Significant progress has been made in understanding science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) education and ways it can be improved, but propagation of change remains a challenge. This study presents an analysis of STEM faculty responses to open-text survey questions that asked them to identify motivations and obstacles to making changes in their teaching.
Gary A. Smith
Many faculty members demonstrate unwavering resistance to adopting research-based instructional strategies. This phenomenon commonly fits with motivated reasoning, whereby a person feels threatened by persuasion to change, leading to overtly defensive and sometimes disruptive behaviors and refusal.
Marsha Lovett and Chad Hershock
A prominent goal of colleges and universities today is to enact data-driven teaching and learning. Faculty clearly play a key role, and yet they tend to have limited time, a lack of training in assessment or education research, and few incentives for engaging in this work.
In July, I wrote to you about transitions and how much they can make us feel overloaded. In recent conversations with POD Network colleagues, though, I’ve felt like it’s more than transitions that are exhausting us. I see, hear, and feel the stress and anxiety that is sapping our energy.
Richard J. Reddick, Beth E. Bukoski, and Stella L. Smith
With an understanding that equity-minded faculty development is an essential space in which to respond to cultural taxation (CT), our study employed a phenomenological focus group design to investigate how Black faculty at a research-intensive PWI located in a creative class city buffeted by racial tensions navigated their service and community experiences.
These open sessions are an opportunity to connect, support, and create community with your educational development colleagues. Let’s check in with one another and talk about what (and how) we are all doing during this pandemic.
Randall Bass
Revisiting an essay from 1999, this article explores the current conditions in higher education, and society more broadly, that help shape the roles for the scholarship of teaching and learning (SoTL) and educational development.
Lindsay Bernhagen, PhD
Hello readers, and welcome to both a new year and a new phase for To Improve the Academy. As your editor, I am thrilled to announce that this is our first open access issue brought to you by our new publisher, Michigan Publishing Services.
Friday, July 17, 2020, 1:00–2:00 PM EST
Facilitator: Rebecca Pope-Ruark, Georgia Institute of Technology
In this interactive PODLive session, we’ll talk about the three indicators of burnout, acknowledge our stressors, and plan for ways to stay balanced and well going into the fall semester.
I considered providing you with some factual updates about our organization given that our Spring Core meeting just happened in June, but I’m going to save that for later. Instead, I’ve opted for something a bit more conceptual, which feels like a better fit at this point in time.