Faculty Motivation and Sustained Engagement with Course Design and Teaching
Allegheny College is currently participating in the Retention Performance Management (RPM) program run by the John N. Gardner Institute for Excellence in Undergraduate Education. A key component of this program is a two-day retreat during which a representative group of faculty, staff, administrators, and students meets to study the college's retention data and to formulate recommendations for the institution. Our retreat took place on Monday and Tuesday of this week and, as part of my preparation, I decided to start reading the book Improving Teaching, Learning, Equity, and Success in Gateway Courses, which was edited by Andrew (Drew) Koch, the President and Chief Executive Officer of the Gardner Institute. I attended some preliminary workshops, plus the Institute's Gateway Conference, in Houston, TX, earlier in the spring and heard about the book there, possibly from Drew himself.
As described in the book, gateway courses are characterized by high enrollment (in the context of a given institution) and high DFWI rates. As it states on page 53, "they represent roadblocks to student persistence and timely graduation, and differentially affect students from underrepresented groups, discouraging them from continuing in higher education." It is for precisely these reasons that I asked to teach precalculus (Math 159) at Allegheny and designed a course that I hoped would help students to increase their mathematical confidence and self-efficacy and effectively prepare them for our calculus sequence. I also redesigned my Calculus I (Math 160) course and I taught both redesigned courses for the first time this past spring (I hope to write more on this over the summer).
I just finished reading the chapter entitled "Fostering Evidence-Informed Teaching in Crucial Classes: Faculty Development in Gateway Courses," which was written by Susannah McGowan, Peter Felten, Joshua Caulkins, and Isis Artze-Vega, all of whom are fellows at the Gardner Institute. Some parts of the chapter rang true for me and inspired me to share them via this post. I was particularly interested in the parts that cited the articles "Faculty careers and work lives: A professional growth perspective," by KerryAnn O'Meara, Aimee LaPointe Terosky, and Anna Neumann, and "Faculty learning matters: Organizational conditions and contexts that shape faculty learning," by KerryAnn O'Meara, Mark Rivera, Alexandra Kuvaeva, and Kristen Corrigan. The authors of the chapter state that through their work with the Gardner Institute, they "have identified three dispositional elements that have a powerful impact on faculty motivation and sustained engagement with gateway-course design and teaching":
1. Hope: Faculty must be supported to feel hopeful that they have the ability to make positive changes. The chapter refers to faculty having a "narrative of growth" versus a "narrative of constraint" in a way that, as they note, mirrors Carol Dweck's work on growth mindset. I tend to be overly (sometimes unrealistically) optimistic in certain contexts and in recent years this has definitely been the case for my teaching. I don't know what the cause is but I know it sustains me through the ups and downs of the semester and the different iterations of my classes.
2. Agency: Faculty also need to feel that they have "the capacity to contribute to both student learning in their courses and larger-scale institutional change" and "a belief that their actions matter." For me, I think this has developed over time. Every time a little (or big!) change in one of my courses has an exciting payoff, it fuels me to look for further changes to make. And I'm starting to see the influence of my work in my department and across campus, which I really didn't expect at the outset.
3. Persistence: There is no quick fix for gateway courses and initial changes may have little to no effect. But faculty and faculty teams need to be willing to keep working at it, believing that "[d]oing the hard work of improving gateway courses often yields only incremental positive outcomes; the cumulative effect of these small changes, however, can be significant over time." For me, the process of developing and improving my courses is just fun and I'm enjoying seeing the results for both my students and myself. Nothing's perfect, that's for sure, but I think it's heading in the right direction.
In a recent conversation with Rick Detweiler, President of the Great Lakes Colleges Association, I described the changes that I have been making in my courses and he astutely recognized that I sometimes feel like, in his words, an outlier. While this occasionally leads me to feel frustrated, I recognize that any hesitation on the part of my colleagues to make large scale changes is not a result of a lack of concern for our students. Caring about our students' success is an integral part of the job at a liberal arts college like Allegheny. On the contrary, I recognize the changes in my own hopefulness, agency, and persistence that started me on this course and that allow me to stick with it, and I'm optimistic that the community of colleagues who feel ready to jump in will continue to grow.
As described in the book, gateway courses are characterized by high enrollment (in the context of a given institution) and high DFWI rates. As it states on page 53, "they represent roadblocks to student persistence and timely graduation, and differentially affect students from underrepresented groups, discouraging them from continuing in higher education." It is for precisely these reasons that I asked to teach precalculus (Math 159) at Allegheny and designed a course that I hoped would help students to increase their mathematical confidence and self-efficacy and effectively prepare them for our calculus sequence. I also redesigned my Calculus I (Math 160) course and I taught both redesigned courses for the first time this past spring (I hope to write more on this over the summer).
I just finished reading the chapter entitled "Fostering Evidence-Informed Teaching in Crucial Classes: Faculty Development in Gateway Courses," which was written by Susannah McGowan, Peter Felten, Joshua Caulkins, and Isis Artze-Vega, all of whom are fellows at the Gardner Institute. Some parts of the chapter rang true for me and inspired me to share them via this post. I was particularly interested in the parts that cited the articles "Faculty careers and work lives: A professional growth perspective," by KerryAnn O'Meara, Aimee LaPointe Terosky, and Anna Neumann, and "Faculty learning matters: Organizational conditions and contexts that shape faculty learning," by KerryAnn O'Meara, Mark Rivera, Alexandra Kuvaeva, and Kristen Corrigan. The authors of the chapter state that through their work with the Gardner Institute, they "have identified three dispositional elements that have a powerful impact on faculty motivation and sustained engagement with gateway-course design and teaching":
1. Hope: Faculty must be supported to feel hopeful that they have the ability to make positive changes. The chapter refers to faculty having a "narrative of growth" versus a "narrative of constraint" in a way that, as they note, mirrors Carol Dweck's work on growth mindset. I tend to be overly (sometimes unrealistically) optimistic in certain contexts and in recent years this has definitely been the case for my teaching. I don't know what the cause is but I know it sustains me through the ups and downs of the semester and the different iterations of my classes.
2. Agency: Faculty also need to feel that they have "the capacity to contribute to both student learning in their courses and larger-scale institutional change" and "a belief that their actions matter." For me, I think this has developed over time. Every time a little (or big!) change in one of my courses has an exciting payoff, it fuels me to look for further changes to make. And I'm starting to see the influence of my work in my department and across campus, which I really didn't expect at the outset.
3. Persistence: There is no quick fix for gateway courses and initial changes may have little to no effect. But faculty and faculty teams need to be willing to keep working at it, believing that "[d]oing the hard work of improving gateway courses often yields only incremental positive outcomes; the cumulative effect of these small changes, however, can be significant over time." For me, the process of developing and improving my courses is just fun and I'm enjoying seeing the results for both my students and myself. Nothing's perfect, that's for sure, but I think it's heading in the right direction.
In a recent conversation with Rick Detweiler, President of the Great Lakes Colleges Association, I described the changes that I have been making in my courses and he astutely recognized that I sometimes feel like, in his words, an outlier. While this occasionally leads me to feel frustrated, I recognize that any hesitation on the part of my colleagues to make large scale changes is not a result of a lack of concern for our students. Caring about our students' success is an integral part of the job at a liberal arts college like Allegheny. On the contrary, I recognize the changes in my own hopefulness, agency, and persistence that started me on this course and that allow me to stick with it, and I'm optimistic that the community of colleagues who feel ready to jump in will continue to grow.
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