In the spring of 2020, many institutions of higher education rapidly adopted new models of course delivery to support the ongoing need for instructional flexibility in response to the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic. This article discusses how the transition to a flexible instructional model at Furman University created space for faculty to consider the value…

Across higher education, educational developers and their supporting campus communities are being called upon to scale up evidence-informed practices, to enhance student experiences, and to document the changes. This article builds on the work of scholars who have taken up this evaluative challenge, by examining varied aspects of the evidencing…

In times of crises, educational developers (EDs) work to ameliorate the teaching- and learning-related impacts caused by campus-wide disruptions such as health-related emergencies, mass shootings, and environmental disasters. These incidents may impact the personal-psychological factors and processes of EDs that, in turn, influence their…

This article outlines an appreciative inquiry (AI) into a departmental professional development process and describes the resulting implementation of an appreciative peer evaluation meeting as one part of the new professional development process. Using AI, a departmental faculty development committee sought to re-envision the professional…

This brief piece has two purposes: to reflect on the argument in "What's the Problem Now?" (Bass, 2020) in light of the events of the past two years and to give that essay's core argument--that the problem of learning in higher education is a wicked problem--a more practical grounding for how it can shape the work of educational…

Due to the "wicked problem" of the Academy's resistance to innovation, new teaching and learning programs struggle to become integrated into the fabric of the Academy, which slows the uptake of evidence-based practices. This wicked problem is rooted in the lack of slow, intentional mechanisms for cultural change in the Academy. In this…

The global pandemic that began in 2020 amplified the chasm between higher education's stated goals to advance diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) and the systemic realities that many students, instructors, and staff grapple with on a daily basis. We contend that attenuating the barriers to DEI outcomes means first acknowledging that DEI is a…

The COVID-19 pandemic brought about unprecedented changes in our approach to delivering educational development (ED) programming. In this article we discuss how our dual ED centers pivoted during the sudden switch to online learning, highlighting how we overcame challenges such as a small staff, tight timelines, and faculty anxieties.…

This article describes how a focus on outcomes can be a tool for guiding systemic change. By focusing on positive outcomes to be achieved, a group can guide its collective efforts toward an ideal future rather than becoming fixated on individual problems to solve. While there is support for an outcome-guided approach in the literature on…

This study focuses on the lived experiences of nine university faculty who were attempting to implement inclusive teaching practices following university-sponsored faculty development. While the participants were each successful in their respective implementations, they all expressed anxiety at the beginning of the semester as well as at the end…

When the global pandemic forced campuses across the United States to send students home in March 2020, instructors were thrown into triage mode, forced to rapidly transition their on-the-ground classroom curriculum to a format that could be completed remotely by students spread out across the country. At the same time, centers for teaching and…

Revisiting an essay from 1999, this article explores the current conditions in higher education, and society more broadly, that help shape the roles for the scholarship of teaching and learning (SoTL) and educational development. By seeing the current "crises" of higher education not only as "problems" to be investigated but as…

A prominent goal of colleges and universities today is to enact data-driven teaching and learning. Faculty clearly play a key role, and yet they tend to have limited time, a lack of training in assessment or education research, and few incentives for engaging in this work. We describe a framework designed to address the practical and cultural…

Many faculty members demonstrate unwavering resistance to adopting research-based instructional strategies. This phenomenon commonly fits with motivated reasoning, whereby a person feels threatened by persuasion to change, leading to overtly defensive and sometimes disruptive behaviors and refusal. Changing away from established practices may…

Significant progress has been made in understanding science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) education and ways it can be improved, but propagation of change remains a challenge. This study presents an analysis of STEM faculty responses to open-text survey questions that asked them to identify motivations and obstacles to making…