Special Feature: CTL Directors Need to Be Centered

Dr. Todd D. Zakrajsek began his career as an adjunct professor, teaching at a small private college, a technical school, and distance education classes for a large university. Securing a tenure-track position at a small regional college in the Pacific Northwest in the fall of 1994, Todd started a center for teaching and learning in his third year at that institution. For his efforts, he received a budget of $500 his first year. The following year his budget went to$5,000 and a one-course release. In year three, the budget was $20,000 with additional release time. While at that small regional college, he was promoted to associate professor and tenured, partly for his campus-wide faculty development work. In 2001, Todd resigned tenure to accept a position as the founding director of a center for teaching and learning at a research university in the Midwest. With an office consisting of himself and an office professional, he began to develop resources for a campus with approximately 650 full time faculty members. In 2003, the provost merged the faculty development center he was leading with the learning technologies group. Todd became the director of the combined office, with a large staff and a budget of approximately$800,000. He also served as Co-PI on a Fund for the Improvement of Postsecondary Education (FIPSE) grant to provide resources to distance and adjunct faculty. In 2008, Todd resigned from his job as faculty development director to become the Executive Director of a large research extensive university in the South. There, he successfully assisted with the transformation of a long-standing and successful teaching center into a center providing support in teaching, research, and leadership; he was responsible for hiring six positions and managed a budget of $1.2 million. In 2012, Todd began working in the School of Medicine at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, as an Associate Professor in the Department of Family Medicine and in the Academy of Educators to assist in building resources for faculty in the School of Medicine. He is still at the UNC School of Medicine. Concurrent with his institutional work, over the past 20 years, Todd has been directing Lilly Teaching Conferences and publishing extensively in the area of effective teaching and learning. Given Todd’s extensive experience in faculty development for 25 years in various types of institutions, regions, and faculty served, we have asked him to write a series on essential issues needed by directors of faculty development efforts. This series suggests areas for faculty developers to consider, along with tips and techniques Todd has found helpful along the way. In this issue, Todd describes CTL director’s workload challenges and offers advise for avoiding burnout. If there is a specific topic you would like Todd to address, contact JCTL’s incoming Editor-in-Chief at [email protected]. &nbsp

Track, Map, and Measure: Diverse Professional Learning Activities Are Associated with Positive Attitudes Toward Pedagogy and Faculty Learning Outcomes

We examined how patterns of participation in instructional consultations, workshops, reading groups, and learning communities were associated with differences in faculty views of pedagogy. A total of 165 faculty completed the Appreciation of Pedagogy Scale (APS), which includes five subscales: 1) awareness of pedagogy research; 2) beliefs that research can inform teaching practice; 3) integration of new strategies with current ideas about teaching; 4) positive emotions about learning about teaching; and 5) the frequency, value, and enjoyment of engagement in professional development (Hurney et al., 2020). We mapped APS subscales to our CTL Faculty Learning Outcomes and then analyzed the impact of program participation on each subscale. We found faculty who participated in three or four different types of professional development had greater appreciation of pedagogy than those with no participation. Faculty who participated in workshops, consultations, or learning communities responded more positively to some subscales than those who participated in fewer of these types of programs. We conclude with advice for centers interested in investigating the impact of program diversity on faculty attitudes toward pedagogy

Pedagogical Wellness: A New Direction in Educational Development

Mental health and well-being in higher education is currently a national topic of conversation. In response to the wellness and burnout challenges among our faculty and students, we created the Pedagogical Wellness Specialist (PWS) position at the University of California, Irvine. Designed to explore the intersection of wellness and pedagogy, the PWS is uniquely embedded in the CTL. In this article, we provide an overview of the state of well-being in higher education, offer the PWS position as an opportunity to enhance the CTL’s connection to the broader campus, reflect on the first year of implementation, and provide an example from Montana State University, Billings, that shows how pedagogical wellness can be adopted even without a formal position. We close with recommendations and lessons learned for other CTLs interested in adopting pedagogical wellness

Use of Narratives to Communicate Value in Educational Development

In the postsecondary educational context, the value of educational development can be challenging to convey. Currently used and widely touted performance metrics often prove inadequate for the scope and wisdom of this type of work and fail to reflect its value. Despite these limitations, there are rich, interdependent, and compelling experiences and informative lessons that do convey value and satisfy the drive to quantify impact. In this article, we draw on existing models and approaches to make meaning from evaluation and put forward a framework for eliciting narratives of experience to communicate value. Through this process, educational developers and leaders working in centres for teaching and learning can reflect on their activities, identify lessons, incorporate affective experiences, readjust goals, and celebrate achievements. They can do this in ways that evidence and communicate to academic stakeholders the value of their contributions and collective efforts

Building a Strategic Plan That Guides Assessment: A Case Study from a Teaching and Learning Center

In this article, we make the case that a well-crafted strategic plan can guide the overall assessment of a Center for Teaching and Learning (CTL). A strategic plan enables a center to assess holistically the degree to which it achieves its purpose an aligns with institutional priorities. Adoption of this approach enabled our center to collect assessment evidence that was relevant and meaningful given the center’s purpose, context, and priorities. In this case study, we describe how the Schreyer Institute for Teaching Excellence, Penn State’s CTL, clarified its vision and mission and used the strategic planning process to transform our daily work as well as the way we assessed and reported our center’s success. The identified strategic goals served to guide the day-to-day work of its educational developers and design programs that moved the center forward

Power Users and the CTL: What We Learned about Filtered Informal Learning in the Time of COVID

One common way faculty learn how to teach is through interactions with colleagues. However, this practice can result in the sharing of ineffective ideas or teaching strategies. This study introduces the term “filtered informal learning,” which refers to the informal sharing of best practices filtered through an authoritative source such as a campus Center for Teaching and Learning (CTL). This study examines how “power users”—faculty who are familiar with, implement, and share best practices learned through formal CTL events—facilitated filtered informal learning during the emergency transition to online learning (ETOL) that accompanied the COVID-19 pandemic in March of 2020. While this study takes place in a very unusual setting (in the midst of a pandemic), it offers a glimpse into how faculty and CTL staff may prepare for future challenges. CTL staff who worked with power users were significantly more likely to report an increase in workload relative to CTL staff who did not work with power users. However, CTL staff who worked with power users were significantly more likely to indicate that they were able to offer the same quality of service after the ETOL as they did before the ETOL. Open-ended interview questions given after the initial survey show that while power users are familiar with instructional technology, they are relatively less familiar with best practices and campus and federal guidelines for online learning. Regular meetings between CTL staff and power users can help familiarize power users with best practices and campus/federal guidelines

Using Google Analytics to Measure Engagement with a Teaching and Learning Centre During COVID-19

Postsecondary educators and students were among the first affected by COVID-19 pandemic safety protocols and were required to transition quickly from face-to-face to unfamiliar remote teaching and learning environments. To support this transition, support staff at teaching and learning centres (TLCs) also pivoted their support strategies and developed and delivered more online resources and virtual professional development workshops. The purpose of this study was to examine whether the demands for online and remote teaching and learning support was evident in the Google Analytics data of the TLC webpages of a research-intensive Canadian university. To facilitate interpretation of observed trends, we aligned the timing of messages emailed to faculty and new resource launches on the TLC webpages to the analytics data. Results confirmed that TLC webpages are vital sources of information for faculty development, and targeted communications increased faculty engagement with teaching resources and professional development opportunities. As pandemic safety protocols ease and educators and students return to their postsecondary campuses, they will face new challenges. In response, TLCs must continue to monitor faculty engagement and their changing support needs, and they must continue to adjust approaches to offering information and professional development opportunities as necessary. The examination of website analytics data is just one measure that can support evidence-informed decision making for this purpose

The CTL Assessing CTL: A Message from the Editor-in-Chief

Whenever I think about assessment in higher education, two quotes come to mind. The first is sociologist William Bruce Cameron’s (1963) remark that “Not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted counts” (p. 13). At the same time, I also tend to think of the concluding lines of W. S. Merwin’s (2005) poem “Berryman.” In this piece, a young poet is speaking with his mentor and comes to ask him “how can you ever be sure/that what you write is really/any good at all,” and the elder poet responds:  … you can\u27t  you can\u27t you can never be sureyou die without knowingwhether anything you wrote was any goodif you have to be sure don\u27t write

Thin-Sliced Embedded Direct Assessment (T-SEDA): Measuring Impacts of Development Workshops on Participants\u27 Learning Gains

How can educational developers best formatively assess impacts of their services? Standard practices tend to rely on indirect measures, such as counts of participants and feedback surveys. This paper responds to recent calls for more robust approaches directly measuring outcomes. We describe how to implement a new, transferable, evidence-based approach for directly measuring instructors’ learning gains within and across educational development workshops: the Thin-Slice Embedded Direct Assessment (T-SEDA) Process. Although this approach does not measure longterm retention of learning or effects on future teaching behaviors, it significantly enhanced our toolkit for formatively assessing educational development workshops. Through case studies, we illustrate principles underlying our approach, impacts on instructors’ learning, and how we iteratively refine our programs and practices using the T-SEDA process. We also discuss lessons learned for fostering an inclusive, collaborative culture of formative assessment among educational developers

The COVID-19 Pandemic Impact: Current Changes in Faculty Development That Have the Potential to Persist

Given Todd’s extensive experience in faculty development for 25 years in various types of institutions, regions, and faculty served, we have asked him to write a series on essential issues needed by directors of faculty development efforts. This series suggests areas for faculty developers to consider, along with tips and techniques Todd has found helpful along the way. In this issue, Todd focuses on areas in which faculty development efforts have already begun to change for the better and may well show persistent changes, given what we have learned during the pandemic. If there is a specific topic you would like Todd to address, contact the Editor-in-Chief at [email protected]