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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Approaching teaching as a scholarly activity with continual evaluations and adjustments allows me to maintain a focus on student learning and continually improve my instruction. By utilizing flexible teaching strategies, rather than strict adherence to a particular teaching style, I am able to adjust my instruction to match the abilities and preexisting knowledge that each student brings to the classroom. Thus, my primary role as an instructor is to create interactions which foster interest and understanding for individual students.

This approach to learning emphasizes a cognitive developmental perspective. As highlighted by developmental theorists, students learn best by actively exploring their environments. This type of “trial-and-error” learning can then be fostered by having a support structure in place to facilitate understanding. The self-paced nature of exploratory learning relies on the notion that effective learning environments actively engage students with the material and promote meaningful associations between new material and information already known. As an instructor, it is my responsibility to help students generate their own context for meaning through the application of new material to their everyday lives.

1. to foster critical thinking so that students may become effective consumers of psychological information,
2. to promote mastery of course content, and
3. to encourage application of course materials to real-world contexts.

B. Jean Mandernach is an associate professor of psychology and research associate for the Center for Excellence in Teaching and Learning at Park University.

Using a sophisticated methodological analysis that involved repeated tests, researchers found that most of the knowledge that students gained in this course was lost within two years. Interestingly, even though “A students” had higher achievement in the beginning, they lost knowledge at a faster rate than “C students,” so that after two years the difference between what the two knew about consumer behavior was much smaller.

The faculty researchers also explored approaches that might lessen the amount of course knowledge lost. They first hypothesized that content learned at a deeper level would be retained better than surface knowledge. Deep knowledge corresponds with an elaborated understanding of something, whereas surface learning equates more closely with memorizing.

This deep learning hypothesis was confirmed, leading researchers to recommend that faculty “develop a pedagogy that requires deep learning early and often” even if this means a sacrifice of breadth for depth. “It is important to remember that although we hate to ‘give up’ some of our favorite topics, the topics that are only covered in passing are not meaningfully retained. Thus, we have already been giving them up; it just has not been obvious.” (p. 189)

Another way to promote deep learning and retention involves building links between what students are being asked to learn and the concepts and tools needed on first jobs. This link motivates students to learn the material. And even if they still forget, when they encounter on the job what they were taught in a class, they are likely to be able to relearn it quickly.

A second hypothesis was also confirmed: students retain course knowledge better when they are tested repeatedly. Researchers recommend the use of cumulative tests throughout a course. In fact, they go so far as to propose that in an “ideal program” cumulative testing would occur across courses in a major.

What most faculty suspect held true in this research: students quickly forgot what they learned, even though the course was in their major and therefore something of interest and relevance. The challenge for faculty is to carefully consider any and all teaching strategies to stem this loss of knowledge.

Reference: Bacon, D. R. and Stewart, K. A. (2006). How fast do students forget what they learn in consumer behavior? A longitudinal study. Journal of Marketing Education, 28 (3), 181-192.

Excerpted from The Teaching Professor, August-September, 2007

This online learning-and-teaching FLC uses a combination of face-to-face meetings and Web-based activities to create an environment in which members can consult with each other to improve their online or Web-supported courses. Another goal is to develop a set of procedures and materials that will help faculty new to online learning implement it in their courses, using existing research, members’ experience, and studies conducted within the learning community.

Because the optimal size of this FLC is between eight and 12, those interested in participating need to submit a proposal. “We want everybody to either have an online course or have one that they want to put online and explain why they think the community would help them do that,” says Albert Ingram, associate professor of instructional design at Kent State.

The concept of the FLC is rather loosely defined and can include members with a wide range of experience, Ingram says. “We see a community as a long-term structure for getting people together who are interested in the same set of issues, usually teaching-and-learning issues. Unlike a committee, nobody’s required to serve. It doesn’t have a particular thing that they’re supposed to do every month. The committee defines what it wants to accomplish. We’re pretty loose about that.”

The group meets weekly for about an hour-and-a-half to talk about problems and progress in group members’ courses. The FLC also has a course space in WebCT Vista in which all members have designer and instructor access and can post materials for the group to try out and critique. Eventually the materials in this course will be made available to a wider audience.

Ideally, faculty will get some background in online pedagogy before learning how to use the course-management system. “Learning to use the software is the least important part of the whole process. Learning to use the software should come after you figure out how you want to use this to teach and how you want students to learn in your course. The idea of this FLC is to talk about online discussions and then get the WebCT Vista people in to show us everything they know about how we can set it up,” Ingram says.

FLC members contribute to the group by sharing their experiences, research, and resources. Participating in this FLC has given Ingram a new group of colleagues from other disciplines that he might not have worked with otherwise and has made him more deliberate in his approach to developing and teaching online courses. “I think the first thing to come out of it is this sense of community, this sense of being in a group of people interested in the same thing. I’m not sure that we have had any earth-shattering revelations come out of it, but from a faculty development perspective it’s been extremely successful in getting people together and talking about problems of teaching and learning. I talk with people completely outside my area. I’ve worked with people from all different sorts of disciplines who I probably wouldn’t have known was interested in online learning,” Ingram says.

Based on his FLC experience, Ingram asks the following questions when considering asynchronous online discussion in his courses:

• Why am I asking the questions?
• What’s the best way to ask them?
• How do I set things up to ensure that everybody participates?
• How do I make sure the participation is actually facilitating learning?

One of the challenges of FLC is maintaining progress and momentum given that participation is optional and members are doing this above and beyond their normal roles. Two grants have helped keep the FLC productive. “The grants have allowed us to do things like have retreats with food, which always brings people together. And they’ve allowed us to offer travel money for active members,” Ingram says.

The grants have been secondary to the FLC’s success. The most important factors to success have been having a leader and a focus on a specific issue. “The leader needs to do a lot of the administrative things like scheduling meetings, but the leader also has to try to get everybody involved in setting and maintaining the direction of it. It’s not a matter of saying, ‘This is what we’re going to do.’ It’s a matter of asking, ‘What are we going to do, and who’s going to take responsibility for that part of it?’” Ingram says.

Contact Albert Ingram at aingram@kent.edu.

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.

How critical are those discipline-specific concerns in facilitating excellence in teaching? If an expert in pedagogy is placed within a faculty to work as a coach and trainer, will it make a difference in the way training programs are designed and utilized to achieve excellence in teaching?

Research still is at a premium as far as tenure and promotion policy structure go in universities in North America. However, the imperatives for excellence in teaching are driven by the changes in student demography, institutional agendas for excellence and global partnerships, and the internationalization of educational climate (Grossen, 2000). Senior administrators at institutional and departmental levels are looking toward excellence in both research and teaching rather than one at the cost of the other.

The epistemological framework of an applied discipline does focus on those aspects of inquiry that facilitate the ability for action—to solve problems, to propose solutions, to move toward a better condition than the current state (Nikitina, 2006). The fact that this discussion is situated among the needs of business educators has a bearing on its shape.

What follows is a critical account of my work as an educational developer, coach, mentor, trainer, and associate between January 2006 and May 2007 within the Faculty of Business Administration at Simon Fraser University. This faculty has eight areas of academic focus with a total complement of 74 full-time faculty members as of May 2007.

Faculty members stated a desire for the following:

• A resource base with information on logistics for classroom teaching, technology use, and best practices within/among courses
• Development of a set of master teachers who could offer mentoring and guidance to novice teachers
• Custom-developed training programs specific to teaching a discipline

Generic skill-based training offered to a university-wide audience does not meet all these needs.

Starting premises

At the outset, I operated according to the following premises:

• My ability to find common ground with the faculty members in another domain is dependent on their perceptions and acceptance of a teaching facilitator as their academic equal whose domain expertise is meant to complement their own.
• Teaching development programs must be in correlation with stated needs and also with grounding in the teaching practice within the faculty (as opposed to the generic, skill-based programs offered university-wide).

In order to facilitate excellence in discipline-specific teaching contexts

• you need to understand the logical structures of an area/discipline AND the context of the instructor,
• there has to be balance between understanding epistemological dictates and recognizing the value of skill-based training, and
• the training content and design must encapsulate these in efficient packages.

Given the complexity of these premises, I had to adopt a fluid approach to interaction and programming rather than a well-structured design approach.

Initial expectations from faculty

Here is a summary of the findings from informal interviews with more than 30 colleagues.

Twenty-five percent of the responses focused on improvement in student engagement/learning (particularly in large classes). The key reason cited for this goal was to find strategies to move the students from a “procedural” mindset to “concept learning”–particularly in areas like accounting that are traditionally seen as procedural.

Forty percent of the respondents expressed a need for training events specific to the needs of their teaching. The reasons stated in support focused on the need to feel like a community and on opportunities for collegial sharing of practice.

Thirty-five percent said that the imperative was to improve classroom teaching effectiveness. They cited the following reasons: the need for good student evaluation of teaching; efficiency in preparation/using TAs; use of technology; managing assessment and handling issues such as plagiarism, developmental feedback, and mentoring from classroom observation; and optimal strategies for grading and assessment of student work.

Programming: approach and content

In direct response to these felt needs, I offered a mentoring program for faculty with the purpose of improving classroom teaching effectiveness. I kept the instrument simple. Items focused on a student-centered approach and strategies to teaching. The instrument offered cues for observing effective use (or absence of) of strategies such as questioning, wait time, diagnostic skills, presentation, and communication, as well as clarity and coherence in the content presented.

The initial observation gave room for an iterative cycle of feedback and collaboration in working with specific issues.

Custom training needs to offer a combination of conceptual frameworks, skills, and strategies as well as to offer room for building a sense of community. Co-facilitating seminars with instructors in different contexts offered scope for contextual grounding for topical concerns. These included

• teaching critical thinking through writing assignments;
• supporting writing assignments: coaching and assessment (both illustrated through teaching practice in a 300-level course in business writing);
• interactive components in large classes: a discussion of how and why (illustrated through teaching practice in a 300-level course in organizational behavior);
• enhancing student engagement: the use of WebCT (illustrated through practice in a 300-level course in human resource management and a 200-level course in management of information science);
• writing, using, and teaching cases (four-hour workshop); and
• teaching problem solving in business education (three-hour workshop).

Data from satisfaction surveys indicate that the faculty found them very useful–both in terms of content and as a platform for interaction.

Lessons learned

Early success has resulted from a mindfulness/understanding of context (institutional/faculty climate), clarity and simplicity in design (while working with individuals and small groups), and an effort to “know” the content they are teaching (faculty conceptions of areas/their ideas of “learning”).

Sustaining this trend may well depend on

• building a repertoire of custom training programs,
• building a body of collaborative published work to establish a record of teaching excellence,
• creating a network of interests within and across institution(s) in order to facilitate sharing of ideas/practice, and
• negotiating for a reward system and formal acknowledgment for teaching excellence.

Additional insights from this experience suggest that the faculty investment (resources, time spent, and sustainability of this effort) must see steady returns–in terms of their own growth as teachers and in terms of student satisfaction.

The sustainability of my position also depends on opportunities for maintaining an active and current profile in my domain of expertise and building a collegial network of teachers and teacher educators in order to keep the work fresh, rich, and rewarding in both epistemological and pragmatic terms in the long run.

References

Grossen, Michele (2000). Institutional Framings in Thinking, Learning and Teaching. In Helen Cowie and Geerdina M. Van der Alsvoort (Eds.) Social Interaction in Learning and Instruction: The Meaning of Discourse for the Construction of Knowledge, London: Pergamon.

Nikitina, Svetlana (2006). Three strategies for interdisciplinary teaching: contextualizing, conceptualizing and problem-centering, Journal of Curriculum Studies, 38(3), 251–271.

Ranga Venkatachary works as teaching enhancement specialist at the Faculty of Business Administration, Simon Fraser University, British Columbia, Canada.

Absent college peers doing in-class evaluations; the adjunct professor works independently. Quality standards, performance expectations, and learning outcomes depend on the “gotta wanna” principle. These individuals simply must want to perform at their best. They must be motivated, not managed–led, not driven.

In my experience, most professionals are capable of managing themselves. But motivation? Ah, that’s the job of a contemporary leader. But how do you raise quality standards when the adjunct isn’t connected with the day-to-day goings-on in the department?

First, build an atmosphere of trust. The prof wants to trust her leader, to be reassured whether her own pleasure in a job well done equals expectations even when you’re not there to observe it–maybe especially then.

Establishing trust sets the stage for discussing specific behaviors critical to enhanced performance. Develop shared reasons for dissatisfaction with the status quo. Encourage the professor to commit to the new objectives. Meld your vision with her values as you mutually–and the key word is mutually–set clear, realistic goals. Establish rewards based on behavioral reinforcements.

It’s a conundrum. How does the leader determine the right reinforcers if the professor isn’t present? The answer is simple and complex. Get to know him. Learn from her what she values. Literally and figuratively, be where they are. Visit the classroom. Drop by the adjunct lounge. Reach out via email. Offer to meet for coffee or a sandwich. All of these require relentless consistent two-way communication.

To create a new platform for shared behavioral expectations, try introducing the notion of the customer into the equation. As heretical as it may sound, a student is a customer. Academic institutions regularly administer student evaluations of pedagogy. Effective leaders use this feedback to orchestrate one-on-one discussions. You can count on the professor to give you his impressions. Listen to what he says. Applaud the positive. Discover why the negative comments sting. It’s critical information the leader can use to identify values. Values lead to reinforcers.

Given the quest for dignity, studies have shown that professionals act according to their own enlightened self-interest. With apologies to B.F. Skinner, when all you have is the opportunity for random reinforcement, aversive stimuli won’t work. Academic leaders must recognize the right reinforcers and use them to reward preferred behaviors.

Research tells us that peer approval is a mighty reinforcer. Engage the adjuncts in peer relationships. Establish a program based on sharing best practices. Invite an adjunct to do peer evaluations to observe her colleagues in action. Solicit descriptions of approaches that work; collect outstanding case studies. Distribute the submissions to the adjunct team. Give part-time faculty members each other’s telephone numbers and email addresses. Encourage them to communicate, too.

An adjunct wants to teach an additional course? Tie in to his need to be viewed as an intellectual. Ask him to develop a new one. A professor with deep experience in a particular field of endeavor wants another course? Invite her to moderate a forum where she can showcase her work. An adjunct recently published his fifth book? Host a book signing; invite students and faculty. You are limited only by your own and each adjunct’s creativity in developing actions and attitudes that reinforce preferred behavior.

The question becomes: can so-called bad behavior be extinguished? Yes, but only if the effective leader replaces existing standards with mutually established performance principles. In an environment built on the expectation of positive reinforcement and trust that it will be more than merely intermittent, a guiding word about off-beam performance will help eradicate negative behavior. In a relationship built on trust, the highest priority in interactions with adjuncts must be to reinforce the “gotta wanna” principle.

Sandra Allen is the director of public relation studies and a full-time marketing communication faculty member at Columbia College Chicago. Allen’s professional experience includes stints in the business world, including serving as a senior executive at a Fortune 500 corporation. In addition to teaching, she now consults and serves on not-for-profit boards.