trust you? That’s an emotional experience. It might be a positive emotional experience. It might be a negative one. Whatever it is, it contains that seed, that very small element of an emotional connection to it: ownership.”

Another obstacle to creating emotionally engaging learning environments is that many online instructors are not technologists. “They’re teachers, they know their subjects, but they don’t necessarily do a good job from a pedagogy standpoint,” Van Sant says.

Many online instructors take a teacher-centered approach to pedagogy, posting PowerPoint presentations, notes, readings, assignments, and tests and quizzes and “tell students to go forth and learn,” Van Sant says. “Really good online teachers have taken up the challenge to learn about the various tools.”

“The classroom must be a learning community. In an online environment, you must be sure you are using the tools to make that happen. And these are the blogs, wikis, Web 2.0 tools and social bookmarks, and the discussion boards. The interactivity creates communities. When that happens, you’ve got far greater potential of engaging that otherwise somewhat unengaged student,” Van Sant says.

Instructors who seek to create learner-centered online courses often read the work of Howard Gardner on multiple intelligences and think that for every lesson they’ve got to create eight different kinds of assignments to reach the learning style preferences of all their students. But Van Sant assures them they need not go overboard in accommodating all learning styles.

“The goal isn’t to cater to all eight individual multiple intelligences. It’s about providing, over the range of a course, the opportunity for people to learn and express their learning within their strengths and not always have to operate within their deficits. To do that, you need variety. You need redundancy. You need multiplicity. You need different ways of sharing and knowing. … What happens here is working in a much richer environment. It is a challenge for us to understand that in this rich environment we’ve got to become masters of that domain.”

Excerpted from A Learner-Centered, Emotionally Engaging Approach to Online Learning, Online Classroom, June 2009.

As online learning grew, so too did the functionality of course management systems. As the systems grew more and more complex, they became more and more fragile, necessitating the new administrative function of instructional designer to manage the systems. Control of distance learning gradually shifted from faculty to administrator as instructional designers started dictating how online courses would look and function.

Now faculty are starting to wrestle control back from administrators through the use of social media such as blogs, wikis, and VoiceThread. These systems can be easily set up by faculty and students to foster interactivity and user generated content that is not possible in course management systems. Best of all, instead of spending hours stocking the modules of a course management system, a faculty member can create a blog in minutes and spend nearly all of his or her time communicating with students.

But few colleges have a social media strategy. The assumption is still that all content must be housed within the LMS. Systems such as Blackboard are adding social media modules like blogs and wikis, but moving them into the locked-down LMS removes the very openness which gives these media value. The better approach is to understand that the LMS is just one tool among many for delivering online learning, and just like a carpenter, use the tool that best suits the job.

Here are some ways to incorporate social media into your course:

• Faculty members who want to create a hybrid course should use social media systems such as blogs or wikis rather than an LMS. An LMS is good for a fully online course, but requires needless administrative time for a hybrid course.
• Many faculty are teaching fully online courses though a combination of social media and LMS systems. For instance, Michelle Pacansky-Brock uses Moodle to manage assignments and maintain her gradebook, and Ning to teach her class. Steve Kolowich uses Moodle plus Skype and Elluminate to add interactive elements to his online courses. At Norwich University, I’ve added blogs, wikis and webinars outside of our LMS to provide students with an opportunity to explore issues within the profession that interests them.
• Schools are starting to attach social media “shells” to their LMS. GoingOn provides blogs and other forms of discussion that exist outside of the classroom to allow collaboration between students across the institution. For instance, all students in a business program can carry on discussions related to business outside of their particular courses. Learning Objects is another system that provides students with a “personal learning space” where they can create a blog, share sites, and collaborate in a variety of ways with like-minded students. It also allows clubs and departments to create Facebook-like sites to share information.
• Schools are changing to an LMS built on social media principles, such as Drupal. An open source platform, Drupal gives faculty the flexibility to make student blogs the homepage of their course, rather than administrative functions, encouraging collaboration. Better yet, any part of a course can be made public so that students can engage in conversations with other students, faculty, or professionals in the field.

Education is changing, and social media is presenting a world of opportunity to improve learning outcomes.

Feedback
As usual, I welcome your comments, criticisms, and cries of outrage in the comments section of this blog.

Resources
Insidious Pedagogy: How Course Management Systems Impact Teaching
http://firstmonday.org/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/2530/2303

Learning Management Technologies: Enterprise Systems or Consumer Goods?
http://www.educause.edu/E09+Hybrid/EDUCAUSE2009FacetoFaceConferen/LearningManagementTechnologies/175842

Envisioning the Post-LMS Era: The Open Learning Network
http://www.educause.edu/EDUCAUSE+Quarterly/EDUCAUSEQuarterlyMagazineVolum/EnvisioningthePostLMSEraTheOpe/199389

The Traditional LMS is Dead: Looking to a Modularized Future
http://ideaentity.ning.com/profiles/blogs/the-traditional-lms-is-dead

Drupal: http://drupal.org/

GoingOn: http://goingon.com/

Learning Objects: http://www.learningobjects.com/

John Orlando, PhD, is the program director for the online Master of Science in Business Continuity Management and Master of Science in Information Assurance programs at Norwich University. John develops faculty training in online education and is available for consulting at jorlando@norwich.edu.

An expert panel of authors, editors, and faculty familiar with pedagogical literature selected one winner and two finalists from a pool of more than 100 submissions.

The winning article
Carrithers, D., Ling, T., and Bean, J. C. (2008). Messy problems and lay audiences: Teaching critical thinking within the finance curriculum. Business Communication Quarterly, 71 (2), 152-170.
Find the article at http://bit.ly/9RBjHk.

Finalist articles, listed in alphabetical order
Kraemer, E. W., Lombardo, S. V., and Lepkowski, F. J. (2007). The librarian, the machine, or a little of both: A comparative study of three information literacy pedagogies at Oakland University. College & Research Libraries, 68 (4), 330-342. Find the article at http://bit.ly/9YwVih.

Pollard, E. A. (2008). Raising the stakes: Writing about witchcraft on Wikipedia. The History Teacher, 42 (1), 9-24. Find the article at http://bit.ly/api3cC.

To be considered for the award, the article had to be at least 1,500 words in length and published after 2007 in a discipline-specific or cross-disciplinary pedagogical periodical, or a general higher education publication. The piece could address any topic related to college-level teaching and learning.

The 2010 Teaching Professor Conference
The winning authors were recognized last month at the 2010 Teaching Professor Conference in Cambridge, Mass. and received a $1,000 stipend provided by McGraw-Hill. The Teaching Professor Conference, the premier conference devoted exclusively to pedagogy and teaching excellence, was attended by 800 college educators from 48 states and three countries. The popularity of the conference continues to grow, with this year’s event selling out nearly a month before the opening date.

“In today’s tough economy, where budgets for travel and professional development often are the first to go, it was exciting to meet so many dedicated professionals working to improve the teaching and learning experiences at their colleges and universities,” said Ricky Cox, Teaching Professor Conference chair and a professor at Murray State University. “This conference is very special to me, and each year I come away with new strategies that I can implement in my classroom and make new friends whom I can turn to for insight and inspiration.”

The 2011 Teaching Professor Conference will be held May 20-22 in Atlanta. Magna will issue a Call for Nominations for next year’s Scholarly Work on Teaching and Learning Award later this summer.

Teach More Effectively with Customizing Learning Experiences

Expectations are rising in higher ed. There’s a growing emphasis on outcomes and accountability, and a steady trend toward personalizing the educational experience to boost individual student achievement and competency. But if online courses were customized to meet the needs and interests of individual students, would instructors’ workloads become unmanageable?

Many fear, and understandably so, that introducing customized, student-specific learning to online courses will add a crushing amount of work for the online instructor. And indeed, that’s a fear that could easily be realized if the process was approached incorrectly.

But there’s a way to do it right–a way that can actually reduce faculty workloads while increasing personalization of online learning. You can learn about it in Teach More Effectively with Customizing Learning Experiences, a 75-minute audio presentation that will introduce you to a model for offering personalized content without creating overwhelming responsibilities for the instructor.

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You’ll learn:

• How to better understand the goals and mental models of individual learners.
• How to integrate the concepts of social, teaching and cognitive presence into course creation.
• How to “design in” choices and options for readings, assignments and projects.
• Where customization makes the most sense within a course.
• How to use rubrics to incorporate self- and peer-review processes.
• And much more.

The program presenter is Judith Boettcher, Ph.D., an author, consultant and leading voice on educational technology and online teaching. Dr. Boettcher has more than 20 years of experience at institutions such as Penn State and the University of Florida, and is co-author of the just-published Online Teaching Survival Guide: Simple and Practical Pedagogical Tips.

Who will benefit:

• Distance learning deans
• Distance learning directors and coordinators
• Instructional design professionals
• Faculty who teach online
• Program leaders
• Anyone interested in sound online pedagogy

It is possible to give students a rich, personalized educational experience online–without overloading the instructor. Find out how with a copy of this seminar!

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Critical pedagogy is the most extreme of the three and has some unique characteristics. The authors below describe its basic tenets as eradication of the teacher-student contradiction “whereby the teacher teaches and the students are taught; the teacher knows everything and the students know nothing; the teacher talks and the students listen; and the teacher is the subject and the students are mere objects.” (p. 26) Critical pedagogy also has a political agenda; it views education as a means to achieve social justice and change.

Whether or not a teacher is philosophically comfortable with the principles of critical pedagogy, implementing it in the classroom presents teachers with the same dilemmas that emerge when using active learning or learner-centered approaches. The article referenced below does an excellent job of articulating some of these challenges and offering advice on how instructors might respond.

One problem that becomes clear early on is the discomfort students feel when teachers solicit their opinions and acknowledge the relevance of previous experiences. More students prefer traditional approaches—those that have them record and then regurgitate information. They aren’t used to having their voices recognized and respected, but they do quickly adapt. The next challenge for the teacher is to ratchet up the ante so that the opinions students express are informed, their views are supported, and they learn to tolerate ambiguity more constructively.

As soon as students are recognized for what they can teach (as they do in most group work settings), a whole set of challenging questions emerges for the teacher. “How do we invite students to be co-teachers if we … begin from a position of intellectual authority?” How can we let students have a say about what they learn when there is a discipline-specific body of knowledge we are expected to cover in the course? “How do we de-center authority when we are working to gain authority?” (as might be the case with new teachers, especially persons of color or women in male-dominated fields). (p. 28)

The answer here is sanguine whether an instructor is using groups or giving students some say over course policies and procedures. “The goal is not to abdicate responsibilities or to deny or conceal our knowledge but to create a genuine space for students to contribute to the curriculum: ‘to teach is not to transfer knowledge but to create the possibilities for the production or construction of knowledge.’” (p. 28-29—the internal quote is attributed to Paulo Freire.)

If students now have a role in making some of the decisions about learning, and teachers use authority more sparingly, what happens when it’s time to evaluate student work and assign grades? And right behind that question is one relating to appropriate assessment measures. These instructional approaches make some of the traditional assessment strategies quite inappropriate. You can’t be expecting and encouraging students to collaborate and work cooperatively on projects if the grading schematic is competitive. It is possible, though, to begin to involve students in both the generation and the critique of those rubrics that will be used to assess their work. Their involvement helps to create clear expectations and makes the whole assessment process more transparent.

Reference: Fobes, C., and Kaufman, P. (2008). Critical pedagogy in the sociology classroom: Challenges and concerns. Teaching Sociology, 36 (January), 26-33.

Excerpted from Critical Pedagogy: Challenges and Concerns, The Teaching Professor, March 2008.

The example they connect to the quote is teacher authority. “Professional authority is derived from greater knowledge of a particular field. It is harbored in the hierarchical relationship of expert to teacher to students and is further enforced institutionally through the intrinsic power and obligation to assign grades.” (p. 299) Their point is that nursing as a field has experienced a movement toward more learner-centered teaching. The authors endorse these approaches, seeing them as mechanisms that develop students’ critical thinking abilities, ultimately making them better caregivers. But traditional approaches to teaching make the kind of sharp distinctions between teachers and students that prevent developing the kind of relationships that promote student autonomy. (p. 300)

Their point is that teachers can endorse these more democratic approaches to education and still teach in ways that reinforce traditional hierarchical models. Unfortunately, many teachers are not particularly reflective about their practice. They do not take time to consider the implications of instructional actions—to “view authority from the students’ perspective and suspend our own judgment to come to a clearer understanding of the teaching process as experienced through the eyes of the students.” (p. 302)

Through the process of reflection, “teachers are compelled to confront answers that may reveal we are other than the venerable teachers we perceive ourselves to be. . . . We may discover that we are unwitting accomplices in maintaining, rather than challenging and changing, the status quo.” (p. 302)

Teacher authority is not repudiated in these emancipatory models. But it is understood in more sophisticated ways. The goal is not to empower students in ways that ignore their mistakes or deny their ultimate accountability. “Teaching that is authentic … involves a genuine fostering of student autonomy as opposed to codependence, a teacher-student relationship that is collegial as opposed to friendly, communication that is candid yet caring, and the expectation for personal and professional accountability.” (p. 301)

Even though this article deals with curricular reforms in nursing education, the same kind of changes are taking place in many other fields, and their points about teachers’ lack of insights into what they do, why, and how it impacts learners are relevant to faculty in every field.

Reference: Myrick, F., and Tamlyn, D. (2007). Teaching can never be innocent: Fostering an enlightening education experience. Journal of Nursing Education, 46 (7), 299-303.

Excerpted from Insight into the Teaching Self, The Teaching Professor, Nov. 2007.

Does your program have all the key elements for sustainability?
Site visits to nearly 100 campuses participating in the National Learning Community Project from 1998 to 2004 indicated a recurring pattern of key elements in sustaining successful learning community programs. These elements are:

1. Clear and well-understood mission, vision, and goals
2. Committed leadership, wide connections, and solid volunteer workforce
3. Purposeful and well-implemented curriculum, pedagogy, and structure
4. Appropriate and ubiquitous assessment
5. Ongoing, well-subscribed formal and informal instructional development for both faculty and staff
6. Staff and faculty rewards and incentives commensurate with the valuable contribution learning communities make to student learning and success, faculty and staff development, and institutional transformation
7. Continual cross-divisional attention to implementation issues, e.g., recruitment, marketing, advising, registration, student assignment into residential learning communities
8. Sustained and adequate mixture of resources to enable the above

Can the impact of the program be enhanced simply by fine-tuning what you’re already doing? Where are the key leverage points? Who are the crucial players?

For example, a good faculty learning community is an essential element of a strong student learning community program. So when I’m asked to assess a program, I always ask, “What support is there for faculty to learn about learning community theory and practice? What is faculty understanding about this? Are there common understandings among faculty about learning community goals and core practices?”

Maintenance of consistent quality in a program requires a comprehensive, ongoing faculty development effort, so I would certainly want to know what you are doing to acculturate new faculty to learning community theory and practice and what issues they face. This is especially important now, with large-scale programs and high faculty turnover.

What challenges are emerging at your current stage of development?
Learning-community programs go through some predictable stages of development. At first, the emphasis is usually on technical issues about startup: recruiting and registering students, getting the support of key players for the new innovation, designing the curriculum. Later on, questions turn to more complex issues about program setting, design, and impact.

Most of the lone established learning communities now face the classic challenges of second-stage reform efforts. Faculty retirement and succession are key challenges since many of the early leaders are now retiring.

Size is an important consideration. Too many innovations never become scalable in terms of reaching a large number of students. While some learning-community programs reach a substantial proportion of all first-year students, many successful efforts remain very small and never reach their potential for addressing institutional needs. There are many reasons why this might be the case, but the consequence is an obvious ceiling on their aspirations. And this leads us ask to the question of institutional goals.

Other issues include developing cost-effective approaches in a time of limited services and offering programs that genuinely promote deep learning.

The bottom line here is this: You should expect new challenges to emerge as your program develops. This is normal. And it’s important to be open to new ways to address these challenges.

Does your assessment program lead to improvements?
Perhaps it is an understatement to say that assessment is critical. You have to know where you are to figure out what to do next. Taking a hard look at student learning outcomes is an important first step. Few institutions use assessment as well as they could, and there are now many good tools available. Really, any number of assessment tools – home grown and/or off the shelf – can be used to raise questions about the impact of your learning community.

An increasing number of campuses are embracing focused assessment and data-driven planning to situate, design, and evaluate their learning communities.

Resources
A new monograph appearing in early October 2007, co-published by NASPA and the Washington Center, is titled Learning Communities and Student Affairs: Partnering for Powerful Learning.
Barbara Leigh Smith, Kimberly Eby, Robin Jeffers, Judy Kjellman, Godon Koestler, Toska Olson, Rita Smilkstein, and Karen Spear, “Emerging Trends in Learning Community Development.” The Washington Center for Improving the Quality of Undergraduate Education’s News, winter 2006.

Barbara Leigh Smith, Jean MacGregor, Roberta Matthews, and Faith Gabelnick. Learning Communities: Reforming Undergraduate Education. Jossey Bass, 2004.

Barbara Leigh Smith is a senior scholar at the Washington Center for Improving the Quality of Undergraduate Education, an emeritus member of the faculty, and a former provost and vice president for academic affairs at The Evergreen State College. Smith and Jean MacGregor are founders of the Washington Center for Improving the Quality of Undergraduate Education, which has led learning community development for 20 years.

Excerpted from How to Take a Fresh Look at Your Learning Community, Student Affairs Leader, December 15, 2007.

Using Clickers to Assess and Engage Student Learning

“Clickers” are quickly becoming vital teaching tools for engaging and involving students in the classroom. Used effectively, these student response systems can increase retention and participation. But instructors must be deliberate when constructing their class time around this emerging technology. And understanding how and why clickers work is critical.

Whether your institution has a clicker system in place or is simply looking into the idea, knowing how to effectively take advantage of this emerging technology can energize any course, while benefiting both instructors and students alike.

Instructors can use clickers during seminars to ask questions and gather student responses. These clicker systems are also commonly called “response systems”. In these systems students use a clicker device,which looks like a TV remote, to answer questions from the instructor, with a summary of the results being shown in real time in the classroom.

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Led by Dr. Peter M. Saunders, director of Oregon State University’s Center for Teaching and Learning, this seminar gives participants clear strategies for integrating clickers into the college classroom. During this seminar, Dr. Saunders discusses:

• What research tells us about the benefits for instructors and learners of using clickers.
• Tips on designing effective clicker questions that promote more than rote memorization.
• What ties clicker assessment to critical thinking, social interaction, peer instruction and fun.
• A review of effective assessment tools that can be adapted for clickers.

Note: This seminar focuses on the pedagogy of using clickers, NOT on the technology of clickers or specific clicker brands.

Intended Audience:

• Faculty
• Instructional Designers
• Assignment planners
• Graduate teaching assistants
• Department chairs
• Technology specialists
• Teaching and learning center directors

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What’s more, distance faculty may not be aware of the degree of presence they need to have in a course, and may effectively just “sit them out,” rather than provide appropriate levels of input to the course. Isolated teachers can also find that they have missed opportunities for professional advancement, not being surrounded by colleagues and associates who can train them in the pedagogical application of new technologies. The missed professional development opportunities may eventually frustrate them, interfere with their career development, and cause them to leave the institution.

Technology also can create challenges. That’s why at Canada’s online Athabasca University, the faculty are shown that there is a pedagogical grounding for the use of the new technology, and it’s not just technology for technology’s sake. A survey of faculty there revealed that faculty weren’t very interested in new technology but if it increased their effectiveness as instructors they would make the effort to attend training sessions. The lesson seems to be that to keep faculty up to date you have to focus on the pedagogy, and why the technology supports more effective pedagogy.

According to the survey, faculty said some of the biggest obstacles to teaching online are:

• Dealing with difficult students in an asynchronous environment.
• Knowing how to use a variety of instructional methods online.
• Motivating students to stay engaged with their learning.
• Understanding how to use the learning management system.

To read this article in its entirety, download our free report: Best Practices for Training and Retaining Online Adjunct Faculty.

The example they connect to the quote is teacher authority. “Professional authority is derived from greater knowledge of a particular field. It is harbored in the hierarchical relationship of expert to teacher to students and is further enforced institutionally through the intrinsic power and obligation to assign grades.” (p. 299) Their point is that nursing as a field has experienced a movement toward more student-centered pedagogies. The authors endorse these approaches, seeing them as mechanisms that develop students’ critical thinking abilities, ultimately making them better caregivers. But traditional approaches to teaching make the kind of sharp distinctions between teachers and students that prevent developing the kind of relationships that promote student autonomy. (p. 300)

Their point is that teachers can endorse these more democratic approaches to education and still teach in ways that reinforce traditional hierarchical models. Unfortunately, many teachers are not particularly reflective about their practice. They do not take time to consider the implications of instructional actions—to “view authority from the students’ perspective and suspend our own judgment to come to a clearer understanding of the teaching process as experienced through the eyes of the students.” (p. 302)

Through the process of reflection, “teachers are compelled to confront answers that may reveal we are other than the venerable teachers we perceive ourselves to be. . . . We may discover that we are unwitting accomplices in maintaining, rather than challenging and changing, the status quo.” (p. 302)

Even though this article deals with curricular reforms in nursing education, the same kind of changes are taking place in many other fields, and their points about teachers’ lack of insights into what they do, why, and how it impacts learners are relevant to faculty in every field.

Reference: Myrick, F., and Tamlyn, D. (2007). Teaching can never be innocent: Fostering an enlightening education experience. Journal of Nursing Education, 46 (7), 299-303.

Balancing Challenge and Support in Undergraduate Teaching

On the one hand, undergraduates need your advice and support; that’s what you’re there for. On the other hand, you’re not a babysitter, students need to take ownership of their learning and meet challenges independently. But finding just the right balance between helping and challenging is a dilemma nearly every teacher faces.

You know a “hands-off” policy helps students meet challenges on their own, and use their abilities to the fullest, but you also know if you don’t provide adequate support, you’ll end up with students who are discouraged, directionless and unlikely to succeed.

This interactive online seminar will help you find the middle ground and explain how you can empower students to grow and solve problems independently, while providing the necessary support to help them stay on track.

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Led by Dr. Ike Shibley of Penn State Berks, thisvideo seminar examines five important areas of the student-teacher relationship:

• The balance of power. You’ll consider the circumstances in which students should, and should not, be empowered.
• The function of content. You’ll look at facts vs. cognition, content vs. skills, memorizing vs. learning.
• The role of the teacher. You’ll discuss when to be spontaneous, when to be certain, when to be the “sage on the stage” and when to be the “guide on the side.”
• The responsibility for learning. You’ll discover ways to distinguish when it’s time for democracy, and when it’s time for dictatorship.
• The purpose and process of evaluation. You’ll review best practices in self-assessment, instructor assessment, motivational methods and more.

You’ll also learn about a wealth of tools and techniques that can engage your students and help them accept the challenges of your classroom:

• Development of strong faculty/student communication channels.
• Proper use of rubrics.
• Prompt and appropriate feedback.
• Creating an atmosphere of reciprocity and cooperation.
• Establishing clear (and high) expectations.
• Encouraging use of campus support services (learning centers, writing centers, career centers, etc.).
• Respecting and working with diverse talents and different learning styles.
• Use of mentors, tutors and writing fellows.

Who should attend:

• Instructors
• Course developers
• Administrators
• TAs
• Anyone with an interest in pedagogy and improving learning outcomes

Sometimes students need your help, and sometimes it’s best if they don’t get it. Learn how to strike the right balance in this insightful seminar!

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The challenge of creating transformational change lies in the structure of higher education institutions. “Faculty are typically involved in their own disciplines, and they don’t have a lot of opportunities to be involved with the work of the institution,” Duponte says. “A lot of times they are not made aware of strategic priorities of the institution and don’t see how their work is connected to the work of the institution. In addition, teaching is a private activity, so when we have innovations going on, they can remain very isolated. They don’t necessarily move out of the classroom in which they’re happening. They don’t necessarily spread among departments.”

Duponte studied three community colleges considered to be pedagogical innovators to determine which factors contributed to their success and how emergent changes—those that evolve in the day-to-day work of faculty—can successfully transform an entire institution. She began by looking at the work of Kezar and Eckel on the key factors that help bring about institutional change. These key factors were collective leadership and culture. “There is no pat and clear process or strategy that institutions need to use [to bring about change]. There need to be very institution-specific strategies based on the culture of the institution,” Duponte says.

In addition to the principles that Kezar and Eckel found, Duponte also observed in her research that the institutions that were successful with transformational change had linkages between innovations and institutional priorities. “These linkages happened by creating lots of opportunities to talk about pedagogy and opportunities for faculty to experiment, assess what they do in the classroom, reflect on it, and share that information with fellow faculty members in a supportive environment,” Duponte says.

Emergent change can come from faculty engaging in formal pedagogical scholarship, but Duponte found that scholarship was not the only means of bringing about transformational change. Individual faculty may get involved in exploring innovative pedagogies, such as service learning, theme-based learning, and electronic portfolios, for any number of reasons, including a personal interest in how the brain works or a feeling that current teaching methods do not work for all students.

The biggest obstacle to involvement is workload. Not surprisingly, engaging in innovative pedagogy demands more time from faculty members. This is why it is essential for faculty to receive adequate support. It is up to academic leaders to gauge individual faculty interest in certain innovations and to provide release time, funding, and other support.

In addition, according to Duponte’s research, faculty need a place, such as a teaching and learning center, where ideas can “cross-pollinate” and that provides a formal structure to support pedagogical innovations. At one institution in the study, cross-pollination created broader institutional linkages, which has led to broader responsibility for developing students’ written and oral communication skills rather than relying solely on the English department to develop these skills. “That’s something that occurred because these cross-disciplinary, cross-functional teams have been working, and they’ve created a set of unifying goals in terms of what they want their students to know and be able to do,” Duponte says.

Communication is a key to successful transformative change, Duponte says. “Communicating the idea of change was a really critical piece, because if the communication was a top-down directive, it was far less likely to succeed, and, I think to some degree, that’s what we’ve seen in terms of the assessment movement. This was planting a seed, inviting participation, and it was administrators who recognized interest and recognized faculty talent and recognized potential for leadership and kind of coaxed these folks, invited them, created the opportunities. It wasn’t just structural support—release time, professional development, or money—it was also cultural support. The senior administrator reflected the true institutional value having to do with student learning. It was reflected in many opportunities, so that at staff meetings they would be talking about this sort of thing. They would point out the work of the people involved in innovation and give folks opportunities to share that information.”

However, the communication is not just formal. It needs to be part of the everyday discussion. “They need the opportunity to talk and reflect with other faculty members and do it again before it becomes embedded in the way they do things,” Duponte says.

As with the assessment movement, pedagogical innovation requires faculty involvement throughout the process in order to be successful. “Faculty want to be respected for their expertise and knowledge. They want to be involved from the beginning in terms of looking at the problem, designing solutions, and participating at every step of the process, rather than [being given] top-down initiatives,” Duponte says.