[MUSIC] Hello, my name is Donna Schnupp. I am both an instructional design team manager and adjunct faculty in the school of education at Johns Hopkins University, where I teach a graduate level course in digital age learning and educational technology. I also work closely with our multimedia technology and training team to develop professional development resources for faculty. Before talking specifically about that work, I'd like to share with you a personal story, which I hope you will see highlights the need for professional development amongst faculty and higher education, something that doesn't always get priority. When my daughter was a freshman in college during her spring semester, she took five classes leading up to midterms other than a few quiz and lab grades in her math and physics classes. She had not received any grades or feedback on any assignments, including several written essays and three significant projects in a design class. As midterms approach, she was eager to see how she was doing. When midterm grades were posted, she was shocked to see only a grade for one class, to say she was disappointed and frustrated is a gross understatement. So here she is, midway through the semester, she has absolutely no idea how she is doing in four out of five classes. Sadly, the situation isn't unique. She had a similar situation in the fall semester. In one class, the first piece of feedback she received on a paper was the third week of November, just two weeks before finals were about to begin. After talking with friends who were taking other classes, my daughter learned they too had received very little feedback for grades leading up to finals. My daughter cares immensely about her grades, but at the midpoint of a semester, had no idea where she stood or how to make improvements, despite advocating for herself and asking for feedback. Finally, on one exam where she did eventually receive a bit of feedback on some short answer questions. It really wasn't anything helpful. Shortcut comments like needs work, no guidance whatsoever. Certainly as a parent, this is frustrating on a personal level given the cost of tuition, but it's equally frustrating on a professional level. As an adjunct faculty at Johns Hopkins, I have a lot of roles as an instructor, and one of them I personally feel very strongly about is that I am here to help students succeed. So when I hear about students not receiving feedback, my immediate reaction is how is this helping a student to be successful in their academic coursework? Ask yourself, am I this faculty who doesn't provide feedback? If so, why? Is it because it's too time-consuming? Do I not realize the importance. Could I benefit from training to help me to learn how to provide quality feedback? If you are the kind of faculty member who does provide high quality feedback to students, what are your thoughts about faculty who do not? Do you care? If so, how might you help other faculty? The point of this story is not to complain about any given institution, but rather to highlight one of the many areas where even the most well respected faculty at prestigious institutions can do better, much better. There's always room for growth and learning. In this instance, faculty at this unnamed institution could benefit from professional development on both, how to provide quality feedback to students and why this is important. Of course, professional development for faculty is much more than about providing feedback to students on their work. It is one of the many strategies faculty should consider when engaging in self reflection and continuous improvement, which brings me to the focus of this final module in this course. What does, reflecting on your own teaching and learning mean to you? Do you ask yourself these kinds of questions? How do I provide an excellent learning experience for students? Do I use a process of reflection to drive continuous improvements to the courses I teach? Am I a lifelong learner who looks to learn new strategies and stay abreast of best practices in curriculum design and online teaching and learning? Do I carefully read my evaluations and make changes when appropriate? Do I seek out support from colleagues to find out what they're doing? Do I proactively seek out professional development opportunities to enhance my own knowledge and skill set? Asking yourself these questions can help you to identify areas of improvement and also areas where you might want to focus on professional development efforts for yourself. At the school of education at Johns Hopkins University, I've worked with faculty who asked themselves these questions. Being an adjunct professor and instructional designer and someone who works closely with a team who provides faculty training, puts me in a unique position to identify potential student barriers to learning as well as collective areas of improvement. We can all make, not just ones I can make In my own course. Over the years, our team identified several key areas that emerged from student feedback and many discussions with faculty. We brainstormed what we could do to address these gaps and areas of improvement. Sure, we knew we could provide typical faculty training, but we wanted to think differently. We put out a call for faculty contributions. We formed partnerships with other offices such as Student Affairs and the Office of Diversity and Faculty Development and in collaboration with faculty and other stakeholders. We then developed resources on best practices in areas such as how to provide high quality constructive feedback, how to build and sustain online learning communities, how to integrate social justice concepts into curriculum. How to engage students in active learning and how to integrate universal design for learning principles, all areas that aim to address potential barriers to student learning and impact excellence and faculty teaching? Let's take a moment to pause again. Think about these resources I just mentioned that we collaboratively developed with faculty. How do you think these resources were disseminated? How might you disseminate them? I should mention that we didn't develop these resources overnight, nor did we disseminate them all at once. The work we did happened over the course of several years and continues today. We took and continued to take a multipronged approach to dissemination. We integrated resources into a self-paced module that faculty new to teaching at the school of Ed are required to take. We included these resources in our repository of learning objects on our faculty community site. We developed and offered specific workshops that focus on a particular area, such as how to build an online community of learners or how to design engaging learning activities for your students. In many of these workshops, we partner with faculty who are experts in specific areas, and they help to develop or lead these workshops. In summary, our work began with identifying common problems or needs, often those that are barriers to student learning. This lead to identifying professional development opportunities and the need for building professional learning communities amongst faculty to share and exchange resources and ideas that ultimately impact the student experience. We are excited about the institutional changes we have made, but we also know there's still a lot of work to do and a lot of faculty to reach. We continue to emphasize the importance of self reflection and asking those difficult yet critical questions. If the goal is to transform practice, then ongoing reflection is seminal to faculty professional development. There is never a reason not to think about our teaching, reflection is good professional practice.
