Sustaining Faculty Professional Development: Evidences from a Localized Professional Learning Community

Abstract

Faculty development is an essential and important part of institutional effectiveness in professional education. The paper reports the findings of creating and sustaining inter disciplinary localized Professional Learning Community (PLC) at our institute. Locally PLC was formed to improve teaching-learning process for various courses across engineering disciplines. The criteria for selecting the participating faculty for creating PLC was those faculty members who have received training during the workshop on Introduction to Research Methods and Research Methods in Education Technology conducted by IIT Bombay under NMEICT. The methods that have been selected for creating the PLC have sufficient evidence in education research literature. PLC of faculty members using think pair share, visualization, flipped classroom, guided presentation and peer instruction were formed across various programs. A total number of 32 faculty members were further sub grouped into six on the basis of teaching strategies and pedagogy they used to improve students' performance in the course/s. Each subgroup was generally comprised of 3 to 6 faculty members. A total of 20 courses have been taught using the above mentioned various instructional strategies. A total of 2244 students were taught from various undergraduate courses of engineering. Quantitative and qualitative analysis was carried out by every PLC faculty member to evaluate the improvement in teaching-learning process a to find the impact of instructional strategy in their courses. It is observed that in all 36 experiments carried out, students have shown a statistically significant higher performance. 91% of the PLC faculty rated that instruction strategy helped them to improve their content delivery. All the participating student and faculty gave a positive feedback towards the PLC approach and rated their experience as good to excellent. The study gives an indication of the best practices and recommendations while developing and sustaining a localized professional learning community.