190 research outputs found

    AD HOC TEAMWORK BEHAVIORS FOR INFLUENCING A FLOCK

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    Professional Development in Florida College System Institutions

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    This is a phenomenological study focused on a small, suburban Florida College System institution that has implemented a three-year induction program for new faculty, as part of its professional development program. It is related to retention of new faculty through the first five years. This study was undertaken to define and exemplify professional development and how it is utilized by practitioners. Secondly, it outlines induction programs and what works best to retain skilled faculty in FCS institutions. Members of several cohorts of the induction program were asked to participate in the study and were interviewed about their experiences in the program and of professional development in general over the first year of their employment. Deep analysis of interview transcripts revealed the benefits of a structured, defined induction program including forming a group dynamic within the cohorts, establishing connections across the offices on campus, and creating bonds with mentors in the discipline. This study focuses on state college faculty and creating an atmosphere that encourages retention and inhibits attrition beyond five years. The key findings of this study show new faculty who participate in a college-sponsored, mandatory induction program relate three primary experiences: establishing connections with others across the college and understanding their own place within the institutional structure, enhancing engagement to the college through mentoring experiences, and increasing their skill in teaching and learning in modalities including fully seated classes, hybrid classes, and completely online classes. These experiences relate to the primary themes uncovered through deep analysis of the collected data

    The George-Anne

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    Making Sense of Successful Global Teams

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    Global teams tend to underperform. Teamwork often frustrates members compromising the results as well as employee motivation. In practice, bad results are often camouflaged, and both management and team members lack insight into what is really driving teams and why they do not reach their goals. The underlying metaphor our economic model is built on is the “machine” where people instead of active agents with true influence are implicitly seen as resources, executors of processes and walking curriculum vitaes to be aligned in precise ways to achieve often arbitrary goals and to meet unrealistic expectations. This study takes a critical stand towards this mainstream view and applies reflexive methodology, the lens of sensemaking as well as the metaphor and the narrative as rhetorical devices to study how and why global teams form and evolve the way they do over time. The insights of this study are based on an experimental methodology studying many teams from a close range, and reveal how different structurally identical well-performing global teams executing the same tasks can be. Teams when studied from within, are dynamic phenomena rather than static sums of their parts. Alternative team metaphors, such as the “chain gang”, “dysfunctional family”, “sandbox”, “scouts” and “master cooks”, for instance, emerge. The very different team dynamics are in part explained by how successful team members are at social sensemaking – establishing shared understandings around such basic concepts as “leadership”, “good communication” and “team goals”. Individual team members and their capability and willingness to engage in self-reflection and their decisions to act or not to act on what may first appear mundane events, can have huge influence over what their teams become. Sustainably successful teams work both on the task and the team itself and consider the team as a constant work-in-progress and not a fixed entity. This study proposes innovative ways of looking at and studying global teams. People, team members, can be considered active agents, capable human beings on whose sensemaking paths depend on what these teams become and how they evolve over time

    Self-Directed Learning Development in PBL

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    Lifelong learning is an emphasized graduate outcome for engineering professionals at the international level by the Washington Accord and at the United States national level by ABET. When a new engineer enters the profession, she will be expected to acquire new technical knowledge in order to solve a problem or create a design. Unlike her experience in college, there will not be a professor to guide this learning. The planning, execution, monitoring, and control of this learning will now fall to the new engineer. The level of the ability to succeed in this self-directed learning modality will be a function of the extent to which the lifelong learning outcome has been met. This paper studies the importance of this graduate outcome and the development of self-directed learning as the way in which the outcome is achieved. Quantitative measures are taken using the Self-Directed Learning Readiness Scale. Quantitative results show a statistically significant difference between the developments of self-regulated abilities by students in a two-year PBL curriculum as compared to students who did not undergo the PBL treatment
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