Sarah E. Silverman

Photo by Aaron Burden on Unsplash

Preface: None of the perspectives I offer here are directed towards particular institutions or individuals. I know so many people doing amazing work in faculty development and I hope they continue. These are just some of my personal musings on stepping away from that work.

Recently I have described myself as a “recovering” faculty developer. Much of my professional work has focused on teaching and supporting other teachers. While I am still involved in that work through writing, speaking, and social media, I decided to leave/take a break from higher ed faculty development as part of an institution around 7 months ago. Functionally, this meant that I left my position as a faculty developer and instructional designer to focus on teaching disability studies to undergraduates and some independent research. When I made that decision, and in the months since then, I had a very clear feeling that I needed to engage in reflection and healing from around 5-6 years of being involved in the faculty development field, especially through the COVID-19 remote teaching transition and its aftermath. The feeling of a need for healing was strong, but it took me some time to articulate exactly what I needed to heal from. This blog post is dedicated to spelling out some of what I landed on, particularly around the topics of measurement and solutionism. I hope it helps other faculty developers and educators in general feel like there are others who are thinking through the complications of our workplaces.

Healing from “measurement”

The first time that I sat down to plan a talk for a group of faculty after leaving my position, I was struck by how much it was my default inclination to have “measurable” learning outcomes for the session. I have been steeped in the borderline-religion of “Bloom’s taxonomy” and the list of verbs that are appropriate bases for learning outcomes. I was once responsible for teaching emerging graduate student instructors to never write out learning goals that said students would “reflect” on something or “think” about a problem because these actions were not measurable and could not be assessed. More recently, I have been trying to force myself to consider that the outcomes of what I teach for the learners may not be easily perceptible to me. I have found this shift to be challenging (given my work in a field that focuses heavily on measurement), but ultimately liberating.

The incentives of formalized faculty development are always to be able to demonstrate that what we do is “working,” and that usually involves measurement. I think these incentives apply to our interactions with faculty and our interactions with administration. With faculty, we hope that the pedagogical strategies we suggest will demonstrably help their teaching, so we tend towards the measurable, the evidence based, the “scholarly” (sometimes this is used as just another word for measurable). It has happened many times in my experience that a faculty member has attended a program at a center for teaching and learning and found that the ideas offered (for let’s say inclusion or accessibility) “made no difference” and decided to stop coming to the program. Not every good teaching decision has an easily observable effect. Sometimes it takes a few weeks, months, or semesters for the effects to reveal themselves, but it is rare that we get to work with an individual faculty member over that time span.

Administrators know that (some) faculty have this criticism and ask faculty developers to highlight the “evidence-based” and “measurable” nature of the pedagogies we promote. In my experience, administrators also like us to be able to pretty specifically measure our “impact” on the campus. I think the reality is that it is actually pretty hard to assess how a teaching center impacts a campus, so we try to use the number of faculty we interact with, the number of programs we run, and the number of students in our pilot programs as proxies. In many ways, these are entirely reasonable data to collect (to determine staffing needs, marketing priorities etc.) but I think they can sometimes mask that the impact of faculty development is likely to remain largely intangible in many ways.

One question that I have been asking myself in light of these reflections is: “How would you advocate for something (a program, a teaching center, a staff person) when its benefits are not guaranteed to be easily observable?” I keep coming back to a point I’ve made in multiple contexts: Teaching is work, and it is hard work. People deserve to be supported at work (in addition to being fairly compensated). I think faculty development programs might make the most sense when understood as worker support programs, which could be evaluated based on whether the workers in question (teachers) felt like they were being adequately supported. 

Healing from “quick tips” and “solutionism”

As I have been reflecting and also doing some casual faculty development outside of a teaching and learning center or other formal program, I have noticed how much both faculty developers and faculty learners are conditioned to expect that “quick tips” will be a component of any offering. By “quick tips” I mean the often simple, low-context suggestions at the end of any teaching program that are offered as solutions, or steps toward solutions to the unfathomably complex issues in education (e.g. inclusion, retention, equity, accessibility). Why are quick tips so prevalent? I think it comes back to the pressures on faculty developers (both from administrators and some instructors) to provide easily actionable information and ideas. How, after all, can we justify our existence under austerity conditions if participants are not getting useful and actionable information from what we do? I have been reflecting over my time away on how quick tips encourage a culture of solutionism (if there’s a problem, there’s a fix).

The example I use in my neurodiversity advocacy for why “quick tips” sometimes do more harm than good is that it is hard to come up with specific “strategies” for supporting “neurodiverse” students, because neurodivergence is an umbrella concept and coalition of people with a diversity of experiences, rather than a single “condition” to be accommodated. Autistic people, ADHDers, people with dyslexia, learning disabilities, intellectual disabilities, and other mental disabilities may all consider themselves neurodivergent, and have very different and possibly conflicting needs in a classroom. Yet, I have observed that it is the norm for colleges and universities to offer these fairly uncritical “lists of strategies” for “supporting neurodivergent students.” What I try to do in my own teaching about neurodiversity is highlight how the difficulties that neurodivergent students face are primarily the result of the systemic enforcement of normalcy in educational settings, rather than small oversights that can be fixed with “quick tips.”

My experience is that thinking deeply along these lines about why and how students struggle in the classroom is very generative for teachers, but it is understandably not the sort of thing that is supported by the administration (which almost always controls the funding of faculty development programs). After years of working in faculty development, I started to feel like my expected role was basically to support “business as usual” academic life, while promoting a revolving carousel of teaching strategies that helped ever so slightly to take the edge off of the debt, precarity, racism, sexism, and ableism that teachers and students alike experience in higher education. Truly unpacking how inclusion and exclusion, white supremacy, ableism, and other forces shape our classroom’s would require broad critique of the university, which is fraught when you work directly for a high ranking academic official like the Provost (which many faculty developers do).

As someone who cares about the field of faculty development and thinks it can continue to do good, I would love to see discussions similar to the ones I have started here take place within Centers for Teaching and Learning, and within POD, the major professional organization for CTL workers in the United States. I know from many one-on-one conversations that a lot of faculty developers have similar concerns to mine. However, since many of us are in staff rather than faculty positions, we lack academic freedom and job security, making the discussion hard to have publicly. For now, I am mostly spending my time teaching and doing ad hoc faculty development in my own unique style. If you would like to further discuss what I have written here, please do let me know!