Faculty Development

Becoming a Better Teacher: Principles That Make Improvement a Positive Process

These principles don’t propose breathtakingly new insights, but they offer a context for improvement that should make efforts to teach better more successful…All teachers can improve; most should. Don’t base efforts on premises of remediation and deficiency. Positive premises work just as well. You can improve your teaching just as effectively doing more of what works well as you can…

Maryellen Weimer, PhD June 6, 2013

Advice for New Faculty: Start with the Syllabus

The ability to teach is not something that one either has or does not have. Teachers are not born. Rather, they are made, through hard work, research, continual learning, and practice. Any teacher, no matter how experienced or new, can improve, and even the best teacher’s skills can degrade if he or she does not pay attention to continual improvement. Teachers are made through hard work and persistence.

Jennifer Patterson Lorenzetti May 31, 2013

Professional Development for Adjunct Faculty Improves Teaching, Builds Community

The Department of Behavioral Sciences at St. Louis Community College-Meramec is a diverse department with 16 full-time and 53 adjunct faculty. In an effort to connect those adjuncts to the department, Darlaine Gardetto and some of her colleagues created an adjunct professional development program focused on improving teaching based on Bloom’s Taxonomy.

Rob Kelly April 16, 2013

Role Reversal: Learning from a Master Teacher

I had a most interesting experience last summer. I have taught college composition for many years, but I had not participated in a writing workshop as a writer for a long time. Of course, I had regularly run workshops in my classroom. But this time, I had written a short, 600-word essay, and it was workshopped (which to those of us in composition means reviewed and critiqued) by my peers as part of a larger in-service on curiosity and writing.

When the workshop was finished, I turned to a fellow English professor and said, “So that’s how it’s supposed to be done!”

Barbara A. Mezeske February 7, 2013

Academic Customer Service Shouldn’t be a Dirty Word

Earlier this year, we kicked off the semester with a faculty development workshop on academic customer service. Academic customer service is a hot and contentious topic on many college campuses, with faculty often reeling at the suggestion that students are customers (and therefore “always right”) or that education is a product intended for consumption. The feedback from our session in August was prickly and some of the comments demonstrated that we were in worse shape than I imagined.

Christine M. Nowik December 3, 2012

Six Paths to More Authentic Teaching

Most frequently, authenticity is described as being “real” or “genuine,” and the advice often given to faculty wanting to develop authenticity in their teaching is to “just do what comes naturally.” But obvious definitions and easy advice frequently obfuscate deeper complexities, and that is definitely the case with authenticity.

Maryellen Weimer, PhD November 8, 2012

Helping Student Veterans Succeed in the Classroom

Student veterans bring to the college classroom a distinct set of strengths, including a level of maturity, experience with leadership and teamwork, familiarity with diversity, and a mission-focused orientation. While these strengths have the potential to help them succeed academically, many student veterans are also at risk due to unique physical, mental, and social needs.

Mary Bart October 25, 2012

What Types of Students Participate in End-of-Course Ratings?

With an increasing number of rating systems now online, the question of who completes those surveys (since not all students do) is one with important implications. Are those students dissatisfied with the course and the instruction they received more likely to fill out the online surveys? If so, that could bias the results downward. But if those students satisfied with the course are more likely to evaluate it, that could interject bias in the opposite direction.

Maryellen Weimer, PhD October 19, 2012

Signs You’ve Lost Your Joy of Teaching

It’s 9 a.m. on a Wednesday morning around mid-term. “Carrie James” (a fictional name) grabs her textbook and class roster and heads upstairs to her first class of the day. It starts at 9 o’clock. She makes a pit stop before arriving at the classroom. When Carrie enters the room, most students immediately stop talking. She quickly calls roll and says, “Let’s get started. We have a lot to cover today.” Carrie begins the lecture by displaying a list of key terms on the document camera. She lectures for most of the period, closely following the text outline and then announces a test to the moans and groans of students. As soon as class ends, Carrie returns to her office, shuts the door, and turns her attention to the manuscript that she was editing for publication. She has an hour before her next class which she puts completely out of her mind.

Patty H. Phelps, EdD September 14, 2012

Summer Refresher Helps Kickstart a New Semester

After a refreshing summer break, which included professional development and time to reflect on the mistakes and successes of the last academic year, the start of a new semester is, at least for me, an exciting time.

Vickie Kelly, EdD September 11, 2012

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