Faculty Development

Benefits of Talking with Students about Mid-Course Evaluations

It takes a certain amount of courage to talk with students about course evaluation results. I’m thinking here more about formative feedback the teacher solicits during the course, as opposed to what’s officially collected when it ends. Despite how vulnerable revealing results can make a teacher feel, there are some compelling reasons to have these conversations and a powerful collection of benefits that may result from doing so.

Maryellen Weimer, PhD June 15, 2016

Tweets from the 2016 Teaching Professor Conference

Year after year, college faculty mark the end to the spring term by attending The Teaching Professor Conference. It’s the perfect venue to reflect, recharge, and rejuvenate while gaining a wealth of instructional ideas and valuable insights.

This Storify provides a collection of some of the tweets from the three-day event.

Mary Bart June 9, 2016

How to Get the Most out of a Professional Conference

An initial look at a conference program can lead attendees to become (in the words of a former colleague) “paralyzed by the possibilities.” There are just so many sessions we’d like to attend that it’s hard to choose. At a recent conference, a new faculty member asked me for advice about negotiating the labyrinth. Here is a collection of strategies that I have developed over the years to help me make the most of the conference experience—before, during, and after the event.

Linda K. Shadiow, PhD May 23, 2016

Course Evaluations: How Can Should We Improve Response Rates?

Shortly after 2000, higher education institutions started transitioning from paper and pencil student-rating forms to online systems. The online option has administrative efficiency and economics going for it. At this point, most course evaluations are being conducted online. Online rating systems have not only institutional advantages but also advantages for students: students can take as much (or little) time as they wish to complete the form, their anonymity is better preserved, and several studies have reported an increase in the number of qualitative comments when evaluations are offered online. Other studies document that overall course ratings remain the same or are slightly improved in the online format.

Maryellen Weimer, PhD May 18, 2016

Broadening Pedagogical Knowledge by Learning from Other Disciplines

The bulk of scholarship on teaching and learning continues to be embedded in our disciplines. It ends up there because that’s where it counts (if it does) and because there’s a long-standing and still fairly widely held belief that the teaching needed for a particular kind of content is unique. Unless you know the content, you can’t know how to teach it.

Maryellen Weimer, PhD January 20, 2016

Becoming a Better Teacher: Articles for New and Not-So-New Faculty

A couple of months ago a colleague asked me to recommend a book for his new faculty reading group. I rattled off the names of several, but then wondered if a packet of articles might not be a better option. When I started to identify articles, it came to me that the what-to-read dilemma for new and not-so-new faculty goes beyond the articles themselves. It is more about the categories of work on teaching and learning rather than individual pieces.

Maryellen Weimer, PhD January 13, 2016

Translating Research into Practice

During the past 20 years, college and university faculty have begun to utilize several areas of the learning sciences (including cognitive psychology) to inform pedagogy. Much of this work has happened in ways that have helped our profession more effectively teach and our students to more effectively learn. However, we still have much work to do if we are to claim that we have a well-developed set of tools that can be applied across disciplines.

Chris Hakala, PhD January 11, 2016

Working to Make a Difference

“When are you going to retire?” “Why are you still working?” These are questions I’m asked regularly. Worried that the question is motivated by signs of diminished mental acuity, I scour old and new writings looking for evidence. Should I stop working? I wonder.

Maryellen Weimer, PhD December 16, 2015

The On-Going Life of One Retired Dean and Professor

“How are you enjoying retirement, Tom?” This is the question I get everywhere I meet old friends and colleagues. “I read that nice article about your retirement in the local paper and see that the mayor even declared in a proclamation that this event was to be honored in the city as ‘Dr. Thomas R. McDaniel Day,’ and I see that the governor awarded you the Order of the Silver Crescent for your contributions to the state and region—very cool way to go out.”

Thomas R. McDaniel PhD September 17, 2015

Where Does Innovative Teaching Come From?

There’s a long-standing tradition of informal sharing of pedagogical innovation among K-12 teachers and a whole line of research on this phenomenon, which is known as teacher leadership. The same type of informal faculty leadership exists in higher education as well, but there is very little research on this topic, according to Pete Turner, education faculty member and director of the Teacher Education Institute at Estrella Mountain Community College.

Rob Kelly July 27, 2015

Faculty Development

Stay Updated with Faculty Focus!

TOPICS

Stay Updated with
Faculty Focus!