Assessing the interactivity and prescriptiveness of faculty professional development workshops: The Real-Time Professional Development Observation Tool (R-PDOT)

TL;DR

The paper introduces the R-PDOT, an observation tool designed to evaluate faculty engagement in professional development workshops, aiming to improve understanding and effectiveness of such workshops in STEM education.

Contribution

It develops and demonstrates the R-PDOT, a new evidence-based observational instrument for assessing workshop interactivity and prescriptiveness in faculty development.

Findings

R-PDOT effectively captures workshop engagement dynamics

Workshop sessions vary significantly in interactivity levels

Preliminary data suggest R-PDOT can inform workshop improvement

Abstract

Professional development workshops are one of the primary mechanisms used to help faculty improve their teaching, and draw in many STEM instructors every year. Although workshops serve a critical role in changing instructional practices within our community, we rarely assess workshops through careful consideration of how they engage faculty. Initial evidence suggests that workshop leaders often overlook central tenets of education research that are well-established in classroom contexts, such as the role of interactivity in enabling student learning. As such, there is a need to develop more robust, evidence-based models of how best to support faculty learning in professional development contexts, and to activity support workshop leaders in relating their design decisions to familiar ideas form other educational contexts. In response to these needs, we have developed an observation tool, the Real-Time Professional Development Observation Tool (R-PDOT), to document the form and focus of faculty's engagement during workshops. In this paper, we describe the motivation and methodological considerations behind the development of the R-PDOT, justify our decisions to highlight particular aspects of workshop sessions, and demonstrate how the R-PDOT can be used to analyze three sessions from the Physics and Astronomy New Faculty Workshop. We also justify the accessibility and potential utility of the R-PDOT output as a reflective tool using preliminary data from interviews with workshop leaders, and consider the roles the R-PDOT could play in supporting future research on faculty professional development.