Friday, September 5, 2014

Faculty desire for professional development..and a scheme emerges

I'm facilitating a Professional Learning Community (PLC) on the flipped classroom. One of the most obvious impressions of this group of faculty is that they are excited about learning a new teaching technique, and hungry for practical information about technology in teaching. It's not enough to present ideas and resources, they want a demonstration of the technique/resource. No wonder: these are busy people who have carved out an hour a week to come to the PLC. They really want a significant ROI.
To me this means that there is much more demand for professional development (PD) than there is demand. Granted, this is a tiny sample that is clearly biased in favor of improving their teaching. I wonder how many other faculty want to improve their teaching but feel too overwhelmed to join a PLC. This seems like an important question to find the answer to. I am developing a survey for the faculty in my Department (using Google form -- cool resource that is new to me) about what they want from me in my new position (more on that in another post). Perhaps a more general interest survey could be made for the entire faculty at my institution. This might provide the administration with the impetus to substantially increase our investment in PD. Perhaps I'll pursue this.

No comments:

Post a Comment