Welcoming Faculty by Meeting Their Specific Disciplinary Needs

This POD session I attended provided several good strategies for centers to encourage participation by specific disciplines. Most faculty development opportunities are created with a general audience in mind. Some faculty do not see how these broad ideas apply to their teaching.

IUPUI is moving to a more discipline-based approach for the following reasons:

• Broad impact
• Increase relevance
• Respond to administrative feedback

A general center's approach ideas

• Cooperative learning
• Pedagogical language
• Come to us meetings, our center's area
• Get a faculty member “plant” to help to spark discussion (new faculty with veteran faculty) and facilitated discipline-specific ideas and questions.
• Tend to fill all the time with content…. And little time for reflection and application for their discipline
• Much of the language comes from education and philosophy
• Broad general examples
• State with learning principle then apply to content
• Marketing programming to a broad audience

Discipline-based approach

• Cooperative learning in the discipline
• Examples provided for in the discipline
• Identify culture, understood ideas, use discipline-specific language. Use discipline-specific vocabulary, define or avoid using unfamiliar terms.
• Go to their areas, meeting to share strategies based on their way of teaching
• Meet in the environment used in the workshop to model the topic, i.e lecture-auditorium, hands-on-clinical or shop, etc.
• Give them the tools and resources for their discipline
• Co-facilitate with a member from the discipline
• In larger group workshops, have disciplines sit together for great discussion and application.
• Examples that use disciplinary content
• Start with problem in the content then give general principle
• Customizing the programming to disciplinary audiences.

In a Discipline Cultural Experiment...

Non-science faculty experienced introductory science courses and reported having trouble following lectures. The stated that the material was interesting, but when difficult to understand the mind froze. They were used to a demonstration….. explanation model of science.

Science faculty experienced a poetry course and found the use of language only was very difficult. There were no visuals, nothing on the board, or an outline - only a lecture with language. Some reported that they were so distracted by others who were furiously trying to keep up by taking notes.

What does this mean to us? Reach the disciplinary intructors with their culture.

A source: Bridging Cultures (McAlpine and Harris, 1999)

1. Understanding comes from disciplinary specifics.
2. Knowledge Domains Impacting Teaching and Learning

• Subject matter knowledge – content within the discipline
• Pedagogical knowledge – general knowledge about teaching
• Pedagogical content knowledge – intersection of pedagogies applied to the discipline

Using both explicit and tacit knowledge… some instructors have tremendous tacit knowledge and may not be able to effectively talk about it. Working together with faculty developers, instructors can explicit pedagogical content knowledge.

Faculty development is often promoting a student centered approach, but rarely do we share information in a teacher-centered way. We need to meet them where they are….. faculty centered.

• Faculty–centered professional development
• Learner-centered teaching
• Faculty developer as facilitator

What does faculty-centered discipline-specific professional development means in practical terms for a center?

• Staff must represent many types of disciplines
• Does our center promote an agenda or mission to share a certain kind of teaching?
• Keep track of campus visits (location) and disciplines to be sure we get all over.
• Renaming workshops to make fit disciplines.

Our Process…. Our Journey IUPUI

• Advisory Board
• New Leader Transition process
• Revision of the Center’s Vision, Mission, and development of Strategic Planning Actions and Intentions
• STEM specialist hired
• CTL Retreat to discuss programming and a new grant program.

Going to POD allows a chance to observe successful programs and centers. It is great to know that our own CTL has had these processes in place for several years.