Perhaps the reports of the death of the Sage-on-the-Stage are premature. Periodically defenders of the lecture approach to teaching rise up to be heard. For instance, continuing op-ed writer Molly Worthen produced “Lecture Me. Really,” a pro-lecture piece aimed at preserving a traditional tool in humanities pedagogy for the New York Times Sunday Review.

Worthen’s defense centers on several factors:

• Active learning is a “craze” that partakes of “that other great American pastime, populist resentment of experts.”
• Lectures are “essential for teaching the humanities most basic skills: comprehension and reasoning . . . the art of attention . . . the `building of an argument’ . . . .”
• Lectures are not always pure lectures and can include questioning.
• Lectures communicate “the emotional vitality of the intellectual endeavor.”
• Students synthesize the lecture into notes.
• Students learn critical thinking.

Despite Worthen’s insistence that “Today’s vogue for active learning is nothing new,” active learning as we know it came into the academy during the last decade of the Twentieth Century. Concerned with teaching, the lecture method primarily envisioned students as passive recipients of knowledge, while the key word in “active learning” is learning—focusing on what knowledge, skills, and values students gain in college courses. Twenty-five years with a growing reputation and body of research make active learning more than a “craze.”

Problems with Lecturing

One major problem with the lecture method is that it does not accomplish what Worthen claims as one of its virtues: it does not lead to students developing attention spans. As we emphasized in our New Forums publication Teaching Applied Creative Thinking (2013), Penner (1984) states an hour-long lecture “outlasts a student’s attention span by 40-50 minutes, so much of even a good lecture is lost. As Medina (2008) puts it, `Before the last quarter-hour is over in a typical presentation, people usually have checked out’” (7-8). In fact, later in Brain Rules (2008) Medina pegs the average student attention span somewhere around 12 minutes. Not only do students check out, but, more importantly, they retain almost none of what they hear in a lecture.

Why don’t students retain what they hear in lectures, even when they take notes? Retrieval. Moving information from one’s short-term memory to one’s long-term memory demands constant retrieval of the information. And retrieval happens in such active learning activities as group work and reflection. Instead of merely remembering or understanding, skills suggested by lecturing, students need to pull information from their memory and utilize it through one of the four revised Bloom’s higher-order thinking skills—applying, analyzing, evaluating, and creating.

Do lectures promote critical thinking? As Jake Barnes says in Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises (1926), “Isn’t it pretty to think so?” We ran across a study that claimed up until a few years ago 90% of all P-20 classes still relied primarily on the lecture method. According to Arum and Roksa’s Academically Adrift (2011), which used CLAP tests as the basis for its analysis, half of all college graduates demonstrated no significant improvement in their critical thinking or writing skills during their higher education years. Students can’t build arguments well or write them either.

Finally, the student’s synthesizing the lecture into notes does not necessarily rely on the delivery of the information by lecture. More important is how the student studies. Brown, Roediger, and McDaniel’s Make It Stick (2014) offers some good study habits to develop:

• Practice retrieving from memory vs. rereading the text or other instructional material—e.g., lecture.
• Space out the practice.
• Switch between topics (e.g., English and psychology).
• Make practice tests.
• Do rewrite by hand, not on your computer.

A Solution

Finally, let’s stop looking at this issue in black and white terms—you must use either the lecture method or active learning. Why not try the mini-lecture? Information can still be provided in 12-minute chunks, especially if you follow some guidelines:

• Lead the mini-lecture with a relevant story that both interests the audience and illustrates a key point.
• Focus the mini-lecture on the most fundamental and powerful concepts of the session.
• Intersperse the lecture, as Worthen suggests, with questions aimed at provoking discussion, and don’t ask for student participation—demand it.
• Build your active learning components of group work and written reflections out of your key mini-lecture points.
• Structure your pre or post-lecture instruction around the higher-order revised Bloom activities of applying, analyzing, evaluating, and creating.
• Try to develop a metacognitive awareness in your students of the best practices in effective learning.

Author

Charlie Sweet is currently Co-Director of the Teaching & Learning Center (2007+) at Eastern Kentucky University. Before going over to the dark side of administration, for 37 years he taught American Lit and Creative Writing in EKU’s Department of English & Theatre, where he also served as chair (2003-2006). Collabo-writing with Hal Blythe, he has published well over 1000 items, including 15 books; of his 11 books with New Forums. Meet Charlie.

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In the beginning of our tenure as directors of the Teaching & Learning Center, we were happy just to find facilitators for our professional learning communities (PLCs) and happier still when faculty and administrators signed up for them. Then reality set in. Most PLCs would finish with approximately half of those who originally signed up, and our cost (food, books, travel) didn’t seem entirely justified by what we were getting out of them.

That’s when we asked the question: what ARE we getting out of our PLCs? Numerically, we discovered that if we sponsored three PLCs per semester, every academic year we reached approximately 10% of our faculty (our programming reached 10% also, but some of those were also PLC participants).

Phase 1: Developing Products

In the beginning—Phase I–we had some really effective PLC products. Our creativity PLC, for instance, presented a plenary session at the annual state-sponsored conference on teaching and learning. That same PLC also spun off a minor in Applied Creative Thinking as well as a series of books for New Forums (e.g., Introduction to Applied Creative Thinking). The PLC we ran of Senate Bill 1 and seamless transitioning Common Core-raised students into higher education produced a highly effective piece of intellectual property, the embedded PLC. And the last two years we have run a PLC on metacognition that is helping us create a book for New Forums, It Works For Me, Metacognitively, as well as a repository for informative and instructional videos we call the Faculty Innovation Network (FIN).

Phase II: Administering Surveys

But what was the effect of the PLC on the individual participants? For Phase II we decided to create and administer a survey of participants, the Enhanced Professional Learning Community Evaluation Form. We created a five-point Likert Scale (ranging from “Strongly Agree” to “Strongly Disagree”) and asked each participant to rate seven statements:

1. I learned much from the scholarly component of my community.
2. I have a greater appreciation of the Scholarship of Teaching & Learning (SOTL) and am more willing to try it on my own.
3. I developed a real sense of community with my colleagues.
4. I have a greater sense of what my colleagues are trying to accomplish in their courses.
5. I will be able to use some things from this community in setting up my course goals and objectives, teaching strategies, and course assessment methods.
6. This community was well-facilitated.
7. I find myself more willing to try to create a student learning community within a course I teach.

In addition, we asked participants what they found most helpful and to suggest what could be improved/revised.

Phase III: Reevaluation

As our PLCs evolved, so too did our assessment of them. Now, as we enter Phase III, we find ourselves once again revising our evaluation form. Our main reason is that we want to reduce the form to its most fundamental and powerful concepts, and in so doing we have decided to focus on what we consider the main impact of the PLC, learning and application. So far, we have three basic questions:

1. What do you consider the most important thing you learned from the PLC?
2. How did you apply that insight to your teaching?
3. Have you seen a positive change in student learning based on that application?

Sure, the earlier questions about facilitation and sense of community are important, but less so.

The major thing we have learned from our experience with PLCs is that faculty are very busy. At a teaching-centered institution of higher learning that has a 4-4 load as average, faculty, especially the non-tenured ones who must demonstrate proficiency in teaching, scholarship, and service, want simpler, less time-consuming professional development, even when they are fascinated by the PLC. And since we try to obtain a 100% response rate to our PLC evaluations, the shorter we can make them, the more likely faculty are to respond. More importantly, as the assessment movement gains greater and greater traction, the most important thing on which we can focus is still student learning. No matter what we do in a PLC, if it doesn’t contribute to enhanced student learning, then we have not been effective.

After all, our unit’s motto is “Helping teachers help students learn deeply.”

Author

Dr. Russell Carpenter is director of the Noel Studio for Academic Creativity and Program Director of the Minor in Applied Creative Thinking at Eastern Kentucky University. He is also Assistant Professor of English. Dr. Carpenter has published on the topic of creative thinking, among other areas, including two texts by New Forums Press. In addition, he has taught courses in creative thinking in EKU’s Minor in Applied Creative Thinking, which was featured in the New York Times in February 2014. Meet Russell.

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A few years ago our state adopted the Common Core Standards and the legislature mandated that all state universities had to align college-level courses to these standards. Our Center of Teaching and Learning (CTL) was charged by our university to figure out how to implement Senate Bill 1 on the campus. In short, the problem was: how do we get various groups ranging from math to social sciences to teacher preparation to come together and develop a delivery plan?

Traditional Professional Learning Communities

Our solution was our go-to process for cross-campus collaboration, the professional learning community. Years ago we attended the Lilly Conference on Teaching and Learning, where we had met Milt Cox (2004), who created the faculty learning community and advocated a few basic principles about his invention:

• Size: 6-15 members
• Frequency: frequent, regular meetings
• Focus: teaching and learning
• Method: active learning principles
• End Product: something tangible to be implemented
• Dissemination: results should be presented to the campus as well as national audience.

Related Reading: Achieving Excellence in Teaching

A Brand of Professional Learning Community

We always believed that since learning communities can include faculty, administrators, and staff members they should be called professional learning communities. In addition, after a decade of PLC experiences, we’ve made a few other changes to Cox’s principles:

• Size: While 15 members seems high for a successful collaboration (think of brainstorming rules), participants attrit at about a 25% rate, and not everybody shows up for every meeting.
• Frequency: Unless PLCs meet at a two-weeks apart maximum, members will lose interest in even the most compelling subject. Likewise, meeting every week dulls the interest level. Besides, most people are so busy that once every two weeks is about all the time they can give. Two weeks between meetings also gives participants plenty of time to work on their assignments.
• Focus: PLCs can be used to solve any problem on campus. We have run them for the housing department, and we once helped our College of Education use a PLC to transfer a national journal. Despite Cox’s desire to center on teaching and learning, we’ve found a better focus is scholarship. Almost every PLC we do begins with an academic text. For instance, we so loved John Medina’s Brain Rules that we developed a PLC around it. When we facilitated our creativity PLC, we chose Erica McWilliam’s The Creative Workforce and Daniel Pink’s A Whole New Mind. Sometimes no relevant book exists, so, for example, when we started a PLC on metacognition, we actually had to research the subject and provide the participants with a notebook of found scholarship.
• End Product: Traditionally we have linked PLCs to scholarship. Members are encouraged to create a publication out of their PLC product. For instance, last year we ran a PLC on flipping the classroom wherein we asked participants to submit articles for a book we were writing for New Forums, It Works For Me, Flipping the Classroom (2015). Another time our creativity PLC presented at a plenary session of a state conference.
• Dissemination: Books and conferences aren’t the only way to publicize the work of a PLC. For our common core PLC, we not only provided syllabi in nine separate areas (e.g., English, physics, and communications), but published an article about a specific form of the learning community, the embedded professional learning community, that we invented to study and implement the problem.

Related Reading: Faculty Development: Consultation and Classroom Observation

How to Choose Subjects

How do we choose a subject worthy of a PLC? Sometimes an administrator faculty member comes to us with a book, such as Derek Bok’s Our Underachieving Colleges and even volunteers to facilitate. Reading the Chronicle of Higher Education, the Wall Street Journal, or even a popular magazine, we run across a book that seems promising, we purchase a copy. Over the years we average reading twenty such books a year—-Borrowing Brilliance, Blink, Smart World, Switch, Academically Adrift—and decide their application to our faculty is important. Sometimes the Provost invites a speaker for her Professional Development Series, and so that the speaker’s presentation doesn’t become a forgotten one-shot, we continue its relevance through a PLC. This semester, for example, the Provost has invited famed metacognition expert Saundra McGuire to campus, and so we will have either a spring or a next fall PLC based on her book.

We also have a group of pedagogical ambassadors on campus we call the Faculty Innovators. Each summer we hold a retreat, and one of the topics discussed is always future PLCs. This semester, for instance, one of our innovators last summer was fascinated with Mindset, Stereotyping, and Grit—guess what he’s facilitating a PLC on this semester?

Next time we’ll examine other aspects of PLCs.

Author

Ph.D Hal Blythe writes literary criticism to mystery stories. In addition to the eleven books he’s published with New Forums, Hal has collaborated on four books on a variety of subjects, over 1000 pieces of fiction/nonfiction, and a host of television scripts and interactive mysteries performed by their repertory company. He is currently co-director of the Teaching and Learning Center for Eastern Kentucky University. Meet Hal Blythe.

 

 

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So now that you have a Center of Teaching and Learning (CTL) to run, you’re going to have to decide what kind of programming to offer. Your supervisor has provided you some input and so has your advisory board, but there’s one more step you could take. When we took over our CTL, we got together with Institutional Research to create a survey, which we emailed to the entire faculty. What we desired to know was what kind of programming the faculty needed and wanted. In our case, the majority of answers centered on recent technology and help with scholarship.

Programming can be complex because CTLs usually serve varying audiences. Think of the possibilities:

• New full-time faculty
• New adjunct faculty
• Full-time faculty
• Others: Teachings Assistants, Specialized Class Instructors, Administrators.

As a result, CTLs must plan the programming to serve all groups. Some of the programs will overlap, but all will not.

Related Reading: Faculty Development: Consultation and Classroom Observation

Program Type: Informative Sessions

For us, since our bosses and advisory board prioritize new faculty orientation, we offer fall programming that introduces this cohort to important services on campus that we didn’t have time to explore during new faculty orientation. Most of these topics are things faculty members really need to know in order to be successful, and the programming also serves to emphasize that fact.

For instance, we began this fall’s programming on the third day of the semester with a session on the university’s academic integrity policy, moderated by a lawyer from that office. Faculty members can encounter cheating from day one, so it’s important to begin with this offering.

Our second presentation is not so time sensitive nor would the knowledge of its contents be mandatory. We have a representative from the university’s co-op and career services office discuss what they can do to help students. Faculty are encouraged to make sure their students also receive this information as co-op is often a great first step toward a permanent job. We offer our next session on teaching abroad opportunities. For faculty on nine-month contracts, this program offers not only summer employment, but a chance to go overseas. During the semester we also provide informative sessions by the office of Undergraduate Research and Creative Endeavors, University-funded scholarship and grant opportunities, accommodating students with disabilities, dealing with distressed students, administering the IDEA (a mandatory campus-wide evaluation of teaching).

Complementing these “things it would help you to know” sessions are our workshops, and we try to offer at least one a month. With our advisory board and with occasional input from the Faculty Senate and the Chairs Association, we pick from a combination of needed and hot topics. This fall, for instances, we are holding sessions on the following topics:

• Contributing to the new Kentucky Journal of Undergraduate Research
• Beyond Brainstorming: Teaching Effective Design and Creativity
• Making Simple, Polished Videos for Your Classroom
• Teaching and Learning with Social Media
• Best Practices for Peer Observation of Teaching, and
• Working Smarter Through SOTL.

Program Type: Workshops

Workshops last longer than purely informative sessions—usually one and one-half to three hours and contain more interactive materials. Participants may learn about editing videos, the best way to have a peer observe your teaching, how to tie a SOTL research project to your teaching, or even how various social media forms can be incorporated into your teaching. While the informational sessions rarely change, new workshops are added each semester.

Through trial and error, we’ve found another type of event—administration-sponsored ones. What got us started was talking with a vice-president for student affairs who wanted a forum to discuss the typical EKU student. For instance, because the last three University presidents and four provosts want to build a rapport with the faculty, we have hosted what we call Fireside Chats. Basically, any administrator sits in from of our meeting room’s fireplace and runs a type of press conference. Our current president so likes the Fireside Chat concept that he is running six this semester.

Related Reading: How to Communicate Best Practices in Higher Ed Pedagogy

Characteristics of Successful Programs

Over the years we’ve figured out a few guiding principles for successful programming:

• Respond to the desires of faculty and administrators.
• Keep it current. Schedule sessions that provide unique perspectives on current topics or new takes on traditional topics. Faculty members want to know that what they’re hearing is the latest and greatest.
• Connect. Help faculty connect sessions with others on related or complementary topics. Sessions can build on one another to provide a more cohesive experience for new and returning faculty.
• Provide food (“If you feed them, they will come”). Our Fireside Chats normally occur around 8:30 so we offer a healthy continental breakfast with a much coffee as they can drink. Other sessions start at 11:00 or 11:15 (depending on the class pattern) so we set up a lunch table.
• Advertise. New faculty receive a notebook with all of this information as well as personalized email for each session. The sessions are also listed on our website, and notice is made eight days out and one day out on the campus email system.
• Follow up each session with an electronic evaluation (more on this another time). Workshop evaluations ask about application to the faculty member’s course.
• Make participants sign in and supply their email address. This information is crucial for assessment, and the federal government requires records on food distribution.
• Develop interactive sessions. All event presenters are provided with a list of tips that range from how to structure a PowerPoint to how to be maximally interactive.
• Work on making all events part of a for-credit program (e.g., certificate). This concept is another we will expand on later.

Author

Dr. Russell Carpenter is director of the Noel Studio for Academic Creativity and Program Director of the Minor in Applied Creative Thinking at Eastern Kentucky University. He is also Assistant Professor of English. Dr. Carpenter has published on the topic of creative thinking, among other areas, including two texts by New Forums Press. In addition, he has taught courses in creative thinking in EKU’s Minor in Applied Creative Thinking, which was featured in the New York Times in February 2014. Meet Russell.

 

 

 

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Years ago before our university even had a Center of Teaching and Learning (CTL), it ran a faculty consultation process. One faculty member directed a cadre of consultants, and each of six consultants worked with two faculty members over sixteen weeks to improve the quality of one’s instruction. Unfortunately, the funding dried up, and faculty became disenchanted with devoting an entire semester to intense observing, consulting, formal assessments, and even videotaping, so the program ended.

Most lists of current services offered by CTLs billboard consultation and classroom observation. While the service is valuable, administrators, especially chairs, occasionally view it like hospital triage—please fix my “broken” faculty member. Sometimes these services are performed for entire departments, but most often a trained CTL specialist talks with an individual about pedagogical matters, serving as a coach.

Mini-Consultations

Now we provide what we call mini-consultations. Most faculty don’t want to spend a lot of time working on their teaching no matter how much they have been encouraged by chairs, promotion and tenure committees, and even deans. They are willing, however, to devote a small amount of time out of personal interest or academic survival.

Most often faculty needing help have identified a specific problem they wish to work on. They start with an email or by simply dropping in. Some faculty hang around after a workshop to ask for specific advice about one aspect of their teaching. Occasionally, we will be visited by a chair who has a faculty member whose assessment scores (we use the IDEA form) are not up to par.

While consultation and observation are most often connected, they are not always so. Recently, we had a faculty member drop in to chat about the whole idea of deep learning. We offered a general explanation and even gave her a book explaining some step that help students learn deeply. When another faculty member asked about the same problem, we saw the writing on the wall. The next semester we provided a professional learning community on the topic.

Related Reading: How to Communicate Best Practices in Higher Ed Pedagogy

Classroom Observations

Classroom observations are more complex as they usually demand three steps:

1. Initial Meeting
2. Actual Observation
3. Follow-up Conversation.

In the initial meeting the CTL specialist talks with the faculty member to determine what the instructor wants. Some faculty are very specific. One of our earliest such experiences was visiting the class of a professor who specialized in question & answer active learning but had little wait time after his questions. We actually timed the responses and found them less than seven seconds. The initial meeting also establishes any secondary concerns and sets up a specific class time to visit.

For the actual observation we have evolved a rubric that we provide to the instructor beforehand. We developed our rubric by starting with Chism’s Peer Review of Teaching (1999), moving to an experimental classroom, developing a rubric through a professional learning community, and finally synthesizing all our research into Achieving Excellence in Teaching (2014). In fact, that book became a self-help guide because we built in an assessment structure we call R.A.T.E.—a Rubric for Achieving Teaching Excellence. At the end of the book we even provide an appendix with rubrics available for selves, colleagues, and students, evaluating everything from an instructor’s disposition to his/her ability to teach creatively.

Related Reading: Achieving Excellence in Teaching

One tip we should suggest for evaluators is be the first to arrive at the observed class and the last to leave. Strike up conversations with students. One of the biggest problems with classroom observations is they tend to provide snapshots of the instructor, and as an observer you want to know how regular are the practices and techniques you are watching. Gaining the trust of the students allows you to ask about the typicality of what you just observed and make better judgments about their typicality.

Even the best trained observers need to be reminded of other potential flaws in the system beyond their own bias (e.g., prejudice against any form of lecture). The Hawthorne Effect recognizes that those being knowingly observed will modify their behavior toward what is perceived as what the observer wants. Of course, if that new pedagogy is positive, then the teacher’s behavior is being modified effectively. Sometimes called the Heisenberg Effect, the principle states that the very act of being observed changes the normal dynamics. Our feeling is that if both the observer and observed are aware of these problems, something positive can still be gained.

In the follow-up conversation the observer details what has been learned about why the observer was there—e.g., are my classroom presentations organized? Almost always more is learned than what one was looking for. In fact, after thirty years of classroom observations we have learned several things:

• In an active learning era too many faculty rely on class-long lectures.
• Almost no faculty member is truly organized (see our article on keeping it C.R.I.S.P.).
• No faculty member is such an effective teacher that s/he cannot learn something from being observed.
• More than half of those observed don’t really like another authoritative presence in their classroom (Ego? Academic freedom? Inability to collaborate?).
• After only five minutes in a classroom, a trained observer can make a fairly accurate judgment on the overall effectiveness of the observed faculty member.

In short, we have found that much can be accomplished in a minimum of contact with faculty if consultation and observation are well designed and executed.

Author

Ph.D Hal Blythe writes literary criticism to mystery stories. In addition to the eleven books he’s published with New Forums, Hal has collaborated on four books on a variety of subjects, over 1000 pieces of fiction/nonfiction, and a host of television scripts and interactive mysteries performed by their repertory company. He is currently co-director of the Teaching and Learning Center for Eastern Kentucky University. Meet Hal Blythe.

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We recently explained the importance of space and instructor placement in Pedagogy Day, the opening day of our innovated New Faculty Orientation. But now that we’ve explained the medium, what is the message? How would you communicate to new faculty the best practices in pedagogy?

Our fundamental and powerful concept here is that it must be modeled, and that is especially true of our mentor from the middle approach. As we say in Teaching Applied Creative Thinking (2013), “A body of research has established the efficacy of the mentor as model” (58). Another way of looking at this approach comes from an allied field. As Hal and I point out in our creative writing guidebook, Options (2014), showing is a more effective storytelling method than telling, so rather than lecture, we stage a scene.

Related Reading: Innovating Faculty Development Lessons From Pedagogy Day

The three of us begin the workshop in the middle of the room surrounded by tables with eight people sitting at each table. Sitting on a flip chart as the newbies enter the room is a poster bearing the inscription EXCELLENCE IN TEACHING IS JOB ONE, which is also at the bottom of every email they have received from us since their hiring. As the mentor from the middle is an active learning approach, we keep lecturing at a minimum (i.e., the mini-lecture) and focus on 1) questions and answers, 2) group work, and 3) reflection.

Questions and Answers Regarding Deep Learning

As we start the workshop, here are some of our favorite interactive questions:

1. How many years of experience in college teaching, part-time or full-time, do you have?
2. Have you ever experienced any of the following elements of pedagogical training: supervised training, a graduate course in pedagogy, publication of a SOTL article, or attendance at a pedagogical conference?

A discussion of these questions usually makes the point that few new faculty members have had much professional development.

Next we like another big question: If excellence in teaching is our main job, what’s our goal with that teaching? What we aim at through discussion is to get around to the concept of deep learning—we want to try to foster learning that endures.

That question is usually followed with another: what can we do as instructors to aid deep learning in our students? The ensuing discussion usually segues into our stressing the importance of the Four Rs of Deep Learning:

• Receive information
• Retrieve Information
• Rate information, and
• Reflect upon how the new information relates to old knowledge.

Facilitate Group Work

At this point we get into the meat of our presentation. As research indicates that the most effective learning in group work begins with individual effort, we ask each participant to consider two alliterative questions: what are the top ten attitudes and the top ten strategies for terrific teachers? Each new faculty member must use the paper provided and jot down five answers for each question. Then, we pair & share as everyone must collaborate with one other person at the table to come up with a single top five list for both categories. Finally, the entire table of eight must negotiate with each other and publish their two decided-upon lists on a flip chart we have provided for each table.

Encourage Reflection

At this point we have anywhere from five to eight flip charts filled with information. We ask the attendees to take some time to look around at the different lists. Then, using the higher-order Bloom skills of analyzing and evaluating what they see, through frequency or any other research method they deem applicable, create two new top five lists. We then select various members around the room to argue the merits of the traits upon their own new lists. Eventually, we try to build a consensus.

Related Reading: 3 Principles for Innovating The Faculty Development Experience

Final Thoughts

Throughout this workshop the three of us constantly circulate throughout the room, looking in on individuals and groups, making suggestions to help new faculty refine their lists, acting as both advocate and devil’s advocate. Sure, we know what the research has shown the top traits to be—we literally wrote not the book, but a book on the subject—but what we are most looking for is engagement, 100% engagement from the group.

Mentoring from the middle, you see, is not just a concept, but an overall methodology that works, and we’ve found no better way to get this approach across than to model it.

Author

Charlie Sweet is currently Co-Director of the Teaching & Learning Center (2007+) at Eastern Kentucky University. Before going over to the dark side of administration, for 37 years he taught American Lit and Creative Writing in EKU’s Department of English & Theatre, where he also served as chair (2003-2006). Collabo-writing with Hal Blythe, he has published well over 1000 items, including 15 books; of his 11 books with New Forums. Meet Charlie.

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According to a 2005 survey by Sorcinelli et al as reported in Creating the Future of Faculty Development (2006), respondents identified eight key issues for CTLs:

• Teaching for student-centered learning
• New faculty development
• Integrating technology into traditional teaching and learning settings
• Active, inquiry-based, or problem-based learning
• Assessment of student learning outcomes
• Multiculturalism and diversity related to teaching
• Scholarship of Teaching
• Writing Across the Curriculum (p. 72).

In A Guide to Faculty Development (2010), Virginia Lee compiles a list of ten programs/services that can most impact an institution:

• Workshops
• Individual consultations
• Classroom observations
• Orientations
• Grants
• Faculty fellows
• Teaching circles
• Faculty learning communities
• Management of grant-funded projects
• Engagement in national projects (pp. 26-28).

So the question becomes, what programs and services should your CTL provide for your campus?

Related Reading: Questions On Center of Teaching and Learning Innovation

Review and Advice

In previous posts we have stressed two major factors in determining what to offer:

• What does your boss want?
• What does your advisory board want?

And now we’d like to suggest a third component. What would you like to do? More specifically, given your institution’s funding of you, the space offered, the support given, and even your allotted time, what are you capable of doing? Our friend and one-time director of a CTL at the University of Oklahoma, Dee Fink, did a presentation here last year and recommended that every CTL be funded at ½ to 1% of faculty salaries and benefits of the group it is being asked to serve. In reality, we doubt many CTLs receive this much University “grace,” so as director, your job comes down to balancing the support realities, your boss’s desire, and your board’s advice. Our advice is two-part.

One, favor your boss’ wishes.

Two, most schools have adopted as their unofficial motto today “Do more with less.” We advise the minimalist approach. It is better, especially when starting out, to do a few programs well than to do a lot of programs in mediocre fashion. As you become successful, you can then argue for more support to increase your programming. Similarly, if you think you are trying to do too much, consider cutting back.

Related Reading: Why Centers of Teaching and Learning Have Advisory Boards

Actual Programming

The program that we believe offers the potential for success and saturation is orientation. In previous posts we have talked about how we offer orientation programs to four groups:

• New tenure-track Faculty (approximately 50/year)
• Part-time Faculty (approximately 75/year)
• University Orientation Faculty (approximately 60/year)
• Graduate Teaching Assistants (approximately 40/year).

Over the past ten years we have discovered that our usual workshops/roundtables draw over an academic year about 10% of the faculty. We’re not positive of the national average, but we know from sitting on the state’s faculty development workgroup that our figure is consistent with other institutions of higher learning in the commonwealth. Our university has approximately 600 full-time instructors, so while we may reach only 50 each year through orientation, we reach 50 new individuals each year. In addition, we have the participation of the other teaching groups. If you wish to effect a culture shift on your campus as we did with our EXCELLENCE IN TEACHING IS JOB ONE initiative, orientation is a good priority.

A second offering that satisfies bosses, boards, and faculty is informational roundtables. When we started, our boss thought it important that we offer a fall series of roundtables for new faculty, highlighting basic informational services—i.e., campus services of which faculty need to be aware. Thus, once a week every fall we have presentations on the University’s academic integrity program, Co-op, opportunities in teaching abroad, mentoring student scholars, counselling center, the 911 program, accommodating students with disabilities, and even grants. All of these programs present key information faculty must know—e.g., pregnancy is now part of Title IX, attendance must be taken, crimes must be reported. What the faculty don’t know can hurt them and, more importantly, their employer. What we are doing is converting all these presentations to podcasts, but that’s the subject of another post.

A third offering is workshops, some which we do every fall and others that we rotate through or add in. For instance, this fall we are providing workshops in a new journal of undergraduate research, emerging technologies, teaching effective design and creativity, the IDEA form (offered every fall because the University has chosen to use this assessment instrument), making polished videos, teaching with social media, best practices in classroom observation, and working smarter through the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SOTL).

A fourth key service deal with consultation and classroom observation, but that, too, is a post for next time.

Author

Dr. Russell Carpenter is director of the Noel Studio for Academic Creativity and Program Director of the Minor in Applied Creative Thinking at Eastern Kentucky University. He is also Assistant Professor of English. Dr. Carpenter has published on the topic of creative thinking, among other areas, including two texts by New Forums Press. In addition, he has taught courses in creative thinking in EKU’s Minor in Applied Creative Thinking, which was featured in the New York Times in February 2014. Meet Russell.

 

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In Creating the Future of Faculty Development (2006), Sorcinelli et al posit that faculty development has “entered a new age—the Age of the Network. Faculty, developers, and institutions alike are facing heightened expectations, and meeting these expectations will require a collaborative effort among all stakeholders in higher education” (pp. 4-5). New faculty developers need to recognize the importance of this observation as they go about building a center of teaching and learning (CTL). One area in which the Age of the Network comes up is with advisory boards.

Why Have An Advisory Board?

Does your CTL have an advisory board? If it does, you might start to think about why the board exists; if it doesn’t have one, you might consider adding one. If nothing else, advisory boards create a sense of ownership, of shared governance, and of a cross-stitching of campus constituents. Traditionally, advisory boards serve two purposes. They function as a two-way highway for CTLs—sometimes the information comes in and sometimes it goes out. Effective CTLs make use of both functions.

Advisory Boards Provide Input

When we began, we thought an advisory board was a necessity. While we knew we had to follow rule number one and do what our boss told us, we knew that we also had to address the needs of our constituents—faculty, departments, deans, and we would include our provost. In one sense it didn’t matter what national trends told us what CTLs were doing, what we had to do was to respond to the immediate and specific needs of our folks. If the University developed a Quality Enhancement Program centering on creative thinking, it was up to us to offer programming—workshops, professional learning communities, and informational sessions—in support. If the faculty senate were taking up a new policy, we could do research for them on the area using our graduate assistant. If the Chairs Association asked us to tackle an area (e.g., the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning), we did.

One different avenue of aid we established early was the book. If the University had a problem area, we wrote a book on it. Back a few years ago, for example, the University was trying to define the relationship between a professor’s traditional duties of scholarship and instruction. We ended up doing two collections through New Forums on the topic, It Works For Me as a Scholar Teacher and It Works For Me Becoming a Publishing Scholar/Researcher. Of course, technology has advanced since then; were we aiming at the same goal now, we might create an e-book, open our own You Tube channel, or develop an electronic repository for the materials.

Advisory Boards Provide Output

Advisory Boards also serve to disseminate information. In the beginning when we needed publicity, we had our board members deliver the information to their constituents. Again, over the years technology has changed many things. We now have our own website to advertise professional development opportunities, and we can even target various groups on campus (e.g., new faculty). We can use the University’s daily information e-system, and Rusty’s Social Media Committee has become quite proficient at tweeting key events before, during, and after. As we now speak regularly with the provost and president, we can usually persuade their offices to disperse any information.

The Future—To Board Or Not To Board?

At this point a good question might be: has technological progress replaced the need for advisory boards? Even if we believed the answer was yes, we would till argue for employing advisory boards because of the notion of shared governance, and that impression is one worth creating at first. Also, you have the option to convene Advisory Boards when you need to solve problems, for issues that warrant face-to-face communication. Down the road you may find less need to convene the advisory board as often, but keeping the board works for another important reason—expertise. Not everyone on your board has the same basic interests and backgrounds. For example, at a meeting this morning of a sub-advisory board, we discovered that one of the members was quite proficient at assessment and was very willing to help us draw up an instrument to evaluate our professional learning communities. Another member suddenly displayed a background in pedagogical software. We’ll bet at future meetings we continue to discover our members have other amazing knowledge and talent.

One final point. Having done the research on brainstorming, and having the experience of facilitating many campus committees, organizations, and work groups, we’re great believers in small groups—say, no larger than seven—accomplishing more. With seven members you have time for everyone’s input, and you will have all the input you need.

Author

Ph.D Hal Blythe writes literary criticism to mystery stories. In addition to the eleven books he’s published with New Forums, Hal has collaborated on four books on a variety of subjects, over 1000 pieces of fiction/nonfiction, and a host of television scripts and interactive mysteries performed by their repertory company. He is currently co-director of the Teaching and Learning Center for Eastern Kentucky University. Meet Hal Blythe.

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You might think that with our past two posts being on Pedagogy Day that we had pretty much covered the subject, but innovation has struck again, spurred by necessity. Every year our university expands the population of those needing an introduction to pedagogy, and this year was no exception. In addition to new faculty and new part-time faculty, we were asked to conduct a workshop for instructors of the University’s orientation class for undeclared majors and another for graduate students who teach—TAs.

In addition, the more we research pedagogy, the more we realize what a wide field it is. Nine years ago when we taught our first workshop, we focused solely on the top ten strategies for terrific teachers. By 2013 when we were writing our Achieving Excellence in Teaching: A Self-Help Guide (2014), we had broadened our pedagogical scope to include not just Strategies, but Dispositions, a term favored by our co-writer Bill Phillips because of his background in educational research. Recently, in training the instructors of the undeclared majors course, GSD 101, we found ourselves getting into a third category, Values, and—again because of research in psychology—even renaming our Dispositions category Attitudes.

Related Reading: Innovating Faculty Development Lessons From Pedagogy Day

As we discussed these three categories in a live session last week with new faculty, we found participants questioning how to include all three in a single approach or methodology. Ever innovating, we decided to add a fourth category, Paradigm. Moreover, because this week we were facilitating the workshop for TAs, we decided to create a single form that would serve both as a worksheet and their notes. While we could have placed all the needed information on a single sheet that we just handed them (or crafted a PowerPoint), we knew from research that our best chance for deep learning to occur necessitated several things:

• Participants had to receive the information and work on it themselves in trying to understand it (vs. simply being told a la handouts or PowerPoints);
• Participants had to retrieve the information as often as possible;
• Participants had to rate the new information; and
• Participants had to reflect upon the new information.

The Chart

We ended up creating a pedagogical chart that we handed out to the participants at the beginning of the workshop:

EXCELLENT TEACHING

	VALUES	ATTITUDES	STRATEGIES	PARADIGM
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.

After bringing up the recent criticism by the Association of American Colleges and Universities (AACU) that graduate schools fail to provide students with pedagogic training, we asked these would-be teachers some research questions of our own:

• How many of you have ever taught before in a supervised program?
• How many of you have attended a pedagogy—not disciplinary—conference?
• How many of you have read a book on pedagogy? Article?
• How many of you have been to a pedagogy event before today?
• How many of you can define pedagogy?

A subsequent discussion on their answers validated the AACU’s major point. We then asked each participant to employ Individual Retrieval to draw upon his/her positive educational experiences and fill in as many of the fifteen members of the first three columns and five rows as they could. After a few minutes of retrieval, they were asked to Pair & Share—i.e., use collaboration with another table member to finish the chart. Finally, we asked each table to select a scribe, discuss the paired charts, and, using an extra EXCELLENT TEACHING form we had provided, come up with a new chart in which the 15 members were ordered as to importance (adding the notion of importance forces the participants not just to list, but to argue for relative worth).

Related Reading: 3 Principles for Innovating The Faculty Development Experience

DISCUSSION

Their charts filled, we started by inquiring as to what values were deemed most important; to keep track, we wrote their suggestions on a white board/flip chart. Values such as excellence, honesty, and drive showed up. We repeated the process for attitudes with passion (interesting, enthusiasm), caring, and rapport dominating. The chief strategies followed with organization and setting a high bar receiving the most votes.

As the highest element upon Bloom’s revised taxonomy is creating, we next asked them to synthesize the three columns in order to develop a pedagogy. Only a few knew the concept of active learning, but at least the lecture/sage on the stage was not an approach to which they wished to adhere—i.e., they had rated the material. We barely had time to introduce the mentor from the middle methodology/paradigm before our hour expired.

By that time, however, they had their original EXCELLENT TEACHING form which they had been revising as we went over the material. In an ideal world we would have had them reflect upon what they had learned, but ideal worlds are not created in an hour. However, we do have a survey we can email them that contains some reflective questions.

Author

Charlie Sweet is currently Co-Director of the Teaching & Learning Center (2007+) at Eastern Kentucky University. Before going over to the dark side of administration, for 37 years he taught American Lit and Creative Writing in EKU’s Department of English & Theatre, where he also served as chair (2003-2006). Collabo-writing with Hal Blythe, he has published well over 1000 items, including 15 books; of his 11 books with New Forums. Meet Charlie.

 

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