Game changers: developing graduate faculty for a technology-rich  (Page 11/14)

Defining the faculty retreat’s scope

Our initial retreat was framed as the “Brave New World of 21 ^st Century Teaching and Learning.” The scope was intentionally broad and we considered new trends, discourses, opportunities, and possibilities in teaching, learning, and curriculum. Early on in the day, however, the conversation quickly veered to online learning. As a faculty, we debated whether to keep the scope broad or to narrow it to online teaching and instructional technology. Given the framework of the IMPACT V grant and capacity (in terms of time and faculty participation), our planning group decided in favor of the latter—online teaching and instructional technology.

“foreignness” of department-wide collaborative learning

While our faculty has regularly held daylong retreats over the years, and while all faculty attend professional conferences routinely and work on projects in small groups, a multifaceted, ongoing, department-wide collaborative learning initiative such as this is foreign for us. Additionally—and ironically—while each of us is familiar with the literature on PLCs and have even published in major venues on this topic with our departmental colleagues (e.g., Mullen, 2009), and while we advocate PLCs in our courses and in the schooling domain, our Department had not functioned internally as an across-the-board PLC itself. The foreignness of these efforts—compounded by significant cultural changes within the broader school and university context—led some to feel as though they were overwhelmed by isolation and foreignness.

Real and perceived threats

We feel the pressure of competition coming from multiple sources, including for-profit programs like the University of Phoenix, which we quip are the “puppy mills of higher education,” as well as the convenience of all-online programs within the State. We perceive these as inferior to our own programs while threats of program consolidation and elimination loom, initiated by university-wide academic program review processes. Colleagues of ours who are educational leadership faculty across the United States seem concerned that such external and internal pressures are generating administrative mandates to move entire graduate programs solely online. We want to underscore the paradox that this high-priority area does not seem to be strongly attached to effective university-based support structures that directly help faculty or to regard for academic freedom in the creation, delivery, and oversight of high-quality leadership programs. These constitute major challenges in our work and compelling reasons for focusing our professional learning more persistently and innovatively. As next described, learning about online learning enables faculty to be proactive about radically changing program delivery.

Some initial developments in professional learning

While this professional learning initiative is in the early stage, key insights are forming.

Appreciating collaborative professional learning opportunities

Based on a survey form we created to collect feedback from our participating departmental colleagues at the faculty IMPACT V retreat in Fall 2011, we learned that they viewed the professional learning opportunities as “refreshing” and rewarding. Additionally, they appreciated the cultivation of “organic” conversations, and reported that these collaborative learning opportunities help them to “think out of the box more.” Additionally, they described value and richness in the experience of engaging in ongoing dialogue with their own colleagues.