Provost S Faculty Development Subcommittee on Teaching

Ivan Sascha Sheehan, Ph.D.

Provost’s Faculty Development Subcommittee on Teaching

Ping-Ann Addo, Arthur Eisenkraft, Peter Langer, Alexia Pollack,

Ivan Sascha Sheehan, Vivian Zamel, and Wei Zhang

The Provost’s Faculty Development Subcommittee on teaching—through its consideration of and research on programs, centers, and initiatives at other colleges and universities—has determined that there is a critical need at UMass Boston to value, foreground, and promote teaching and teacher development in more concerted, multiple, and palpable ways.

We acknowledge that CIT Seminars have been invaluable because of the ways in which they bring together cross-disciplinary faculty who devote themselves in an ongoing way to reflect on and evaluate their teaching practices in a substantive, supportive, and non-evaluative context. But we also recognize that UMass Boston needs to do more in order to give faculty to understand that teacher development is a priority.

The following are recommendations that would contribute to developing and promoting such a “culture of teaching”:

· New faculty need an orientation regarding teaching and teaching expectations within their departments. This would mean that chairs (or some other designated individual) within a department would work with new faculty members so that they have a clearer understanding of their role as teachers and about other teaching-related issues such as designing curricula, developing classroom strategies and approaches, creating teaching portfolios, evaluating teaching and learning. New faculty members would thus come to understand how they, as teachers, will be evaluated within their departments and beyond.

· Mentorship programs need to be established so that (new) faculty members are supported in their efforts and teaching practices. Mentors need to support and guide faculty members in an ongoing way. Given the time and effort this work would require, mentorship needs to be recognized as a valuable service contribution.

· When initiatives are created, faculty members need to be given to understand that their participation in these teaching-related events is valued. Ideally, these initiatives should build on one another over a series of meetings or workshops. At a number of institutions faculty members meet at regularly scheduled workshops or brown-bag lunch discussions.

· A website should be developed to make available the full range of resources available on campus to improve teaching effectiveness, drawing on both best practices in the field and the needs of UMB faculty. Development of the website should follow a careful examination of resources available on other campuses and be tailored to meet the needs of the UMB community. One idea discussed was to include a social-networking/self-populating component of the website through which faculty could make available new and useful resources related to teaching effectiveness.

· Surveys should be undertaken to develop a sense of what types of resources are currently available with regard to teaching effectiveness/faculty development at UMB and what types of resources faculty would like to see made available in the future. The hope is that such a survey will illuminate “what specific resources provide most value to the teacher.”