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Professional Development, Shifting Perspectives, and Instructional Change among Community College Anatomy and Physiology Instructors.

ABSTRACT: This paper presents community college (CC) instructors' responses to the Community College Anatomy and Physiology Educational Research (CAPER) project, a professional development program focused on active learning and educational research. We engage with conceptual change theory to better understand why and how CC instructors shifted their perspectives toward active learning. Qualitative data indicate that the participating CC instructors experienced pedagogical discontentment, leading to increased positive beliefs about active learning and educational research. In addition, we find that CC instructors have continued their pursuit of pedagogical change and educational research through communities of practice, which provide positive learning environments.

SUBMITTER: Hyson AR

PROVIDER: S-EPMC8715805 | biostudies-literature | 2021 Sep

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Professional Development, Shifting Perspectives, and Instructional Change among Community College Anatomy and Physiology Instructors.

Hyson Audrey Rose AR Bonham Branden B Hood Suzanne S Deutschman Megan C MC Seithers Laura C LC Hull Kerry K Jensen Murray M

CBE life sciences education 20210901 3

This paper presents community college (CC) instructors' responses to the Community College Anatomy and Physiology Educational Research (CAPER) project, a professional development program focused on active learning and educational research. We engage with conceptual change theory to better understand why and how CC instructors shifted their perspectives toward active learning. Qualitative data indicate that the participating CC instructors experienced pedagogical discontentment, leading to increa ...[more]

PMID: 34424756

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Project description:The effectiveness of active learning on promoting students' academic outcomes and persistence has been established in the literature. However, despite the effort of purposeful change agents, the uptake of active learning in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) is slow. While previous research from the chemistry education community has provided insights into the implementation of specific active learning strategies across the United States, the extent to which chemistry instructors leverage these strategies in general remains unknown. This article presents the results of a national survey aimed at exploring introductory chemistry instructors' knowledge and implementation of active learning, variations on this knowledge, and use across tenure statuses and institution types. This paper also aims to address the gap in the literature in our understanding of the characteristics of instructors of these courses. We thus provide a description of instructors' demographics, training, teaching experience, and teaching responsibilities. Our findings reveal that instructors in these courses are prominently males of European descent. Additionally, instructors come into their teaching position with minimal pedagogical training and participate mainly in short training once in their position. While the majority of instructors have knowledge of specific active learning strategies, their consistent implementation remains limited, with lecturing still being the instructional practice of choice. Variations were found between institution types and across tenure statuses within institutions in terms of pedagogical training, use of specific active learning strategies, and proportion of class time spent lecturing. The findings provide a baseline for future studies that aim to assess the effectiveness of interventions fostering the implementation of active learning in introductory chemistry courses and highlight the critical need for improved communication about teaching practices across institutions and tenure statuses.

Project description:BackgroundFor vocational and professional education to remain relevant, instructors need to keep developing themselves and their practices. Much of instructor learning happens on-the-job. Drawing on literature on teacher learning in the workplace, this article explores how structural and cultural conditions shape professional learning of instructors in departments for post-secondary vocational and professional education in western Canada.MethodsA multiple case study approach was used to explore how instructors perceive departmental conditions as enhancing or inhibiting professional learning. Interview data, meeting observations, and program documentation was collected from 27 instructors from 5 departments in three institutes for post-secondary vocational and professional education. The educational programming in the five departments cover four industry sectors: two healthcare departments, one building trades, one business, and one social services department.ResultsStructural conditions reported to facilitate instructor professional learning at the department level include student feedback, job-rotation, coordinating work-placements, and whether participation in continuing professional development is a licensing requirement of the profession. Heavy workload and the way teaching is scheduled are most often reported as conditions inhibiting learning. Considering cultural conditions, three in-depth case descriptions illustrate how instructors draw on beliefs and practices prevalent in their original trade/profession when shaping their departmental culture as a learning environment.ConclusionsThe concept of sense-making proved useful to describe how instructors draw on elements of the occupational culture taught in the program when shaping their workplace as a learning environment. This influence of occupational culture could help explain previously observed differences in how instructors from various industry sectors engage in professional learning. Organizational support is warranted for facilitating organizational conditions for instructor learning including the development of departmental leaders' capacity to influence workplace conditions for professional learning.Supplementary informationThe online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1186/s40461-023-00151-z.

Project description:BackgroundStudies continually show benefits of active learning in college classrooms, yet it is difficult to get faculty to adopt these methods. Particularly challenging is the final step of the instructional change process, "refreezing," when after making initial changes in instructional methods, instructors decide whether to continue with new instructional methods or return to their previous methods. Though this stage is important, it is not well studied. Most available studies about ongoing support following professional development on teaching merely state that facilitators made an effort to offer support, or report how frequently participants engaged with online support mechanisms through counting postings on listservs or message boards. Such measures do not show evidence that participants actually received positive reinforcement or intellectual and emotional support, which are crucial to refreezing, nor do these frequency analyses help other professional developers learn how to create productive ongoing support mechanisms that yield high participant engagement.ResultsThis workshop for 35 college mathematics instructors used online and in-person communities to provide support to participants during the post-workshop period of "refreezing." Almost all workshop attendees participated in "e-mentoring" (94%), primarily through a productive, engaging group email listserv. By combining qualitative coding of message content with the techniques of social network analysis, we reveal how facilitators and participants on the group listserv provided intellectual and emotional support, as well as positive reinforcement through feedback loops. The analysis also shows how the facilitators made this a helpful group and maintained participant engagement through frequent encouragement, deliberate community building, and thoughtfully timed responses.ConclusionsThough many professional development workshops offer online support through email listservs, there is little evidence that these listservs successfully engage and support participants. Applying the analytic approach of social network analysis allowed us to model the conversation threads in one highly engaged and supportive listserv following a mathematics professional development workshop. This method revealed the processes of ongoing support in ways that traditional frequency-based analyses cannot. This method also revealed lessons for how other professional developers can create productive, helpful online support listservs. Since this is an innovative application of social network analysis, we describe the method in detail.

Dataset Information

Professional Development, Shifting Perspectives, and Instructional Change among Community College Anatomy and Physiology Instructors.

Publications

Professional Development, Shifting Perspectives, and Instructional Change among Community College Anatomy and Physiology Instructors.

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