Assessing the interactivity and prescriptiveness of faculty professional development workshops: The Real-Time Professional Development Observation Tool (R-PDOT)

摘要

Professional development workshops are one of the primary mechanisms used tohelp faculty improve their teaching, and draw in many STEM instructors everyyear. Although workshops serve a critical role in changing instructionalpractices within our community, we rarely assess workshops through carefulconsideration of how they engage faculty. Initial evidence suggests thatworkshop leaders often overlook central tenets of education research that arewell-established in classroom contexts, such as the role of interactivity inenabling student learning. As such, there is a need to develop more robust,evidence-based models of how best to support faculty learning in professionaldevelopment contexts, and to activity support workshop leaders in relatingtheir design decisions to familiar ideas form other educational contexts. Inresponse to these needs, we have developed an observation tool, the Real-TimeProfessional Development Observation Tool (R-PDOT), to document the form andfocus of faculty's engagement during workshops. In this paper, we describe themotivation and methodological considerations behind the development of theR-PDOT, justify our decisions to highlight particular aspects of workshopsessions, and demonstrate how the R-PDOT can be used to analyze three sessionsfrom the Physics and Astronomy New Faculty Workshop. We also justify theaccessibility and potential utility of the R-PDOT output as a reflective toolusing preliminary data from interviews with workshop leaders, and consider theroles the R-PDOT could play in supporting future research on facultyprofessional development.