Professional Development
Intellectual development and service to peers as integral to professional teaching
The third major component of treating teaching as a scholarly activity (in addition to setting goals through professional reflection and getting feedback on one's effectiveness) is professional development. This involves a commitment to continued growth in knowledge and skills, participating in scholarly dialogue about teaching, and sometimes sharing one's acquired expertise with colleagues. Consider, for example, the model of professionals in law or health care who have continuing education requirements for renewed licensure.
Forms of professional development might include (but would not be limited to):
- observing peers and discussing observations -- for one's own enrichment
- taking post-graduate courses or seminars on teaching
- reading literature on teaching: education journals; college teaching journals; teaching articles in topic-related journals; books
- participating in workshops on teaching methods or perspectives
For example: workshop on collaborative learning; writing across the curriculum; etc. - using CETaL support for specific problems (for example, videotaping & analysis)
- peer review and teaching circles
- mapping future goals, based on careful analysis of past performance
- assembling a course portfolio for others to use and build on
- publishing or leading workshops on teaching; other forms of mentoring fellow teachers
- diagnosis of past evaluations for strengths and weaknesses, and future plans based on these; and/or analysis of recent efforts at improvement
- innovation -- and evaluations of their effectiveness or impact
- research on teaching, whether local (for personal use) or publishable
- disciline specific education or activities that helps you remain current in your field
One should also be careful to distinguish between development and mere change. Development should increase one's teaching capital, the non-consumable resources or repertoire of strategies and knowledge that one has to apply to more effective teaching. For example, learning how to use new instructional technologies may have potential benefit -- but how does one use them to enhance teaching?
One startegy may be to document the improvement of a single course over time. This might include analysis of successive syllabi, etc. This is another occasion to link directly to one's statement of teaching philosophy.
Bibliography
Stephen D. Brookfield. 1995. Becoming a Critically Reflective Teacher. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.
---See chapters 9-10 on using the literature on education as a lens to intepret our own teaching.
Teitel, Lee, Maria Ricci and Jacqueline Coogan. 1998. "Experience Teachers Construct Teaching Portfoilios: A Culture of Compliance vs. a Culture of Professional Development." Pp. 143-155 in Nona Lyons (ed.), With Portfolio in Hand, Teachers College Press (New York).
O'Neil. Carol and Alan Wright. 1997. "Description of Steps Taken to Evaluate and Improve Your Teaching" (pp. 48-51) and "Presentations, Research and Publications on Teaching" (pp.52-54) in Recording Teaching Accomplishment: A Dalhousie Guide to the Teaching Dossier, 5th ed. Halifax, NS: Dalhousie University Office of Instructional Development and Technology.
Menges , R.J. and Weimer, M. 1996. "Feedback for Enhanced Learning." Chap. 10 in Teaching on Solid Ground: Using Scholarship to Improve Practice, San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.