Reflections into changed practice

• FACETS
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Table of Contents
• The Team

"He that would be a leader must be a bridge." —Welsh proverb

The purpose of this collection is to share parts of others’ professional journeys as they have grappled with the potent realities of teaching a decidedly new generation of students in a new time. To place the works in context, we offer in this introduction an overview of the program that inspired these changes in professional attitudes and practices, and briefly describe some of the programs’ history, its framework, and meta components.

The FACETS Program - A Framework for Change

The FACETS project, Faculty Alliance for Creating and Enhancing Teaching Strategies, was a temporary grassroots faculty development program at the University of Wisconsin Stevens Point and the sponsoring agent of this journal. The program ran from 2003-2006 and focused on giving teaching faculty participants fiscal, emotional, social, and intellectual support and up to date information for changed practices. The work of this program was funded by a Congressional Award garnered by Wisconsin Congressman Dave Obey. The FACETS program will cease in June of 2006.

The program started simply with focused dialogs by four faculty concerned over issues of teaching excellence - Leslie Wilson of Education and Marty Loy from Health and Human Development, both from the College of Professional Studies, were joined by Susan Gingrasso from Dance and Karlene Ferrante in Communication Arts from the College of Fine Arts. The four of us conceptualized the initial ideas that led writing a FIPSE grant. However, when the program did not receive funding after its first submission, Karlene chose not to continue with the group. After the initial proposal was rewritten and funded, Craig Wendorf from Psychology from the College of Letters and Science joined the program to help with its administration and program delivery. The leadership of the group was a fully shared process and we believe that the diversity of group – our different perspectives, training, and disciplinary orientations -- helped to strengthen the emergent program and increase our general abilities to relate to a very diverse pool of participating faculty.

With the end of the funding for the program imminent, we decided to initiate this journal because we believed that through sharing the stories of some of our participants, we may be able to help other university professionals make the transitions needed to create an updated vision of higher education. Here too we offer brief overviews of the related pedagogical ideas that served as the foundation for the FACETS’ Program. We want to stress that this is simply a starting place for understanding some of the complex changes that we feel need to occur in many college classrooms if higher education is to survive and meet the educational challenges inherent in a new century – one that seems to be demanding a very different kind of teaching and learning.

Impact

Over its three-year lifetime, FACETS served fifty-eight participants from twenty-five different disciplines, four different colleges, and two different campuses, University of Wisconsin Stevens Point, and Marathon Center. The program also included twenty-one facilitators from area businesses, K-12 public educators, former and current UWSP students, and senior faculty from both participating institutions. All of these people were involved in focused discussions about teaching and learning excellence and how to make that happen. Conservatively, projecting the enrollments of participants over the three year life of the award, we estimated that 5000-6000 students were impacted at some level by changed teaching practices and related research on teaching and learning. To make as large an impact as possible in a short amount of time, FACETS participants were required to disseminate seminar information to their home units so that related research on teaching and learning impacted twenty-five different faculty units from both UWSP and UWMC during the period of the grant. We are still receiving reports from participants who have gone beyond this local dissemination requirement and have shared seminar information with other teaching peers through state and national organizational affiliations also.

In the end, the four of us found it pretty amazing what sincere and well-directed efforts could do to transform peers’ teaching and attitudes, as well as initiate the spirit of change and renewal for teaching excellence at our two institutions. The FACETS’ motto distilled the simple essence of the program and what we hoped to accomplish – it reads -- by faculty, for faculty – supporting excellence in teaching.

Background and Contexts

Like so many universities, the primary mission of ours states that it focuses on excellence in teaching. This mission mandate seems even more haunting as our parent institution, like so many others, was transformed in the 1960s from a normal school established as a teacher training college into a comprehensive university. Despite this history and the focused rhetoric about teaching excellence, at the time of the FACETS initiative our university had no continuous history of a professional development office, nor did we have a designated fulltime campus officer. This is not to say that we lacked examples of excellent pedagogy on our campus, as we have had many excellent, award-winning teachers. Nor is it to say that we lacked programs that promoted teaching excellence, as we had, and still have, an array of initiatives that encourage inquiry into teaching and learning issues, including those emerging from many of our colleges. But, while the administration has just created a new Associate Vice Chancellorship for Teaching and Learning, it takes time, well-defined visions of the issues inherent in teaching today, continued administrative support, as well as a strong fiscal commitment to establish a well directed, respected learning/professional development center and related supportive programs.

So, at time of this writing, there is still no single force, no cohesive or coordinating structure, or one person to consistently respond to faculty and their related teaching problems, nor any one visibly designated person to address general faculty concerns about teaching across all colleges, nor anyone to offer clear leadership in garnering new ideas about teaching and learning. These are all emerging elements.

From this continuous absence of focused professional development, the FACETS Program evolved and materialized. It was intended from the start to be a purely short-term grassroots movement--its design and intentions emerged from very specific faculty concerns rather than from an administrative directive. Primarily, our foundational dialogs focused on the mismatch between the university’s stated mission and reality of practices and funding. Because our efforts and concerns emerged from those expressed by our peers, we wanted to create a program structure that could be easily mobilized and replicated on other campuses as we anticipated that there were similar problems at other small and midsize universities across the country.

The Formed Program Emerges

First steps: Through discussing observations and concerns of our own, combined with focused conversations with peers, and a campus-wide electronic survey geared specifically to teaching faculty and academic staff, we identified several immediate issues that had the potential to impede or impair teaching excellence at our institution. These were:

• The beginnings of clear rifts between the expectations of newer, incoming generations of students, as compared to the teaching styles, methods, and presentation styles of many faculty members. In many instances, even content foci seemed to fall short in meeting the projected professional needs, prospects, and learning styles of incoming Millennial students.
• A general lack of awareness among faculty of many of the new findings and research on the nature of learning, cognition, and information retention.
• And again, negligible levels of awareness of newer, more effective methods of creating meaningful, dynamic, relevant curricula.

We placed all of the above under a general introduction and umbrella of reflective practice and focusing on these problematic areas, we developed a comprehensive professional development program with three, distinctively tiered stages, concentrating specifically on offering information and peer support for changed practices. Our targeted, published program objectives were:

1. To expand faculty understandings of how generational differences affect teaching and learning. (focusing on the Millennial Generation)
2. To expose faculty to the latest developments in research in cognitive science and the related implications to processing and retaining information.
3. To provide faculty with a firm foundation in a broad array of effective instructional strategies, ones that better match the learning needs and styles of current and future student populations.
4. To create a quality prototype for faculty teaching development and renewal that is flexible, collaborative, inventive, and supportive.
5. To conceptualize and construct a working prototype for a supportive consortium that includes an extended educational community involving secondary, post-secondary, and business partnerships in order to provide faculty with current models of training and education, and extended perspectives or the importance of educational progressions.

Program Design and Unique Features
Our program design looked like this:

• Stages 1 and 2 are by application
• Stage 3 is voluntary
• Stage 3 also included funding for reflective writing projects

As mentioned earlier to help with the continuity of our vision, we partnered with faculty from our largest feeder school and nearest two-year campus, UW Marathon County. And, to aid participants in understanding the educational continuum of our students, we added to our participant mix area public school educators, representatives from local business (concentrating on those hiring our graduates), and both newly graduated and current university students. This unique outreach component developed into an immensely valuable aspect of our program as it allowed our college and university participants to better understand students’ educational continuums and histories, as well as giving voice to concerns of these outside groups. This component also afforded opportunities for faculty to glean wisdom, advice, and different perspectives from shared dialogs and reflective activities with those outside the immediate college/university community. These extended groupings, especially those including students, proved to be extremely valuable in breaking down academic mindsets that might have been barriers to changed practices and the concepts we were presenting.

Creating a cycle of support: Throughout their involvement in the program, participants were offered supportive services through the readily available expertise and help from FACETS administrators, and through their peer and community interactions. Additional support came through a devoted electronic archive and website, distributed professional books and materials, and generous funding for experimental and personally defined professional research and projects. Toward the end of the program we also encouraged reflection and supported those participants who chose to write about their experiences and accomplishments within the program. Those end reflections are included in this e-archive and also published in hard copy for dissemination to the larger professional development community.

Program components – Deciding Which Concepts to Include

As we examined the complaints and survey data concerning faculty interests in professional development, there seemed to emerge clear patterns.

Millennials: One was the mismatched expectation between students’ background knowledge and skills, and what was being taught. Thus, an important issue in crafting an effective faculty development and training program for our population appeared to be offering them key insights into the mindsets, cultural, and educational histories of Millennial students. We also included the educational implications of teaching this new group of students, as well as discussions of students’ personal professional expectations from a college education. And, while we offered faculty general stereotypic overviews of Millennials, we also conducted research and examined the immediate profiles of our local student population to see how they compared to published data on Millennials.

Research on cognition and learning styles: Additionally, we wanted to widen participants’ knowledge of how humans actually process and retain information by offering them some of the latest information on brain-based education and on learning styles. Both concepts capitalized on research coming from the neurosciences and from those studying learning behaviors. We felt this information had the potential to help professors craft instructional situations better by picking more effective learning strategies. We wanted participants to understand and address students’ cognitive differences in new and innovative ways by offering educational experiences that were more diverse, or ones more personally meaningful and relevant to today’s students.

Backward course design: Another major concept we included was a course design element we call backward design. This concept melded Leslie’s work in her graduate curriculum classes and the work for the Association of Supervision and Curriculum Development by Wiggins and McTighe in their book Understanding by design. Our version of the backward design process was and is important as it requires users to first create well-defined visions of learners at the end of their contact by forcing them to ask these types of hard planning questions:

• What do I want students to be able to do?
• What do I want them to know, understand, and be able to remember?
• What skills and knowledge are enduring or at the heart of the discipline?
• What content and processes are engaging and can be made relevant to learner’s lives?
• How will students’ thinking, actions, and feelings be changed as a result of their contact?

All of the above was placed under the general umbrella of reflective practice, the tenets of which direct users to think about what they do in the classroom from multiple perspectives. Leslie offers a succinct definition for her graduate students as:

Simply, thinking about one’s professional growth and changes in the workplace in a deliberate, thoughtful, and consistent manner. This must be done with regularity and purposeful intention in order to create greater meaning and improve professional performance and one’s personal sense of job satisfaction. (Wilson, 2003)

Through the focused discussion exercises we included in the informational seminars, our application process for continued support for research, and the sharing meetings for research stipend awardees, we provided numerous opportunities for participants to examine and reflect on their teaching from a variety of viewpoints.

Scaffolds-Rounding out the array: The educational principle that directed the overall structure and design of our program and how we delivered its content was one called “scaffolding.” Originally, this is a term developed and explained in social learning theory as it pertains to language acquisition and developed by Lev Vygotsky (1978). The idea is pretty literal as Vygotsky’s principle states that difficult learning tasks should be arrived at incrementally and with help or “scaffolds” as adults or experts support learners until they reach a stage of independent action, or in Vygotskian terms “the zone of proximal development.” 

Our program included a great many scaffolds, several of which have been mentioned already – dedicated website, pertinent books, access to FACETS team members for personalized help and advice, a community of response from peers, area educators, business leaders, university students, as well as feedback and support from previous participants as several of them became discussion facilitators in the second year. But, perhaps the best scaffold was that our program was carefully divided into three distinct stages or tiers – information, individual research, plus one other requiring dissemination, performance, and reflection. Participants could choose how involved they wished to be. They could leave the program after the informational seminars, or go on to actively investigate or choose to change selected teaching practice. As mentioned, some first year participants even came back into the program to help mentor second year participants. However, at each stage of the process, participants received some level of fiscal or collegial support, as well as access to expertise through the program administers. We have come to believe that this tiered approach is an exceptionally effective way to encourage optimal participation as everyone is not at the same place at the same time in the process of wanting to change their teaching or even in investigating related literature or research on pedagogy.

Lastly, while many faculty development programs such as ours bring in experts to offer information, our seminars were delivered by the program’s administrators. We felt that this provided several advantages. First, it affirmed that we were all on the same journey, together. Second, it established a ready source whereby participants could approach presenters with questions after materials had time to percolate. Guest presenters are not usually available post presentation. In essence, presenters became tethers or touchstones as participants thought about the changes they wanted to make. Too, since we were also actively investigating and using the principles and information inherent in the designated topics, we had our own stories to share, our struggles to point to. Even as program directors we were living and modeling our motto – by faculty, for faculty -- to the fullest.

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References for further reading

1. Hausfather, Samuel J., (1996) Vygotsky and Schooling: Creating a Social Context for learning. Action in Teacher Education. (18) 1-10.

2. Lancaster, L. C. and Stillman, D. (2003) When Generations Collide: Who They Are. Why They Clash. How to Solve the Generational Puzzle at Work. New York, NY: HarperBusiness.

3. Martin, C. A. and Tulgan, B. (2001) Managing Generation Y. Amherst MA: Human Resource Development Printing.

4. Raines, C. (2002) Managing Millennials. http:www.generationsatwork.com/articles/millenials.htm

5. Strauss, W. and Howe, N. (1998) The Fourth Turning: An American Prophecy. New York, NY: Broadway Books.

6. Strauss, W. and Howe, N. (2000) Millennials Rising: The Next Great Generation. New York, NY. Vintage Books.

7. Vygotsky, L.S. (1978). Mind and society: The development of higher mental processes. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press

8. Wiggins, G. and McTighe, J (2005) Understanding by design, expanded 2nd ed. Association of Supervision and Curriculum Development (ASCD). Alexandria, VA.

9. Wilson, L. O. (1997, 2005) Wilson’s curriculum pages: The backward design process. http://www.uwsp.edu/education/lwilson/curric/backdesignoverview.htm

10. Zemke, R., Raines, C. and Filicpzak, B. (1999) Generations at Work: Managing the Clash of Veterans, Boomers, Xers, and Nexters in Your Workplace. New York, NY: American Management Association

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