Abstract
With increasing emphasis on accountability in higher education, the value of faculty professional development continues to gain traction across campuses. Prompted by growing accreditation, assessment, and accountability measures, higher education institutions must provide evidence of faculty compliance with requirements that are tied to professional development. This is as true for community colleges as well as for four-year institutions. External and internal pressures for continuous improvement in teaching necessitates institutional commitment to understanding faculty perceptions and acceptance of high-quality professional development. Community colleges need to gain faculty acceptance of and participation in professional development in order to achieve fidelity to institutional instructional goals and initiatives. This chapter investigates community college faculty buy-in and support for professional development and considers cogent and relevant literature related to faculty professional development within the contemporary American community college setting.
TopBackground
Higher education stakeholders today must provide evidence of faculty compliance with requirements that are tied to professional development. External and internal pressures for continuous improvement in instructional practices necessitate institutional commitment to understanding faculty perceptions and acceptance of high-quality professional development related to instruction. In short, institutions need to know how to gain faculty participation in professional development in order to achieve high degrees of compliance and fidelity to institutional instructional initiatives.
A significant body of literature exists about successful professional development and how college faculty respond to requests for their participation in institutional initiatives. As assessment and accountability practices have grown, faculty have been increasingly called upon to become more informed about institutional expectations that affect instructional work. Campus leaders understand the need for faculty professional development within the institution in order to improve student learning as well as to evaluate the effectiveness of instructional practices and institutional initiatives.
Key Terms in this Chapter
Southern Association of Colleges and Schools Commission on Colleges: The regional body for the accreditation of degree-granting higher education institutions in the Southern United States of Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Virginia and Latin America and other international sites (SACSCOC, 2020).
Faculty Development: Professional development with specific application toward “faculty and instructional development together” (Gillespie, et al., 2002, p. 5). With regard to this chapter, the term professional development was used to indicate the programs and initiatives that institutions offer internally to faculty that are intended to enhance their role in instructional practices (Smith, 1998). Professional development initiatives were defined as programs designed to promote longer-term faculty learning and are required or highly recommended to faculty by their institution in order to provide a broader and more commonly accepted set of faculty teaching practices.
Quality Enhancement Plan: Set forth plan for institutional study in compliance with the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools Commission on Colleges .
Assessment: Institutional measurements of student academic achievement, learning success, and student retention (Maki, 2012).
Buy-In: Faculty buy-in was equated to two concepts: ownership and validation through experiencing the College professional development initiative. Ownership was indicated through autonomy to implement instructional practices according to personal commitment, and validation was demonstrated as recognition by either or both institutional and individual of respect leading to increased motivation to perform specific teaching strategies.
Culture of Improvement: The concept of a culture of improvement was identified as an attitudinal change which leads to acceptance of change for the sake of institutional improvement (Bryk, Gomez, Grunow, & LeMahie, 2015).
Accreditation: A voluntary process of evaluation and quality review of institutions of higher performed by peer evaluators in order to establish institutional viability and efficacy (Eaton, 2012).
Resistance: Resistance to professional development included refusal of participation by faculty as well as rejection of teaching strategies promoted within the professional development initiative.