The advent of faculty development centers that focus on the improvement of teaching skills and better understanding of student learning concepts dates back to the 1960s. These centers were initiated from a realization that the effectiveness of a faculty member resulted from growth and maturity over time and that certain support systems were…

In this article, the authors convey what scholarship of teaching and learning is and is not, and how educational developers can and do engage in such scholarship to grow as individual providers, units, and academic institutions seeking to continue improving teaching and learning. Further, the advancement of effective teaching techniques, expansion…

An extensive body of correlational and experimental evidence has demonstrated the positive (and perhaps causal) link between different dimensions of effective postsecondary classroom instruction and both course-level learning and more general cognitive growth. In this chapter, the authors present evidence from a longitudinal study of first-year…

During the last two decades an increasing number of international faculty specializing in different disciplines have been hired by U.S. institutions of higher education. Most of these instructors have been college educated in their native countries but have come to the United States for graduate studies and then earned doctoral degrees from U.S.…

Forum theater is an interactive theater method in which audience members become active performers, taking advantage of the opportunity to explore multicultural dimensions of teaching in a "safe space" and receiving feedback from colleagues. Forum theater methods derive from Theater of the Oppressed, an interactive approach founded by the Brazilian…

This chapter describes Clemson University's Laptop Faculty Development Program and its assessment, offering the program as one model for designing faculty development to successfully implement laptop mandates. The chapter also acquaints readers with the many types of in-class, laptop-based activities that meet best-practice criteria for effective…

Provides suggestions for how faculty can encourage students to take faculty evaluations seriously and to provide thoughtful and constructive criticism. (EV)

Discusses written comments by students on faculty evaluations and suggests how faculty can organize them to provide usable feedback to improve their teaching and student learning. (EV)

Examines some simple and more complicated ways for faculty to obtain meaningful feedback in the middle of the semester, while there is still time to make changes for the students in that class. (EV)

Offers suggestions about how faculty can incorporate technology into midsemester student feedback, asserting that it gives students more opportunities to provide input. (EV)

Describes student quality teams as a way to help faculty make the process of getting student feedback more reflective and collaborative. (EV)

Describes a streamlined process for using student focus groups to obtain student feedback on faculty and course effectiveness. (EV)

Offers suggestions for writing student rating scale questions that target individual faculty needs and interests. (EV)

Provides information about how faculty can use the data on their own student ratings to develop a narrative that will help others (such as administrators and the public) understand what the numbers mean and how they should and should not be used. (EV)

Discusses the often difficult process of evaluating teaching effectiveness in terms of student learning outcomes. Suggests approaches for micro- and macro-level teacher evaluation using student outcomes. (EV)