20: Transforming a Teaching Culture Through Peer Mentoring: Connecticut College's Johnson Teaching Seminar for Incoming Faculty (original) (raw)
Related papers
Faculty Development in Community Colleges: Challenges and Opportunities in Teaching the Teachers
Brock Education Journal, 2010
This article stems from a qualitative inquiry research project that examined the significant experiences of adult educators. For this article we explore the experiences of our faculty educator participants working within the community college context and examine the ways in which their practice connects to faculty development literature. Key insights gleaned from this research highlight both challenges and opportunities that college faculty developers face today. Our findings call for community college leaders and teachers to more effectively explore the ways in which personal, professional, and institutional epistemologies interact in order to better support learning.
2003
This study focused on the nature and formation of a professional identity for the community college professoriate. In late 2000, a random national sample of more than 1,500 community college faculty were surveyed on their professional practices and attitudes. This survey, which contained over 200 items, revealed that the community college professoriate grew not only more diverse but also more disparate since 1975, when a similar survey was undertaken. Survey data showed that faculty differed significantly on a wide variety of measures according to their personal and professional characteristics, including their instructional practices, levels of professional involvement, and use of professional reference groups. Some groups, most notably full-timers and doctoral seekers, demonstrated higher degrees of commitment to teaching, to their profession, and to their institution. However, these same groups also reported closer ties with four-year colleges and universities, a finding that contradicts the notion that community college instruction has developed as a professional practice sui generis. In conclusion, the community college professoriate has become increasingly differentiated at the same time the community college mission has grown ever more complex; however, it is not clear that the institutional mission and instructor practice have developed with close regard for one another. (Author/NB) Reproductions supplied by EDRS are the best that can be made from the original document.
Faculty Development: Getting the Sermon Beyond the Choir
Proceedings of the 1998 Annual American Society …, 1998
A reform movement has been active in higher education for several decades. The proponents of change argue that the traditional teacher-centered approach to classroom instruction, which emphasizes lecturing, individual effort, and competition for grades, is not particularly effective for promoting learning and skill development. They claim that a more balanced approach incorporating active, inductive (discovery), and cooperative learning improves the chances of achieving almost every conceivable educational objective, including depth of learning, length of information retention, development of problem-solving, communication, and teamwork skills, attitudes toward subjects and increased motivation to learn them, and self-confidence. They offer an impressive array of learning theory-based and classroom research results to support these claims.
The Community College Professor: Teacher and Scholar. ERIC Digest
1986
The emphasis in community colleges on teaching as a primary faculty responsibility has frequently caused classroom teaching to be divorced from scholarship. Although the teaching role is not a necessary condition for successful scholarship, some form of scholarship appears to be a necessary condition for successful teaching over an extended period of time. Therefore, the stress on teaching in community colleges may have actually led to a decline in the quality of teaching. The facts that new colleges are not being opened, that enrollments are declining, that funds for professional development are scarce, and that community college faculty are aging all reinforce the importance of scholarship as a means of enhancing faculty members' performance and image as professionals. While at the university level scholarship is equated with research, at the community college level a more liberal definition of scholarship should be employed, including professional activity, research/publication, artistic endeavors, engagement with novel ideas, community service, and pedagogy. The systematic processes involved in each of these activities will do much to strengthen teaching and combat boredom and burnout. Though examples of schoIar-teachers exist on every campus, there is a need for the formal encouragement, support, and reward that would institutionalize the role of the scholar-teacher, and, in doing so, revitalize the teaching role. (EJV)
Helping new faculty get off to a good start
Proceedings of the 2000 Annual ASEE …, 2000
College teaching may be the only skilled profession that does not routinely provide training to its novice practitioners. New faculty members at most universities have traditionally had to learn by themselves how to plan research projects, identify and cultivate funding sources, write proposals and get them funded, attract and supervise graduate students, and present their research results in an effective manner. They have also had to teach themselves how to devise stimulating lectures and rigorous but fair assignments and tests, how to motivate students to want to learn and how to make them active participants in the learning process, and how to help them develop critical problem-solving, communication, and teamwork skills. Perhaps hardest of all, they have had to figure out how to balance the competing time demands of teaching, research, and other professional and personal responsibilities. Learning all these things by trial and error usually takes years. Some new faculty members eventually learn them; many others never do and either fail to earn tenure or spend their careers as unproductive researchers and/or ineffective teachers.
Selected Characteristics of New Faculty: Implications for Faculty Development
To Improve the Academy, 1991
Faculty new to The Ohio State University take part in a New Faculty Orientation Program. Prior to the 1990 orientation, The Center for Teaching Excellence (CTE) surveyed the new faculty members as part of our continuing faculty development effort. The survey questionnaire sought to acquire data on new faculty expectations and needs, with emphasis on background information, concerns about professional well-being, and specific expectations about support for their teaching. The survey considered several variables and their interactions: (a) personal characteristics, such as age and gender; and (b) professional characteristics, such as predicted or anticipated percentage of total appointment designated for teaching, advising responsibilities, and previous teaching experience. This paper reviews the method of the study and summarizes the fmdings of the new faculty survey. One should note that, while these fmdings are applicable to similar research universities, they are not as generalizable to all college and university settings, although other studies suggest there are similar themes across a variety of academic environments (Sorcinelli,
Emerging Trends in College Teaching for the 21st Century: A Message from the Editors
Journal on Excellence in College Teaching, 1993
Over the last 30 years, the role of teaching in academe has been ambiguous. At both established and developing universities, faculty attitudes and activities came to be shaped by the demands of, and rewards for, discovery scholarship. At two-and four-year colleges, heavy teaching assignments stifled pedagogical innovation. Faculty with an interest in teaching became confused and frustrated by the conflicting messages of mission statements and reward structures. In the narrow confines of discipline, specialization, and department, the community nourished by teaching disappeared; professors isolated their classrooms and were left to pour content into students. Dialogue and collaboration around teaching dwindled. Amazingly, through it all, some faculty, as individuals-as loners-maintained their interest in and love for teaching. And a few individuals, programs, and colleges developed and published their teaching innovations.
1995
Teaching in colleges is marked by historic paradox: though institutions constantly talk up its importance, they evaluate faculty primarily on the basis of scholarly achievements outside the classroom. Teaching is what almost every professor does, but it seems to suffer from that very commonness. It occupies the greatest amount of most professors' time, but rarely operates at the highest level of competence. There seems to be an ingrained academic reluctance to regard teaching in the same way the profession regards every other set of skills: as something that can be taught. Professors who take painstaking care for method within their discipline of chemistry, history, or psychology, for example, all too often are unreflective when it comes to teaching.