ERIC Number: EJ1122478
Record Type: Journal
Publication Date: 2016
Pages: 30
Abstractor: As Provided
ISBN: N/A
ISSN: EISSN-2469-9896
EISSN: N/A
Assessing the Interactivity and Prescriptiveness of Faculty Professional Development Workshops: The Real-Time Professional Development Observation Tool
Olmstead, Alice; Turpen, Chandra
Physical Review Physics Education Research, v12 n2 p020136-1-020136-30 Jul-Dec 2016
Professional development workshops are one of the primary mechanisms used to help faculty improve their teaching, and draw in many STEM instructors every year. Although workshops serve a critical role in changing instructional practices within our community, we rarely assess workshops through careful consideration of how they engage faculty. Initial evidence suggests that workshop leaders often overlook central tenets of education research that are well established in classroom contexts, such as the role of interactivity in enabling student learning [S. Freeman et al., Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A. 111, 8410 (2014)]. As such, there is a need to develop more robust, evidence-based models of how best to support faculty learning in professional development contexts, and to actively support workshop leaders in relating their design decisions to familiar ideas from other educational contexts. In response to these needs, we have developed an observation tool, the real-time professional development observation tool (R-PDOT), to document the form and focus of faculty engagement during workshops. In this paper, we describe the motivation and methodological considerations behind the development of the R-PDOT, justify our decisions to highlight particular aspects of workshop sessions, and demonstrate how the R-PDOT can be used to analyze three sessions from the Physics and Astronomy New Faculty Workshop. We also justify the accessibility and potential utility of the R-PDOT output as a reflective tool using preliminary data from interviews with workshop leaders, and consider the roles the R-PDOT could play in supporting future research on faculty professional development.
Descriptors: Professional Development, STEM Education, Workshops, Elementary Secondary Education, Elementary School Teachers, Secondary School Teachers, Teacher Improvement, Physics, Astronomy, College Faculty, Undergraduate Students, Science Education, Science Instruction, Science Teachers, Classroom Observation Techniques
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Publication Type: Journal Articles; Reports - Research
Education Level: Elementary Secondary Education; Elementary Education; Secondary Education; Higher Education; Postsecondary Education
Audience: N/A
Language: English
Sponsor: National Science Foundation (NSF)
Authoring Institution: N/A
Grant or Contract Numbers: DUE1431681