What is TAP?

Teaching Academy for Professors (TAP) was first conceptualized in 2014 by Dr. Ruth Ahn, Professor of Education at California State Polytechnic University, Pomona, when she was serving as the Faculty Associate at the university Faculty Center.  She saw the urgent need to create an effective, structured learning environment for higher education faculty to improve student experience and performance.  Initially funded by an internal grant supported by the Faculty Center (Director: Dr. Victoria Bhavsar), the first cohort of 8 Teaching Fellows from 5 different colleges "graduated" in 2016 with strong student and faculty results.  TAP continues to grow, led by the multidisciplinary leadership team consisting of Drs. Yam Lee (Chemical Engineering) and Amy Gimino (Education/Assessment), along with Jennifer Mahlke (Communication) and K-12 teachers Nicole Tronske (Biology) & Poe Teng (Math/Computer Science/Special Education).   

TAP is a collaborative, multidisciplinary professional learning model designed to transform higher education teaching and learning using student-centered pedagogy.  Unlike one-stop professional development models that deliver quick fix methods, TAP is a contextualized, sustained, and bottom-up approach to fundamentally change how we think about teaching and learning that results in higher student engagement and performance.  Faculty are engaged in the following structured activities: 

• Participate in a Summer Institute to learn foundations of teaching and learning and student-centered pedagogical approaches
• Participate in on-going seminars with a discussion on teaching observation and focal topics on learning principles
• Based on the Japanese professional development model of lesson study, regularly observe peers’ teaching in a multidisciplinary-based triad with post-observation discussions
• Analyze faculty and student performance data to examine the effectiveness of instruction. 

Key features of TAP include the following:

• It is a supportive, non-threatening, and trusting community of professors who are open-minded, passionate, and committed to improving their teaching and student learning.
• It is an evidence-based model guided by student and faculty data, guided by accountability to peers, students, and stakeholders.   
• It is intentionally composed of faculty from different backgrounds with respect to years of experience in teaching, discipline, faculty rank, race/ethnicity, gender, age, etc.  This enables professors to view pedagogy from multiple perspectives. 
• It emphasizes theory into practice.  Learning the foundations of teaching and learning and student-centered pedagogical frameworks and approaches in the Summer Institute, TAP participants learn why they teach the way they teach and reflect on how they would incorporate new theories, frameworks, and approaches into their own teaching. 
• The most distinctive feature of TAP is the application of a modified version of Japanese lesson study.  Participants open their classrooms to observe one another’s teaching and engage in post-observation discussion on teaching with their colleagues.  The focus is on providing nurturing, non-threatening, and constructive collegial feedback to improve pedagogy that is student-centered.