Modeling Best Professional Practices in Teaching
Faculty members regularly discuss and plan for ways to model best professional practices. In syllabi integration meetings (SIMs), graduate-level faculty plan each semester for ways to maximize teacher candidates’ learning. This also serves as a model of professional collaboration efforts for teacher candidates. Assessment of teaching effectiveness is discussed under Substandard 5f. (Unit Evaluation of Professional Education Faculty Performance)
All professional education faculty have earned graduate degrees in the areas of their teaching assignments, making them well prepared for such assignments.
As part of the college’s college-wide assessment of teaching and learning, faculty members’ understanding of the content area they teach is assessed by students, using the Student Observation of Course and Teaching instrument. Data using this evaluation instrument are collected in the fall and spring semesters each year. Table 5.5 provides mean scores for the full-time and part-time professional education faculty on items related to content knowledge. A five-point scale is used, going from the lowest score of -2 to the highest score of +2, with 0 being neutral.
The conceptual frameworks of the programs guide each faculty member as he or she prepares course syllabi. At the graduate level, graphic representation is on the cover of each course syllabus. Faculty introduce their course objectives in relation to the four major areas or domains: Choreographer of Instruction (Planning and Preparation), Designer of Learning Environments (Classroom Environment), Production Managers of Learning Experiences (Instructional Delivery), and Professional Educators (Professional Responsibilities).
Faculty members remain current in knowledge in their fields through their research, attendance at professional meetings and conferences, and professional reading. The currency of full-time tenured-track faculty is regularly assessed by the college as a part of the tenure-track review process. That of tenured faculty is assessed every five years, as part of the post-tenure review process. Faculty members’ research and scholarly interests have translated into the classroom in various forms, such as the introduction of the Japanese Lesson Study model as part of the field experience requirements for graduate students and the use of pre-school sites involved in faculty research also being used for early childhood field experience placements.
Candidates are encouraged to engage in critical thinking, problem solving through a variety of individual assignments and collaborative projects. In addition, candidates are required to write reflection papers in the great majority of their courses. Reflections include journals, including online journals, with peers, faculty members, and field supervisors. Rubric-based class projects are often critiqued, not only by faculty, by also by the candidates’ peers. Faculty provide students with checklists and rubrics that they can use to assess their own work, before submitting their work for evaluation by the course instructor. This practice not only encourages candidates to monitor their own learning, but also models for them how to make assessment transparent. Course evaluations indicate the degree of candidate satisfaction with faculty’s efforts.
An understanding of different learning styles is an important basis on which faculty base their teaching. These strategies include the use of cooperative learning strategies, journal dialogues, think-pair-share, online discussion groups, threading, role play simulations, use of the fine arts, teacher work samples, analysis of audio or videotaped lessons, among many and varied instructional strategies.
In addition, at the graduate level, candidates take a learning style inventory, so they can better understand their own preferred learning styles. This learning style inventory is now administered in the first week of the first semester of the candidates’ programs of study. While faculty have always used a variety of instructional strategies, they will now use the information from the candidates’ learning style inventories to also explicitly link the strategies used to learning style preferences, pointing these out to the teacher candidates.
In the unit’s efforts to ensure that the use of a variety of instructional strategies reflect different learning styles, faculty members also take a teaching style inventory. Discussions about learning and teaching style preferences and ways in which these are reflected in course assignments are a part of faculty meeting discussions.
Faculty integrate diversity and technology in their courses in a variety of ways. Course syllabi explicitly indicate how the State’s diversity and technology standards are operationalized. Table 5.7 provides a compilation of the variety of ways that diversity and technology are integrated in courses.
Faculty use a variety of ways to assess their own effectiveness as teachers and the positive effects they have on candidates’ learning and performance. These include several formal faculty meetings each year, one before the beginning of each semester and the other mid-way through the semester. At these meetings, faculty meet with a peer or several peers to review aspects of their syllabi and to share student products. One of the agenda items for these meetings is to share lessons learned for the benefit of the learning of everyone.
Faculty are also paired with another faculty member for peer observation and peer review of course materials. Their feedback to each other are kept confidential, although faculty are asked to include their reflections based on peer feedback in the self-assessment essays that are submitted to the chair.
Informal and impromptu sharing sessions are also frequent among faculty.
