Describe what you plan to do, the anticipated impact your project will have on student learning, with reference to program goals, and plans for assessment of impact on student learning.
Based on the promising results from the SPICE funded 2017 Fall Teaching Academy for Professors (F-TAP; see Supplemental Information: Appendix A) with faculty participants from 7 different colleges, a multidisciplinary leadership team (PI: Expert in student-centered pedagogy from Education, Co-PIs: Mentor/experienced Teaching Fellows from Chemical & Materials Engineering and Communication, Co-PI: Evaluation expert from Education) proposes a 2019 Spring Teaching Academy for Professors (S-TAP) to improve faculty teaching and student learning experiences in freshman introductory courses with high enrollment and high failure rates. TAP is informed by teacher learning research, which indicates that 1) Teacher effectiveness is one of the most important determining factors in student learning (Darling-Hammond & Bransford, 2005); and 2) Collaboration among fellow teachers leads to improvement in teaching (Lewis, Perry, & Hurd, 2009). Grounded in solid theoretical foundations on social constructivism (Vygotsky, 1978), professors from multiple disciplines co-construct knowledge on teaching and learning in the company of their peers, with the assistance from more experienced peers. Unlike one-stop professional development models (e.g. workshops), TAP is a collaborative, sustained, evidence-based professional learning model (Archibald, Coggshall, Croft, & Goe, 2011; Killion & Kennedy, 2012) that helps faculty to deeply reflect on teaching and learning. Using the Japanese lesson study model (Fernandez & Yoshida, 2004), Teaching Fellows actively engage in observing peers’ teaching and discussing observations and evidence of student engagement and learning to improve one another’s teaching that ultimately results in improved student experience and learning. Faculty learn to apply student-centered pedagogical/instructional approaches (Weimer, 2002) that can effectively improve student learning experiences in difficult courses to pass such as freshman introductory courses. These include effective strategies to teach diverse learners, including English learners (Echevarria, Vogt, & Short, 2008).
According to the report by the Association of Public and Land-Grant Universities (2016), high enrolled freshman introductory courses are classified as one of the categories of “gateway courses,” which “contribute heavily to overall institutional drop-out rates between a student’s first and second year” (p.3 & 4). In the same report, they list suggested solutions to resolve these gateway/bottleneck courses. Importantly, the S-TAP addresses 3 of these suggestions:
- Faculty professional development
- Different pedagogical approaches
- Hiring teaching specialists/instructors for gateway courses
The proposed project’s focus on freshman introductory courses that have high enrollment and high failure rates hits the core of the nation’s and CPP’s challenges to improve freshman graduation rates. This also addresses and impacts the CPP’s GI 2025 goal to narrow the equity/achievement gap for underrepresented minority students, since CPP has 54.5% Hispanic students and 57% first-generation students (Institutional Statistics, 2016).
The aim of this project is to improve faculty’s teaching (i.e. pedagogy) in order to maximize student success in their learning experience and performance across freshman introductory courses. The ultimate goal of this project is to address the GI 2025 campus goals, which are to “narrow the equity gap and improve freshman graduation rates” (http://www.cpp.edu/~studentsuccess/oss/gi-2025/campus-goals.shtml).