Jean Layne

Faculty Learning Communities

Professional development for teaching frequently focuses on methodology and strategy. Information and opportunities to practice techniques are often offered in onetime, interactive workshops. However, one-shot faculty development opportunities are not designed to address a critical element of the faculty role in the learning/teaching dynamic-individual beliefs, experiences, and research regarding learning. Faculty Learning Communities (FLC) is a collaborative initiative at Texas A&M University in which interdisciplinary groups of participants examine learning. The format includes ninety-minute weekly meetings over an academic year, recommended readings on learning, reflective journaling, and individual and collaborative tasks. FLC provides an opportunity to explore learning from multiple perspectives. This process validates what participants know, while supporting the development of a common language and theoretical foundation from which to dialogue. The sustained nature of the interaction provides an increased sense of connectedness and community. Through participation in FLC, faculty members draw ideas, energy and perspective from their exchange that they incorporate into their thinking about, and practice of learning and teaching.

Understanding and improving faculty professional development in teaching

Various entities within and related to higher education offer activities designed to promote professional development of faculty in the area of teaching. A critical challenge to these efforts is the lack of understanding of the actual process of faculty development in teaching. Insight into what faculty members believe about learning, assessment, and teaching, and how those views change, would assist efforts to improve faculty development opportunities. This paper describes the current status of assessment of faculty professional development activities related to teaching. Working from this foundation, it suggests how to improve assessment strategies and begin the process of measuring the impact of specific program activities on faculty beliefs and practices. In addition, it describes ways of investigating and drawing conclusions about professional development process paths in the area of teaching, variables that influence and enhance development trajectory, and roles of various types of faculty development activities in this process.

Frameworks for faculty development

Faculty development is pivotal to improvement in engineering education. Faculty perceptions of these efforts as well as their attitudes, beliefs, and assumptions about learning and teaching, in addition to their experience and operational confidence regarding implementation of innovative approaches all impact translation of innovative approaches to actual classroom practice. Improvement efforts can be derailed due to faculty mental models that result in misunderstanding and/or misapplication of new content and pedagogy. Therefore, more understanding about the nature of faculty development activities is a necessary co-requisite for efforts to improve engineering education. The MESSAGE framework applies concepts from learning theory approaches to faculty development and offers structural factors to consider in developing learning activities for faculty members. The goal of this paper is to provide a framework for non-traditional approaches to faculty development as well as traditional approaches such as workshops and individual consultations and to explore these approaches within the MESSAGE framework

Issues Regarding Change in Engineering Education

As the scholarship of engineering education has advanced, it has confronted a number of challenges that come with working for change. As curriculum development is being addressed more systematically, the process of curricular change also needs to be addressed systematically in future initiatives in order to continue positive progress in student learning. The paper offers a seven-element framework for the process of curricular change: goals for change, objects for change, barriers to change, change mechanisms, models of change, change agents, and the role of faculty development. This paper examines what has been learned through engineering education initiatives and other related research

Faculty development strategies for overcoming the “curse of knowledge”

Research shows that novices and experts organize knowledge very differently. Experts may make huge leaps up an educational ladder of inference and often forget how to explain the reasoning process through which they arrived at their complex, deep understandings. Shortcuts become invisible. In an educational setting, this phenomenon is called ldquocurse of knowledgerdquo. It describes how being an expert in something may make it more difficult to infer what a novice requires in order to develop a deep, working knowledge of engineering and scientific content. In the paper, the authors explore potential faculty development strategies to increase awareness of the ldquocurse of knowledgerdquo and offer approaches through which faculty can use their expertise for effective teaching. Several approaches are offered: (i) principles to make messages sticky, (ii) developing more reflective approaches to understanding learning and teaching, (iii) encouraging construction of teaching portfolios, and (iv) ascertaining knowledge that students have at the beginning and throughout a course.

Curriculum redesign: Concurrently addressing content mastery and development of cognitive abilities

Design or redesign of undergraduate engineering curricula is a complex process. Curriculum redesign addresses both development of content mastery as well as development of cognitive abilities that are common across engineering disciplines. Concurrently addressing learning outcomes in both cognitive ability and content mastery presents a substantial challenge for faculty curriculum committees. This paper outlines a process and offers tools to facilitate curriculum redesign for student learning.