Search for: All records

Our evidence-based practice paper will present a Teaching Excellence Network (TEN) implemented at a large, multi-campus, North-Eastern US, R1 institution. TEN was funded by a 5-year NSF IUSE grant (institutional and community transformation track) that was part of a multidisciplinary collaboration of science and engineering faculty and Learning Centers staff. We discuss our practices, the reasons behind them, and impacts on participating faculty, emphasizing building connections between the institution’s offices, departments, and schools. TEN addressed perceptions of fragmentated and siloed faculty development initiatives at our institution. Faculty development efforts are distributed across departments, including an office for teaching with technology, one for assessment and evaluation, two school-based offices, a center for faculty research excellence, and an office for DEIB efforts. While each contributes significantly to faculty development, the siloes and disconnected communication channels lead to a perception of scarcity when it comes to support around teaching. In addition, most units focus on specific areas of development and not the kind of holistic teaching support we implemented. Recently, engineering departments have hired full-time teaching-focused faculty to improve teaching practice and education quality. While some science and math departments have many teaching-focused faculty, our engineering departments often have only a few faculty in these positions. We designed our BDI to bring siloed faculty together and create easier access to the many and varied programs across campus. TEN, and our study, are grounded in questions about how institutional structures impact faculty agency and motivation. Our work is guided by three theories: Structuration, Agency, and Expectancy-Value. These theories conceptualize human motivation as being connected to instructors’ expectations of success in an endeavour (e.g., transforming aspects of their course) and the perceived value of that endeavour, while allowing us to examine the interdependence of human decision-making and institutional structures. We planned TEN around maximizing value for faculty, while generating structures that supported faculty becoming involved in our programs and focusing efforts on teaching development. TEN has two major components: summer institutes are focused on pedagogical content delivery, and the production of usable materials and course design plans; semester support groups focus on the production or implementation of specific smaller projects, or the in-depth discussion of particular research-based ideas to provide faculty continuing support and a sense of connectedness with peers. Our analysis will start from a thematic analysis of interviews with faculty, in the style of Braun and Clark, to develop a sense of our data and the impacts that this program has had on participants. We will be using our theoretical lens to look for themes around how the structures of TEN have impacted faculty. Through the iterative process of thematic analysis, other themes may also emerge for investigation, which will enrich our understanding of participants’ experiences. Presentation of these themes, alongside illustrative cases of STEM faculty, will demonstrate the impacts of TEN on participants, provide context for engaging roundtable discussions of what participants are taking away from the programs, and present implications for faculty development initiatives. 

Understanding how relationships between instructors and students develop is important for understanding the undergraduate student experience. We expect the development of positive relationships is related to the social practices (e.g., greetings, using names, sympathizing, or empathizing with students) that instructors use in the course of normal classroom interactions with students. We recorded interactions between instructors and students in remote synchronous online physics problem-solving sessions and surveyed students about their perceptions of their instructors. We selected the highest-rated instructor and lowest-rated instructor in our sample and identified social practices in their conversations with students. We first characterized the frequency of social practice usage by each instructor in their conversations with students. We find that both instructors relied on a set of core social practices in most conversations with students, but that our higher-rated instructor used comparatively more positive commentary and sympathizing or empathizing behaviors than our lower-rated instructor. In comparison, our lower-rated instructor engaged in more negative commentary. Using network analysis, we then explored patterns in co-occurrences of social practices used by each instructor moment-to-moment in conversations and compared the instructors’ social practice network patterns. We find that our higher rated-instructor used a greater variety of social practices during moment-to-moment interactions with students, while our lower-rated instructor spent most of his time focused on classroom business. We suggest that professional development for instructors should include guidance on how messages are delivered in classes and encourage the use of high-impact social practices to foster positive relationships with students. 

ABSTRACT Protists and other eukaryotes are present in diverse terrestrial and aquatic environments. They can easily be collected from local ponds and streams. Although they are typically larger in size than prokaryotes, making them easy to study with even basic microscopes, microbiology laboratory courses often do not discuss them in detail and may only dedicate a short time to observing preserved samples. This laboratory exercise allows students to develop microscope skills, experience real world application of collecting and processing field samples, and delve deeper into the diverse world of protists and other microbial eukaryotes. Students may also engage by sharing their findings on the website iNaturalist to contribute to the scientific knowledge collected around the world. This laboratory module was initially designed for in-person learning but has been successfully adapted to remote learning and can also be applied to a complete online learning environment.