Evaluating a novel faculty development program in teaching at a research-intensive university

ABSTRACT

Early-career faculty (ECF) are faced with maintaining excellence in teaching and research for tenure. However, many enter academia with little or no teaching experience. Madison Teaching and Learning Excellence, a year-long professional development program, was designed to mitigate these pressures and help faculty become fast, efficient, and effective teachers. The authors evaluated this program on participants’ use of learner-centered course designs and classroom practices compared with non-participants and also measured challenges encountered by ECF. Participants’ gains in effective course design were positive, stable, and transferable to other courses. Participants reported feeling more prepared for tenure review and possessed a heightened self-awareness and assessment of their teaching. Although participants scored moderately high on measures of learner-centered practices, their scores were similar to non-participants. The authors hope their evaluation will inform faculty development programs; they summarize challenges they encountered to spur development of better evaluation tools that balance practitioners’ needs and available resources.

KEYWORDS:

• Professional development
• early-career faculty
• higher education
• program evaluation
• teaching

Acknowledgments

The authors wish to acknowledge Dr. Janet Batzli, who, along with Dr. Nicholas Balster, created MTLE. We are also grateful for the assistance of Ashley M. Bellet and Rachel Carroll. They assisted in classroom observations, as well as the development of rubrics and assessment for those observations, which were critical to this study. We likewise thank Dr. Chris Castro for his most insightful consultations and advisement during this study. Finally, we appreciate the anonymous reviewers of our manuscript whose suggestions greatly improved its presentation.

Supplementary material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed here.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Megan E. Schmid

Megan E. Schmid is the Director of the Excel Initiative, a collaborative course design program, and the Administrative Officer in the Collaborative for Advancing Learning and Teaching at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her work in educational development includes faculty professional development in teaching, first-year seminars, and organizational development.

Alex W. Bajcz

Alex Bajcz is an Assistant Professor of Biology and Environmental Science at Drew University. His research utilizes quantitative tools to make sense of flowering plant evolution. Specifically, he seeks to understand how reproductive structures such as flowers and fruits are made and what factors influence their ecological success or failure.

Nicholas J. Balster

Nicholas (Nick) J. Balster is a Professor in the Department of Soil Science and affiliate faculty in the Department of Forest and Wildlife Ecology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He is a co-originator and co-faculty director of the Madison Teaching and Learning Excellence at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. His research spans disciplinary science in the interaction between soil and plants, as well as the scholarship of teaching and learning.