Educational Development Practices Research Articles

Strategic planning tools for educational developers supporting SoTL cultures and programs at their institutions

As centers for teaching and learning increasingly offer support and leadership for the scholarship of teaching and learning (SoTL) at their institutions, educational developers need better tools to plan their SoTL programming. This article shares the work of a regional network of educational developers across six institutions in Virginia, who aimed to enhance SoTL offerings within and across their institutions. While SoTL tools and models for individual instructors proliferate, this community of practice noted a gap in support for developers doing more institution-level planning. Through their collaboration, they developed two tools for planning and launching institution-level SoTL programs: the SoTL Strategic Planning Worksheet and the SoTL Program Taxonomy. This article describes the development of these tools and assesses their implications for educational development practice.

Technology, Time And Communication: Exploring Postgraduate Students' Experiences Of Online Supervision During The Pandemic

Doctoral supervision is both a rewarding and challenging experience for supervisors and doctoral students, while effective supervision and research practice is of crucial importance for the developmental process and both students’ and supervisors’ careers. Although several challenges in the research journey are strictly research-focused, supervision is a human activity where intersectional aspects influence actions and activities. Power dynamics are involved in supervisor and research student interactions, many of which link affective with intellectual domains, and many are based on differences, of gender, age, race, or intersectionality. Here, we are mainly concerned with how to tackle challenging issues that grow from gender differences and intersectionality. Within the complex landscape of doctoral supervision, this paper is based on both research and educational development practice, since as authors and practitioners we are engaged with this. We use research, policy, widely available literature, and professional practice to underpin, build and share our developing “gender equality toolkit”. We use case studies to support constructive policies and practices and engage colleagues in reflective and practical development aimed at tackling issues concerning gender and intersectional inequalities in doctoral experiences and supervision.

Tackling Gender Inequality In Doctoral Supervision - An Intersectional Toolkit Involving Hearts, Minds, Policies, And Practices

Doctoral supervision is both a rewarding and challenging experience for supervisors and doctoral students, while effective supervision and research practice is of crucial importance for the developmental process and both students’ and supervisors’ careers. Although several challenges in the research journey are strictly research-focused, supervision is a human activity where intersectional aspects influence actions and activities. Power dynamics are involved in supervisor and research student interactions, many of which link affective with intellectual domains, and many are based on differences, of gender, age, race, or intersectionality. Here, we are mainly concerned with how to tackle challenging issues that grow from gender differences and intersectionality. Within the complex landscape of doctoral supervision, this paper is based on both research and educational development practice, since as authors and practitioners we are engaged with this. We use research, policy, widely available literature, and professional practice to underpin, build and share our developing “gender equality toolkit”. We use case studies to support constructive policies and practices and engage colleagues in reflective and practical development aimed at tackling issues concerning gender and intersectional inequalities in doctoral experiences and supervision.

Data-driven iterative refinements to educational development services: directly measuring the impacts of consultations on course and syllabus design

Evidence-based practice in educational development includes leveraging data to iteratively refine center for teaching and learning (CTL) services. However, CTL data collection is often limited to counts and satisfaction surveys rather than direct measures of outcomes. To directly assess impacts of consultations on course and syllabus design, we analyzed 94 clients’ syllabi (32 faculty, 62 graduate students and postdocs) before and after consultations. Faculty and non-faculty clients demonstrated significant change following consultations (6% and 10% gains in syllabus rubric scores, representing 50% and 31% of possible gains and effect sizes of 0.73 and 1.04 standard deviations, respectively). We compared faculty clients to quasi-experimental control groups that did not receive consultations. Syllabi from non-clients scored lower and did not demonstrate similar changes across semesters. Attendance at a CTL seminar on course and syllabus design did not explain variation in clients’ syllabi. We discuss implications for assessment of CTL services and how we leveraged formative assessments to inform and iteratively refine our educational development practices.

Introducing the latest teaching and educational development practices in mathematics: the experience of EU countries

The purpose of this work was to investigate the qualitative implementation and the possibility of use in the educational context of Ukraine. For this work, the author invited five groups (a total of 169 students of different genders). The second was a conversation with the teachers about the atmosphere in the classroom, the difficulty of the learning process, and the results. The study showed the weakness and small effectiveness of the old teaching methods (control group) and elementary explanatory online meetings.

The Educational Development Interview: a guided conversation supporting professional learning about teaching practice in higher education

ABSTRACT Drawing on the qualitative research interview, the authors propose the Educational Development Interview is an important but understudied form of significant conversation and educational development practice. By summarizing types of interviews from educational development literature, and describing our recent use of interviews for producing videos and podcasts about teaching practice, we contend that the Educational Development Interview can be used to: elicit reflexive practice about teaching and learning, increase academics’ self-confidence, influence their sense of identity as educators, and may increase capacity for and visibility of collegial conversations about teaching and learning.

‘Complexifying’ our approach to evaluating educational development outcomes: bridging theoretical innovations with frontline practice

ABSTRACT Increasing instructional quality in higher education is a key goal of educational development (ED) work, yet demonstrating complex outcomes remains challenging and lacks practical guidance. Evaluating ED services often relies on a reductionist approach characterized by linear assumptions of causal pathways to measure the extent to which instructional outcomes have been achieved and uses proxies such as short-term participant satisfaction. This paper advances a complexity-informed approach for guiding the evaluation of complex outcomes of ED services across individuals and activities within institutions that is adaptable across institutional contexts. To do this, we position the need for innovation in evaluation approaches within current ED literature and practice, and outline key implications of four complexity principles for guiding our approach. Then we describe an iterative process for developing and implementing the evaluation approach within a larger Centre for Teaching and Learning self-study. We describe the transferability of the evaluation approach to contexts beyond the study, and conclude with theoretical, practical, and methodological implications for evidence-based decision-making and strategic planning of ED work.

Sessionals’ educational development: a review of North American research, 2008-2018

ABSTRACT This systematic literature review explored North American educational development programs designed for sessionals. After reviewing the literature, five needs are identified: (a) teaching and learning development, (b) connections to the academic culture, (c) administrative and organizational supports, (d) technological proficiency, and (e) content expertise. Initially focused on Canada exclusively, this review unintentionally uncovered the need for North American educational developers to increase the amount and accessibility of scholarship on educational development practices for sessionals. Implications for future research and practice are explored.

Using multidimensional methods to understand the development, interpretation and enactment of quality assurance policy within the educational development community

ABSTRACTPolicy texts are representations of practice that both reflect and shape the world around them. There is, however, little higher education research that critically analyses the impact of higher education policy on educational developers and educational development practice. Extending methods from critical discourse analysis by combining textual analysis of a policy text with in-depth interviews with policy-makers and policy users, this article seeks to better understand the process of production, interpretation and implementation of policy. The article focuses on a leading national UK quality assurance policy in relation to the educational development community in order to uncover how policy is played out in practice. The findings paint a picture of a text that presents a version of higher education that is portrayed linguistically as universally accepted. Yet, the methodological approach enables the uncovering of the complexities of the policy process that go beyond the text’s words by highlighting the debates that shaped its development and the interpretations of its textual form that subsequently shape its enactment. Looking specifically at the constraints of policy boundaries, word choice and calls to educational development action (or inaction), the policy text is analysed in light of educational developers’ contexts and institutional positioning, surfaced through the research process itself. The article concludes by arguing that the combination of data collection and analysis methods used provide greater insights into how policy is played out in practice than the employment of any one of these methods individually could have achieved.

Toward a New Creative Scholarship of Educational Development: The Teaching and Learning Project and an Opening to Discourse

This invited essay of To Improve the Academy’s special feature on Creative Scholarship presents one example of creative scholarship in educational development as a forward to other forms and approaches in the special feature. This example, the Teaching and Learning Project, merges documentary and art photography traditions with faculty consultation. Following a review of the literatures of visual interpretation and instructional consultation, along with their intersection, the essay presents the Teaching and Learning Project in three ways: (1) as images, analyzed using the disciplinary grounding of the visual arts; (2) as a consultation methodology and an educational development practice; and (3) as a research project using a social science-based approach (grounded theory) exploring the experience of the subjects photographed. Finally, as a segue to the rest of the TIA special feature, this invited essay addresses the transformative nature of creative scholarship and its implications for the field of educational development.

Are We Asking the Right Questions?

This is a conceptual review of the literature variously referred to as faculty development, educational development, instructional development, and academic development in higher education. Previous empirical reviews covering more than 30 years of published literature could draw only tentative and weak conclusions about the effectiveness of educational development practices. The authors used different questions that queried the nature of educational development practice and the thinking underlying practice. Their conceptual review yielded a framework with six foci of practice (skill, method, reflection, disciplinary, institutional, and action research or inquiry) that was drawn from an analysis of the design elements of the educational development practices in the research they reviewed and from an analysis of the conceptual, theoretical, and empirical literature cited by those articles. This six-cluster framework provides a new way of thinking about the design of practice and a more meaningful basis for investigating the effectiveness of educational development practice.

Doing staff development: Practices, dilemmas and technologies

<span>Online learning technologies now pervade higher education institutions, and the convergence of teaching and learning onto technological systems has created new work practices and a demand for staff development. Educational developers are located at a nexus between the institutional and pragmatic imperatives, from which tensions and incongruencies emerge and need to be resolved in daily practice. In this paper, this nexus is explored by analysing accounts of educational development practice from one institution, based on interviews with educational developers. This paper considers staff development practices in higher education in response to the processes of change associated with learning technology, and the strategies used to resolve incongruencies and conflicts that emerged from these practices were analysed. The discourse analytic method of "interpretative repertoires" (Potter & Wetherell, 1987) is used to explore the resolution of dilemmas in practice. In this case study, two contrasting repertoires are used to account for staff development: one that 'enables' academic staff in their use of learning technologies, and another which 'guides' staff in their online teaching towards specified technologies. The intersection of the two repertoires in the institution presented dilemmas for educational developers. The responses to these contexts and the implications for educational development are explored.</span>

Academic development units and the improvement of teaching

A survey of those educational development practices which directors of educational (academic) development units in Australia found most effective in their institutions for the improvement of teaching was conducted in late 1983. The responses are presented and discussed. Academic staff are one of the targets of educational development. A series of interviews with 100 academic staff of the University of Queensland at about the same time confirmed that the approaches taken by units for improving teaching are approved of by staff. In particular staff recognised and valued the connection between evaluation and development. The staff development programme at the University of Queensland responded to the expressed needs of staff for specific developmental activities. It is described as one example of a systematic approach to staff development with emphasis on formal workshops/seminar sessions and evaluation of teaching. Practicalities and problems are discussed.