The Impact of Faculty Development on Community College Faculty in a New Culture of Learning

HEOC 803 Dissertation SeminarDissertation Prospectus Draft

Michele CuomoBenedictine University

High Impact Practices: A New Culture of Learning

• The American Association of Colleges and Universities has identified a series of higher education classroom strategies as ‘high impact,’ including practices such as learning communities, service learning, and writing intensive courses. (Kuh, 2008).

• These practices have been demonstrated through the Community College Survey of Student Engagement as engaging academically underprepared and historically underserved students, and therefore retaining them. (Kuh, 2008).

• The Faculty Survey of Student Engagement demonstrates that the high impact practices are most highly valued and implemented by faculty women and faculty of color. (Laird, 2012)

A New Culture of Learning (Thomas & Seeley Brown, 2012)

• The old ways of learning are unable to keep up with our rapidly changing world.

• New media forms are making peer-to-peer learning easier and more natural.

• Peer-to-peer learning is amplified by emerging technologies that shape the collective nature of participation with those new media.

A New Culture of Learning• A growing appreciation for

the porous boundaries between the classroom and life experience, along with the power of social learning, authentic audiences, and integrative contexts, has created not only promising changes in learning but also disruptive moments in teaching. (Bass, 2012)

Learning in the Participatory Culture

• Low barriers to entry • Strong support for sharing one’s contributions • Informal mentorship, from experienced to

novice • A sense of connection to each other • A sense of ownership in what is being created • A strong collective sense that something is at

stake (Bass, 2012)

A New Culture of Learning

• The study of teaching and learning is not widely pursued in Ph.D. programs, yet, increasingly faculty in USHE, particularly community college faculty, are called upon to employ interdisciplinary and social pedagogies in their classrooms in order to best engage their students.

• Fugate and Amey (2000) observed the lack of understanding of the paths and expectations of community college faculty, despite the common beliefs that the strength of community colleges were in the faculty (p. 1)

Question

What is the relationship between the instance (and varying qualities) of interdisciplinary pedagogical development on community college faculty members, and their students’ ability to make connections in their learning, and to remain engaged with the institution in a new culture of learning?

Question

How does community college faculty identity, philosophy and disciplinary perspective affect the impact of faculty development and pursuit of high impact practices/interdisciplinary pedagogies?

PurposeThe purpose of this qualitative study is to explore the impact on

teaching and learning for community college faculty members at an urban community college in the northeast, who participate in interdisciplinary faculty development, as part of an initiative to bring high impact practices to the college’s classrooms. What are faculty views of the outcomes of the interdisciplinary pedagogical development they received in support of the community college’s high impact strategies initiative? How does their own identity, philosophy and disciplinary perspective shape faculty experiences and attitudes as their practices respond to a new culture of learning?

Further Questions• What led faculty members to elect to undergo interdisciplinary faculty

development? • What were the faculty members’ experiences as students with highly engaging

practices? • How do faculty members view the development they received in support of the

community college’s high impact strategies initiatives? • How do faculty members view the development thy received in relationship to

their own disciplinary perspective?• How do faculty members view their status (full-time, part-time, rank) as a factor in

their participation in faculty development and high impact practices?• How do faculty members view the institutional support available for

interdisciplinary faculty development? • Did receiving the faculty development change the way faculty members

conducted their classes? If so, how? • Did faculty members observe changes in student response or understanding after

faculty had undergone the development? If so, how?

Faculty Survey of Student Engagement(FSSE)

Predicting Value Placed on High-Impact Practices Faculty Characteristics • Women +• Faculty of color (all groups) +++• Non-US citizen +• Doctorate -• PT lecturers/instructors --

(Laird, 2012)

Faculty Survey of Student Engagement (FSSE)

Predicting Emphasis Placed on Integrative Learning Faculty Characteristics • Women ++• Faculty of color (all groups) +++• Years teaching -• FT lecturers/instructors -- • Course load +Course Characteristics • Soft fields +++• Lower division courses ---• Small and medium courses +++• General education requirement ++

Are community college level classes participating enough in practices which have been determined to be most beneficial to them (Kuh 2008)?

(Laird, 2012)

FSSE and Community Colleges

Fugate and Amey observed that most surveys of community college faculty were drawn from national survey data, and that these instruments used models for 4 year institutions or disciplinary specific models, rather than observing community college faculty as a distinct group (p. 1).

Mixed Results on Student Success• The MDRC Learning Communities demonstration, it was found that the

effect on student graduation and retention was not demonstrated to correlate beyond the semester of enrollment in the learning communities.

• The pilot strategies in the Achieving the Dream initiative also yielded disappointing results, although there is evidence that this result may have been due to problems with implementation. (Gonzalez, 2011).

• LaGuardia Community College has demonstrated that students who participate in ePortfolio, an electronic archiving system which allows students to archive and reflect longitudinally on their growth, have increased success rates, but students who participate in ePortfolio with faculty who attend development sessions on ePortfolio, the success rates were markedly increased. (Eynon, 2011).

Community College Faculty

According to Goldrick-Rabb “we still know too little about what works” (p. 459) for community college students. The literature on community college faculty observed suggested that there was more to learn about faculty themselves and their relationship to student success. The literature on faculty development throughout higher education that was reviewed supports the premise that faculty development is most crucial at this juncture in higher education.

Community College FacultyFaculty development was considered very significant to the faculty and there

was active participation in not only an important orientation, but ongoing seminars and interactions with the teaching and learning center on the campus. (p. 13).

Faculty deemed it necessary to pursue faculty development as their education had not prepared them for the task of teaching in a community college classroom (p.13).

Faculty feared burnout as well as the challenges of facing new generations of students and how best to reach them in an open access environment (p. 11).

They distinguished their roles from 4 year university faculty in that they saw that they needed to provide more than classroom content, but the tools in which students needed to receive the information (p.13). (Fugate & Amey, 2001)

Audience• A study which can uncover the relationship of the community college

faculty experience to the process of faculty development has the potential to support increased offerings of faculty development, through greater institutional participation, as well as more nuanced offerings and incentives in response to faculty feedback.

• As researchers learn more about the process of community college faculty interdisciplinary pedagogical development in terms of motivation, philosophy, identity, and observations of best practices based on faculty experiences as well as student outcomes, there is a potential for a further analysis of the phenomena, as well as the possibility of more priority and attention from community college administrations and policy makers to place on this activity to produce meaningful student- faculty interactions which will lead to desired student learning outcomes.

References (slide 1 of 7)

• Association of American Colleges & Universities. VALUE Valid assessment of learning in undergraduate education. Retrieved on April 12, 2011 from: http://www.aacu.org/value/index.cfm.

• Association of American Colleges & Universities. Collaborative for

authentic assessment of learning. Retrieved on June 18, 2011 from: http://www.aacu.org/caale/index.cfm.

• Angelo, Thomas A. (2008). Doing faculty development as if we value

learning most: Transformative guidelines from research and practices. Retrieved on April 6, 2011 from http://academic.research.microsoft.com/Detail?entitytype=2&searchtype=2&id=355861.

References slide 2 of 7

• Bass. R. (March/April 2012). Disrupting ourselves: The problem of learning in higher education. EDUCAUSE Review, vol. 47, no. 2 ((http://www.educause.edu/EDUCAUSE+Review/EDUCAUSEReviewMagazineVolume47/DisruptingOurselvesTheProblemo/247690.

• Brown, J. S., and R. P. Adler. (2008). Minds on fire: Open education, the long tail, and learning 2.0. EDUCAUSE Review 43 (1): 16-32. http://www.educause.edu/EDUCAUSE+Review/EDUCAUSEReviewMagazineVolume43/MindsonFireOpenEducationtheLon/162420.

• Brown, T, King, M.C. & Stanley, T. (Eds.). (2011). Fulfilling the promise of the community college: Increasing first-year student engagement and success. Columbia, S.C.: National Resource Center for the First Year Experience & Students in Transition, University of South Carolina.

References slide 3 of 7

• Creswell, J. W. (2008). Educational research: Planning, conducting and evaluating quantitative and qualitative research. 3rd ed. Upper Saddler River, NJ: Pearson.

• Dawson, D., Mighty, J. & Britnell, J. (2010, July). Moving from the periphery to the center of the academy: Faculty developers as leaders of change. McDonald, J. & Stockley D. (Eds.). New Directions for Teaching and Learning. 22.pp. 69-79. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.

• Eynon, B. (2011, April 8). EPortfolio pedagogy. Lecture presented at Making Transfer Connections in La Guardia Community College, Long Island City, NY.

References slide 4 of 7

• Fugart, A.L. & Amey, M.J. (2000, July). Career stages of community college faculty: A qualitative analysis of their career paths, roles and development. Community College Review. 28, 1. p. 1-23. Retrieved on June 3, 2011 from: http//web.ebscohost.com.libweb.ben.edu/ehost/pdfviewer/pdfviewer?vid=3&hid=125&si.

• Goldrick, Rabb, S. (2010, September). Challenges and opportunities for

improving community college success. Review of Educational Research. 80. 3. Pp. 437-469 Retrieved on February 21, 2011 from:.http://rer.aera.net.

• Gonzalez, Jennifer. (2011). Achieving the dream produces little change at

community colleges. The Chronicle of Higher Education. Retrieved on March 29, 2011 from http://chronicle.com/article/Achieving-the-Dream-Produces/126304.

References slide 5 of 7

• Gumport, P. & Chun, M. (2005). Technology and Higher Education. Altbach, P.G., Berdahl, R.O. & Gumport,(Eds.) American Higher Education in the Twenty First Century: Social Political and Economic Challenges. (pp. 393-424). Baltimore: John Hopkins Press.

• Huber, M.T. & Hutchings, P. (2005). Integrative Learning: Mapping the Terrain. Washington, D.C.: Association of American Colleges and Universities.

• Kuh. G. D. (2008). High-Impact Educational Practices: What they are,

who has access to them, and why they matter. Association of American Colleges and niversities. Retrieved on July 18, 2010 from www.aacu.org.

References slide 6 of 7

• Kuh, G.D., Laird, T.N. & Umbach, P.D. (2004, Fall). Aligning faculty activities and student behavior: Realizing the promise of greater expectations. Liberal Education. Association of American Colleges and Universities. Retrieved on July 8, 2012 from: http://www.aacu.org/liberaleducation/le-fa04/le-fa04feature2.cfm.

• Laird, T.N. (2012, June 20). The professor who played with fire (student success). A

mystery. Plenary Session of Association of American Colleges and Universities Institute on High Impact Practices and Student Success. Retrieved on July 8, 2012 from: http://www.aacu.org/meetings/hips/documents/NelsonLairdProfWhoPlayedWithFire.pdf.

• MDRC. (2011). Learning communities for students in developmental math: Impact studies at Queensborough and Houston community colleges. Retrieved on March 29, 2011 from http://www.mdrc.org/publications/579/execsum.pdf.

References slide 7 of 7

• Thomas, D. & Seely Brown, J. (2011). A new culture of learning: Cultivating the imagination for a world of constant change (Kindle Locations 1545-1548). CreateSpace. Kindle Edition.

• Twombly, S., & Townsend, B. K. (2008). Community college faculty: What we know and need to know. Community College Review, 36, 5-24. Retrieved on May 15, 2011 from: http://web.ebscohost.com.libweb.ben.edu/ehost/pdfviewer/pdfviewer?vid=21&hid=111&

sid=badee4fa-3100-4c83-aee2-f6fcc22abbda%40sessionmgr115.