Influences on Faculty Uptake from a Faculty Learning Community

TL;DR

This study explores how faculty members adopt ideas from professional development programs, highlighting the roles of assessment, instructional practices, and departmental culture in influencing their teaching choices.

Contribution

It provides a detailed analysis of factors affecting faculty uptake of professional development ideas within a specific faculty learning community.

Findings

Assessment and instructional alignment influence faculty adoption.

Participation in instructional practices impacts uptake.

Departmental culture affects implementation of new teaching ideas.

Abstract

Professional development is a tool that faculty members use to develop knowledge and skills that help them become better teachers. We investigate what influences affect the ways in which faculty take up ideas from professional development programs. By employing the framework of Pedagogical Reasoning and Action, we investigate how faculty take up ideas from a particular Faculty Learning Community (the STEM Teaching & Learning Fellowship) and the factors that influence their instructional and material design choices. We examined influences affecting faculty in three different cases. From these cases, we constructed themes, and examined those themes across all cases using a cross-case analysis. In this multiple case study we find that assessment and instructional alignment, participation in instructional practices, and the culture of the department all influence the extent in which faculty bring new teaching ideas and practices into the classroom. These findings can be leveraged by developers to design and improve programs, as well as inform researchers on future avenues of research.