College teaching may be the only skilled profession that does not routinely provide its practitioners with prior instruction or on-the-job training. The assumption seems to be that getting a Ph.D. in a discipline somehow equips people with the knowledge and skills to design courses, motivate students to learn and equip them with well-developed problem-solving, communication, and lifelong learning skills, lecture effectively, write good assignments and tests, and deal with the hundreds of problems that routinely arise when dealing with a class full of individuals with different abilities, needs, motivations, and problems. The assumption is false, and it typically takes new instructors 4-5 years to learn to teach effectively by trial-and-error, and some never learn. Unfortunately, the ones who pay the penalty for the errors are usually not the ones making them.

As it happens, a great deal is known from both research and experience about what makes teaching effective. Most of it does not require innate teaching ability or a particular type of personality, but simply involves a combination of easily implemented strategies and common sense. This workshop draws on this material to provide faculty members and graduate students with tools to make them more effective teachers and good sources of information for further study.

For Whom Intended

Workshops may be tailored specifically for professors and/or graduate students in the physical and mathematical sciences, engineering, and engineering technology, or they may be designed to address campus-wide audiences from all disciplines.

Topics Addressed

• How do students learn? How do teachers teach? What often goes wrong in the process?
  
• How do I plan a course? What do I do on the first day?
  
• How can I be a better lecturer? How can I get students actively involved in class, even if there are 200 of them in the room?
  
• How do inductive teaching methods (inquiry, problem-based learning, project-based learning, case-based instruction,...) work? Why should I use them?
  
• How can I create tests that are both rigorous and fair?
  
• What student-related problems am I likely to face (classroom management, emotional crises, cheating, etc.)? How should I deal with them?
  
• What other problems am I likely to run into (evaluating teaching, promotion and tenure, time management, etc.)? How should I deal with them?
  

Cooperative Learning Workshop (optional half day).

• What are the defining criteria of cooperative learning and how can they be met?
  
• What are productive ways to involve students in teams in lecture, laboratory, and project courses?
  
• What has the research shown regarding the effectiveness of cooperative learning?
  
• How should cooperative learning teams be formed?
  
• How can individual contributions to team projects be assessed and taken into account in grading?
  
• What skills are required to work effectively in teams? How can students be equipped with those skills, and how can teams be prepared to function more effectively?
• What forms might student resistance to group work take and how might the resistance be minimized or eliminated?

Course Planning Workshop (optional half day).

Participants develop learning objectives and detailed plans for the first several weeks of a course they plan to teach, working collaboratively with colleagues interested in the same course. They are guided in incorporating a number of the teaching and assessment strategies presented in the basic effective teaching workshop, and so this workshop is only suitable for faculty members who have previously taken the basic one. The procedures learned and practiced in this workshop can easily be extended to plan the rest of the course.

Professors tend to be skeptical about teaching workshops, imagining that they are going to be subjected to many hours of lectures about things that are irrelevant to their subjects, students, and problems. Following are complete ratings from the effective teaching workshops we have presented since the beginning of 1996, with a total of 4247 participants responding. The results show that our workshops are practical and active enough to overcome this skepticism in almost everyone who participates.

Excellent -- 3425 (81%)

Good -- 790 (19%)

Average -- 32 (<1%)

Fair -- 0

Poor -- 0

Active learning is classroom instruction that involves students in activities other than watching and listening to a lecturer. Working individually or in groups, the students may be called upon to answer questions, solve problems, discuss, debate, reflect, brainstorm, or formulate questions. Cooperative learning is instruction that involves students in team projects under conditions that meet several criteria, including positive interdependence (the team members must rely on one another to carry out their responsibilities) and individual accountability for every part of the project. Both cognitive science and empirical classroom research have repeatedly demonstrated that when properly implemented, these techniques motivate students to learn, increase the extent and quality of their learning, lower attrition from academic programs, and improve attitudes of students toward their education. This workshop is designed to provide participants with (a) guidance and practice in methods of active and cooperative learning; (b) a summary of the research that confirms the effectiveness of these methods; and (c) information about possible pitfalls associated with the methods (including student resistance to them) and strategies for overcoming them.

For Whom Intended

Workshops may be tailored specifically for professors and/or graduate students in the physical and mathematical sciences, engineering, and engineering technology, or they may be designed to address campus-wide audiences from all disciplines.

Topics Addressed

• How can students be actively involved in class, even if there are 200 of them in the room?
  
• What are the defining criteria of cooperative learning and how can they be met?
  
• What are productive ways to involve students in teams in lecture, laboratory, and project courses?
  
• What has the research shown regarding the effectiveness of cooperative learning?
  
• How should cooperative learning teams be formed?
  
• How can individual contributions to team projects be assessed and taken into account in grading?
  
• What skills are required to work effectively in teams? How can students be equipped with those skills, and how can teams be prepared to function more effectively?
• What forms might student resistance to group work take and how might the resistance be minimized or eliminated?

College professors have to do a lot of different things to be successful. They must plan, fund, and manage research programs, attract and retain graduate students, design courses, plan lessons and deliver them effectively, create appropriately challenging but fair assignments and tests, and deal with a wide range of student problems and problem students. They also need to learn to integrate into the campus faculty culture and somehow find time to have a life outside the campus. Unfortunately, as a rule no one tells either graduate students or new faculty members anything about how to do most of these things, and it is therefore not surprising that becoming a successful professor usually involves a long learning curve. Robert Boice, who has studied many new faculty members, notes that it generally takes 4-5 years for professors to become as productive in research and effective in teaching as they are capable of being. However, about 5% of them--the ones Boice calls “Quick Starters”--manage to do it in 1-2 years. The questions are, (1) what do the quick starters do that most new faculty members don't do, and (2) can other new faculty members learn to do those things? The answer to the second question is, yes. This workshop is intended to provide answers to the first question.

For Whom Intended

Workshops may be tailored specifically for new faculty members and/or graduate students in the physical and mathematical sciences, engineering, and engineering technology who are considering academic careers, or they may be designed to address campus-wide audiences from all disciplines.

Topics Addressed

• (For graduate students) What should I do to maximize my chances for getting a good academic position?
  
• What mistakes do new faculty members commonly make that limit their research productivity and teaching effectiveness, and how can I avoid them to become a quick starter?
  
• How do I plan a research program and get it funded? How can I persuade new graduate students to work with me when I am competing with more experienced and better known professors?
  
• How do I plan an effective course and get it off to a good start? How can I get students actively involved in learning, even if there are 200 of them in the class? How can I create tests that are both rigorous and fair?
  
• What problems am I likely to face as a faculty member (promotion and tenure issues, classroom management, time management, etc.)? How should I deal with them?

Robert Boice has shown that most new faculty members take roughly four years to become reasonably productive in research and effective in teaching. Appropriate mentoring and support can help new faculty members become what Boice calls "Quick Starters," reaching full productivity and effectiveness in 1-2 years. Mentoring is itself a skilled and complex craft, however, and when poorly done it may do more harm than good. This workshop is designed to help administrators and senior faculty members develop effective support programs for their new faculty, increasing the likelihood that they will become quick starters.

For Whom Intended

College administrators, department heads, and experienced professors who might be in a position of mentoring new faculty colleagues.

Topics Addressed

• What are the attributes that distinguish most new faculty members from quick starters?
  
• What constitutes good mentoring? What pitfalls should be avoided?
  
• How should mentors be prepared and supported?
  
• What types of programs other than mentorships have been found effective for supporting new faculty members?
  
• What incentives can be offered to motivate new faculty members to make the effort to become effective teachers? What incentives can be offered to motivate experienced faculty members to serve as mentors?
  
• Summary: What are the elements of an effective new faculty development program?

The usual way to evaluate how well a course was taught is to survey the students at the end of the course and compile and average the ratings. If the rating form was carefully designed and validated, this procedure provides unique and important information, but student ratings alone are not adequate to provide a good comprehensive evaluation of teaching quality. Students are not in a position to judge certain aspects of instruction, such as whether the course learning objectives were appropriate, the content was up-to-date, the instruction followed well-established pedagogical principles, and the instructor had an adequate mastery of the subject. Only peers can do that. Recognizing this situation, a growing number of institutions have begun to include peer review of teaching in faculty performance evaluations, but there are problems here as well. In many peer reviews a faculty member simply observes a single lecture, notes whatever catches his or her attention, draws conclusions that may reflect questionable preconceptions of what constitutes good teaching, and files a report. This procedure does not provide a fair, reliable, or valid assessment of teaching quality: an observation conducted by a different observer or by the same observer on another day could lead to completely different conclusions.

There are better ways to evaluate teaching. The goals of this workshop are to present methods that have been proved effective and to equip participants to design an evaluation process that meets the needs of their department.

For Whom Intended

Faculty members and administrators.

Topics Addressed

• How can I get reliable and valid student evaluations of teaching?
  
• How can I get reliable and valid peer ratings of teaching?
  
• How can I evaluate teaching performance comprehensively and effectively?
  
• How can I use evaluations to improve teaching quality (formative evaluation)?

Research on education used to be the exclusive province of professional educators and psychologists, but no longer. There are unique problems associated with pedagogy in every discipline, and some of the best—and most highly funded—educational research is now discipline-specific and done by faculty members in the disciplines in question. However, there are some significant differences between research in a field and research in education in that field. Individuals trained only in their disciplines are generally poorly equipped to formulate appropriate educational research questions, design effective implementation and assessment plans, and sell their ideas to potential funding sources. This workshop is intended to prepare faculty members in technical disciplines to carry out all of these activities.

For Whom Intended

Faculty members and administrators in engineering and the physical, biological, and mathematical sciences.

Topics Addressed

• What is the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning? How does it differ from traditional disciplinary scholarship?
• How should I pick a research question? What pitfalls should I avoid in making the choice. How can I find relevant prior work? What research approach should I use (quantitative, qualitative, or mixed)? Should I collaborate, and if so, with whom?
• What sources are available to fund educational research? Should I approach them before writing and submitting a proposal? How? What does it take to win a CAREER Award?
• How do I design an effective research, assessment, and dissemination plan? Why am I unlikely to get funded without strong assessment and dissemination components? How else can I maximize my proposal’s chances of being funded?
• How should I approach publication of my work?

• Why are scientists and engineers often resistant to teaching workshops? How can I overcome this resistance?
  
• What are the learning needs of adults? How can I design a workshop that addresses these needs?
  
• How do I plan, schedule, and promote a teaching seminar and workshop?
  
• What can I do to make my presentation effective?
  
• What are different ways to get participants actively involved?
  
• What problems might arise during the workshop (time management, difficult participants, equipment failure, etc.)? How should I deal with them?