Search for: All records

In answer to calls for research about professional change, this study addressed the question: What is involved in college science faculty readiness for change in instructional practice? The setting was a professional development experience in oceanography/marine science and paleoclimatology among 32 faculty from 2- and 4-year colleges. Ten of the 32 participated in interviews, and all provided survey responses and documents used in the study. Cycles of inductive analysis generated three example case stories to illustrate a new model for exploring faculty readiness for change in teaching. The model blends results from the health sciences on readiness for behavioral change with research on the personal, external, professional, and consequence domains of a professional change environment. The blended model attends to how an instructor draws on the domains to (a) see an instructional challenge as requiring intentional action to be resolved; (b) notice new significance (for the instructor) in some aspect of instructional practice; (c) feel able to manage instructional stressors/challenges; (d) have commitment to initiate/sustain change; and (e) perceive adequate support in undertaking change. Profiles of instructional readiness for change are represented by composite cases named Lee, Pat, and Chris. In the case of Lee, factor (c) drove change efforts; for Pat, factors (a) and (b) were in the forefront; and for Chris it was factors (d) and (e). The three cases are valuable both as sketches of the blended model in use and as touchstones for future research and development related to postsecondary faculty professional learning. 

The purpose of this report is to share a conceptual model useful in the design of professional learning about teaching for university mathematics faculty. The model is illustrated by examples from a particular design effort: the development of an online shortcourse for faculty new to teaching mathematics courses for prospective primary school teachers. How novice mathematics teacher educators grow as instructors is an emerging area of research and development in the United States. At the same time, it is well established that effective instructional design of any course, including a course for faculty, requires breadth first: understanding and anticipating the needs of the learner. Therefore, given the sparse knowledge base in the new arena of mathematics teacher educator professional growth, effective design requires leveraging the scant existing research while also exploring and iteratively refining broad goals and objectives for faculty learning. Only after a conceptual foundation is articulated for what is to be learned and what will constitute evidence of learning, can cycles of design productively examine and test-bed particular course features such as lesson content, structures (like scope and sequence), and processes (like communication and evaluation). In the example used in this report, several researchbased perspectives on learning in/for/about teaching guided design goals and short-course objectives. These valued perspectives informed creation and prioritization of principles for short-course design which, in turn, informed evaluation of faculty learning. With these conceptual foundations in place, design of lessons to realize the goals, principles, and objectives rapidly followed. The work reported here contributes to the knowledge base in two ways: (1) it addresses faculty professional development directly by describing and illustrating a model for supporting instructional improvement and (2) it provides metanarrative to scaffold the professional growth of those who design professional learning opportunities for post-secondary mathematics faculty. 

This brief report describes the conception, development, and use of a rubric in evaluating the feasibility of a new program. The evaluators searched for a meta-analytic tool to help organize ideas about what data to collect, and why, in order to create a detailed story of feasibility of implementation for the client. The main advantage of using the rubric-based tool is that it lays out key evaluative criteria that are defined as concretely as possible. The article gives a brief overview of the literature on the use of rubrics in evaluation, illustrates the use of a feasibility of implementation rubric as a tool for development, analysis, and reporting, and concludes with recommendations emergent from the use of the rubric.