The future of faculty development rests, in part, on forming guided "communities of practice" to foster the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL), which may enhance both scholarly productivity and pedagogical effectiveness. This article will discuss University of North Georgia's SoTL Academy, which bridges geographic and scheduling…

Technology is changing the landscape of higher education. As the editors of this special issue have noted, technology has been particularly useful when trying to solve problems. At Texas Christian University (TCU), we employed technology to create a tool that would help standardize the evaluation of teaching while still offering enough flexibility…

Centers for teaching and learning (CTL) have traditionally relied upon on-campus programming to support faculty professional development, but as increasing numbers of faculty access resources and collaborate online, CTLs could do more to build online community. To meet this challenge, our team developed a website, EdTech Commons, which features…

The need for faculty development continues to increase despite the limited resources of many developers to serve growing demands. To address this conundrum, we explore existing literature about communities of practice (CoPs) in higher education and case studies of CoPs at our institution as an avenue to extend and supplement future professional…

Assessment is a cyclical process within which educators construct outcomes, implement programs, assess constructs such as learning, evaluate results, and utilize results to craft stronger programs and services. Within educational and faculty development, assessment measures program impact on faculty, students, and/or institutional culture.…

Building on previous studies on the changing nature of faculty work, this article presents a conceptual framework for faculty professional success. The authors report on the perceptions of 300 faculty development professionals regarding the importance of skills in nine competency domains: teaching; research; leadership; diversity, inclusion and…

Members of the UWM CETL online and blended faculty development team share innovative technological and pedagogical strategies that they currently utilize to motivate and assist instructors in developing courses for the online or blended environments, and they discuss the lessons learned from incorporating active learning, open content, bring your…

How should educational developers develop their own expertise and skills in the twenty-first century? Today educational developers are drawing on new discoveries in educational research, supporting new pedagogies in many fields, and experimenting with new technologies for teaching and learning. Yet they must do so in a time of uncertain and…

Consultation has been found to improve teaching effectiveness, have benefits on teaching effectiveness for both young and older faculty members, and have persistent benefits beyond the consultation process. In light of the prevalent use of consultation in educational development, this qualitative study explored how educational developers…

Role theory is a sociological perspective that examines the ways in which interactions with others in a social environment can lead to role-related stress. Faculty may suffer from role-related stressors such as role conflict, ambiguity, and overload as they navigate the job facets of research, engagement, and teaching. This role stress can result…

Kansas State University designed a 20-month faculty development program with the goal of fostering broad, institution-wide adoption of teaching practices that focus on brain-based learning. Components of the program included annual teaching and learning workshops, reading and discussion groups based on content of a book about how the brain learns…

Faculty development efforts have had varying success in changing the culture of a department or institution. In this paper, we describe a faculty development program using a residents as teachers (RATS) curriculum that we believe effected educational change in a department with a history of suboptimal student evaluations on the clerkship and an…

Communities of practice, which enable sustained collaboration among fellow practitioners, have potential for advancement of faculty development, but traditionally employ face-to-face meetings with inherent economic and geographical limitations. Our virtual community of practice (VCP) model exposes engineering instructors from across the country to…

This article focuses on the challenges faced by faculty members in a consortium of 13 Liberal Arts Colleges (LACs). We present findings, by academic rank, from a mixed-methods study of faculty development needs and experiences within the consortium. Relying on human resource principles, we advocate a greater focus on the development of the person,…

Although studies have examined numerous factors that predict junior faculty success, previous research has paid little attention to the role played by department chairs. Drawing on theory from person-environment fit theory and value congruence, we sought to examine the implication of a match versus mismatch between faculty members and their chairs…