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Faculty Success Initiative: An Innovative Approach to Professional Faculty Onboarding and Development.

ABSTRACT: Higher education institutions have been increasingly dependent on adjunct faculty to provide instruction at undergraduate and graduate levels. At professional schools, most faculty begin teaching graduate courses with limited to no formal training or teaching experience as industry expertise is the primary requirement for employment. Despite the availability of ample pedagogical resources to advance teaching, these faculty require additional support during their induction into academia. This paper describes the design and operationalization of the New York University Faculty Success Initiative (FSI), an innovative, semi-structured, faculty-centered onboarding and professional development program that provides quality, longer term preparation to new faculty throughout their first semester of instruction to increase their teaching effectiveness and their sense of connection to their academic unit. An analysis of multiple qualitative and quantitative data sources indicates that FSI led to an increase in teaching effectiveness and played a significant role in transitioning professional faculty from practitioners to educators.

Supplementary information

The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s41686-022-00069-x.

SUBMITTER: Farakish N

PROVIDER: S-EPMC9321297 | biostudies-literature | 2022 Jul

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Faculty Success Initiative: An Innovative Approach to Professional Faculty Onboarding and Development.

Farakish Negar N Cherches Todd T Zou SiYun S

Journal of formative design in learning 20220726 2

Higher education institutions have been increasingly dependent on adjunct faculty to provide instruction at undergraduate and graduate levels. At professional schools, most faculty begin teaching graduate courses with limited to no formal training or teaching experience as industry expertise is the primary requirement for employment. Despite the availability of ample pedagogical resources to advance teaching, these faculty require additional support during their induction into academia. This pap ...[more]

PMID: 35910308

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Project description:BackgroundEven though student-centered instruction leads to positive student outcomes, direct instruction methods are still prevalent. Multiple barriers prevent faculty from further adopting evidence-based student-centered practices and holistic approaches to faculty support are necessary to promote faculty change. The Collaborative for Institutionalizing Scientific Learning (CISL) is an HHMI-funded program to reform undergraduate science and mathematics education at a large Hispanic-Serving public research university. The program has established a Faculty Scholar support model to impact the number of science and mathematics faculty using evidence-based practices in their classrooms. Through this program, Scholars are selected to undertake a transformation of a course of their choice and conduct an assessment of the impact of the reform on students-while receiving multiple supports including summer salary, undergraduate Learning Assistants, professional development, course assessment and education research support, and opportunities to develop manuscripts on their course transformations.ResultsCISL has supported over 40 Faculty Scholars in the transformation of both introductory and upper division biology, chemistry, physics and mathematics courses. Faculty are motivated to transform a course due to factors related to their own experiences and beliefs, their students' needs, the course structure, and/or departmental elements. Quantitative analysis of the impact of the project on student success show that, overall, students in CISL-supported courses have higher passing rates compared to students in traditional classrooms. Survey and interviews of Faculty Scholars identified that the most valuable elements of the program were the personnel support from undergraduate Learning Assistants during reform implementation and guidance from the program's Assistant Director during design, implementation and evaluation.ConclusionsThe CISL program provides an example of significant effort sustained over several years to systematically improve the quality and culture of undergraduate education in a large research-intensive Hispanic Serving Institution. The program has had an overall positive impact on the professional development of Faculty Scholars and led to an increase in the number of STEM courses implementing evidence-based teaching practices, thus, taking a step towards solidifying a culture of evidence-based instructional strategies in STEM departments.Supplementary informationThe online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1186/s40594-022-00353-z.

Dataset Information

Faculty Success Initiative: An Innovative Approach to Professional Faculty Onboarding and Development.

Supplementary information

Publications

Faculty Success Initiative: An Innovative Approach to Professional Faculty Onboarding and Development.

Similar Datasets

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