Working with Teaching/Faculty Development Centers

[macargel]

Andrea, it's tricky to respond to all these thoughts here, but are you going to report back on how you use the info?

I am using this info to host a webinar for folks who work in teaching/faculty development centers. It is on December 5 from noon-1PM. Anyone is welcome to attend. bit.ly/facdevsunydec5.

It seems that several folks here have very different experiences with teaching centers than what ours offers. We are completely optional, so no one is sent to us for remediation. But like marshwiggle mentioned, the folks who interact with us are typically more highly-skilled educators or at least show a greater interest in improving versus those faculty who believe teaching (especially ungrads) just gets in the way of their research. We are quite popular and appear to well-regarded by many faculty, so we have no issues with folks using our services. I know this is different from other places, hence the reason for my original post.

[Aster]

There is also a common misconception among certain campus services (e.g. Teaching Centers) that they are "popular with faculty" when the reality is that just a tiny subset of faculty are voicing support while the vast majority either have no opinion (or choose to not voice their opinion).

This can create an echo chamber effect where a few people are controlling a conversation that only they themselves end up listening to. In a university setting, breakdowns in shared governance and academic freedom can result.

I have seen this happen with all kinds of university groups. Faculty senates. Instructional Technology. Student Services. Accreditation compliance. Leadership committees. T&P committees. Insert any committee here.

So when someone says that something is "popular" and "well received" at a university, I have learned to take that with a lump of rock salt. Maybe it is. Maybe it's the opposite.

With Teaching Centers, my experience is that they are well used as a "Plan-B option" with new and/or inexperienced professors who lack the "Plan-A option" of having a proper mentorship/leadership experience within their own academic units. The Plan-B option may be common in such academic units if the units are very small and/or have unavailable or non-collegial faculty in them.

Myself, I took the Plan-A option at two universities, also tried Plan-B at two universities (but got disgusted), and then discovered the superiority of the CHE forums and used that to mostly replace both. I still use Teaching Centers occasionally, but I am careful to only refer other faculty to them if there is an actual specific need. For instance, an inverted classroom workshop. Or a seminar on how to create a micro-credential. But for the most part, I either now train individual new faculty directly, refer new faculty to other faculty for training within our own academic unit, or send them here to run a search on general educational topics.

So, maybe a great Teaching Center should stick a hyperlink to this place and incorporate it as one if its primary resources. Ha ha.

[marshwiggle]

With Teaching Centers, my experience is that they are well used as a "Plan-B option" with new and/or inexperienced professors who lack the "Plan-A option" of having a proper mentorship/leadership experience within their own academic units. The Plan-B option may be common in such academic units if the units are very small and/or have unavailable or non-collegial faculty in them.

This has the problem Spork indicated earlier; unless the senior faculty member is actually a really good teacher, (rather than just in his/her own mind), then the value of the "mentorship" is dubious.

Myself, I took the Plan-A option at two universities, also tried Plan-B at two universities (but got disgusted), and then discovered the superiority of the CHE forums and used that to mostly replace both. I still use Teaching Centers occasionally, but I am careful to only refer other faculty to them if there is an actual specific need. For instance, an inverted classroom workshop. Or a seminar on how to create a micro-credential. But for the most part, I either now train individual new faculty directly, refer new faculty to other faculty for training within our own academic unit, or send them here to run a search on general educational topics.

So, maybe a great Teaching Center should stick a hyperlink to this place and incorporate it as one if its primary resources. Ha ha.

I'd say the value of this place and Teaching Centres is different; this has lots of clever one-off ideas, but TCs can walk people through involved processes in workshops and so on.

[Aster]

This has the problem Spork indicated earlier; unless the senior faculty member is actually a really good teacher, (rather than just in his/her own mind), then the value of the "mentorship" is dubious.

I perhaps oversimplified mentoring. There is not a one-size-fits-all method to this. Some departments assign mentors. I don't agree with that model, for exactly the reason that you listed above.

What I really mean by mentoring is that individual faculty identify and seek out their own mentors within their departments. And then you and that "mentor" (who I suppose is really just a senior colleague) hit if off and you pick up great tips from him/her.

When I did this at an R2, I scouted out the department first. After a few weeks I identified who the "go-getters" were for leading teaching initiatives. I approached two of them for advice. That worked out great.

At Big Urban College, it took longer to do this. Our department was small. Most faculty had already checked out on college service and were just there for the paycheck. But I did find one exemplary person eventually, and she became my role model for most of my future leadership training. In many ways she's still my role model.

[Biologist_]

We encourage our new faculty to observe lectures by established faculty to pick up ideas and techniques. They may or may not find the time to do so, but we encourage it. I think that's a better investment of time than most of what our campus teaching center does. The established faculty observe the new faculty teaching as part of the RPT process, so we have regular opportunities to learn from them as well. There's also a lot of sharing of teaching materials, such as lecture slides, lab handouts, and exams, within the department. If someone is teaching a course for the first time and it's not a newly created course, the other faculty who have taught the course usually hand them all of their course materials to use as a starting point.

The teaching center puts on at least one event per year where excellent teachers who are not part of the center present on some aspect of how they teach. I think they should set up more of those sorts of things.

[marshwiggle]

The teaching center puts on at least one event per year where excellent teachers who are not part of the center present on some aspect of how they teach. I think they should set up more of those sorts of things.

FWIW, that's how they all are here, as far as I can recollect. The staff themselves don't really try to explain how to teach; they facilitate instructors helping each other. (The one kind of "instruction" they do directly is about how to use our CMS, and since their staff are the ones administering it, that makes sense because they actually know what they're talking about.)

[kiana]

What would make a workshop valuable to me would be if it were specifically aimed at people teaching computational STEM/developmental STEM classes. Most of the workshops that I have been to for professional development are aimed at more qualitative classes and their teaching strategies fit great there, but they're not going to help me teach my students how to factor.