This program description presents a unique, radically simple mentoring model for post-secondary institutions. The Faculty Peer Support Program invites all faculty members, regardless of rank, to connect for personalized professional development support. Participants self-select partner(s), meeting times, places, and topics. They also self-direct…

The Threshold Concepts Framework acts as a catalyst in faculty development activities, energising and provoking discussion by faculty about their own courses in their own disciplines, and often leading to the discovery of transformational concepts that occasion epistemic and ontological shifts in their students. The present study focuses on…

Scholarly teaching, the act of systematically examining the links between one's teaching and student learning, remains a challenging idea for many faculty members. We argue that two threshold concepts--teaching as an inquiry-based process and teaching as a public act--serve as powerful hurdles to the more wide spread adoption of scholarly teaching…

Even though many curricula are built on a foundational assumption that students will transfer knowledge from one course to the next, faculty often struggle with teaching for transfer. This article introduces the design of courses for transfer as a threshold concept that is conceptually difficult and cognitively troublesome, yet potentially…

Using the Threshold Concepts Framework, I explore places where faculty frequently get stuck when attempting to adopt new technologies. They may be held back by preconceptions that technology is superfluous to traditional teaching methods or believe that they must understand the technology perfectly before introducing it into their teaching.…

Requiring and fostering shifts in perspective, practice, and identity, the counter-normative pedagogy of service-learning can be challenging for faculty to learn. Meyer and Land's (2003, 2005) work on threshold concepts may enhance understanding of the troublesome yet transformative nature of learning to collaborate reciprocally with students and…

For over a decade, Western Washington University has sponsored the Teaching-Learning Academy, bringing students, faculty, staff, and community members together as co-inquirers into overarching questions about teaching and learning. In this safe space, participants frame one research question of interest each year; sharing their perspectives and…

This essay addresses the affective and social components on online teaching, components that have been neglected in much research on distance learning. The essay offers accessible and practical advice for online teachers to create a "context of care" in their classrooms, thus minimizing student anxiety and maximizing student learning.

Technology, Learning, and the Classroom, a workshop designed to jump-start faculty's use of instructional technology in face-to-face classrooms, was offered as a week-long intensive workshop and once-a-week session over a semester. Faculty were interviewed five years after participation to determine the longitudinal effects, differences in opinion…

This study explores the interpersonal faculty development interactions of university faculty as a function of their demographic representation (with regard to gender and ethnicity) in their home departments. For one academic semester, a small sample of 30 tenure-track junior faculty participated in a weekly diary checklist study in which they…

Developing a course with a service-learning component includes several factors. One common mistake among faculty members involves the practice of sending students into the community without a plan for connecting the experience with the learning objectives of the course. Invariably, the service component is where the experience ends for the…

This study utilizes a social exchange framework to analyze the qualitative narratives of 81 graduate student mentors participating in the Intellectual Entrepreneurship Pre-Graduate Internship at The University of Texas at Austin. Findings suggest that in addition to personal benefits, mentorship has four major professional benefits: a deeper…

Meetings have a bad reputation with faculty. Rarely does one hear a positive word uttered about an upcoming or past meeting. That reputation has metastasized throughout higher education. The primary reason is because meetings can be major time wasters, accomplishing very little, often deteriorating into just another social event, or they may be…

The purpose of this article is to describe the impact of a three-day academic writing retreat on the writing lives of four female university faculty members. Goals of the retreat included rejuvenating their writing lives, focusing their research agendas, improving their writing, and engaging in concentrated blocks of writing and collaborative…

Concept papers and quality circles help future dissertation advisors improve doctoral student success in the completion of the Ph.D. and increase retention. Through these tools, students navigate the conceptual development of a topic and evaluate final drafts of chapters. Implementation of these innovations indicates positive trends in the…