Faculty Collaboration as Faculty Development

Since 1999, the Center for Teaching Excellence (CTE) at Columbia College Chicago has developed a wide range of professional development opportunities and taken a variety of approaches to meet the needs of a large and diverse faculty body, where part-time faculty members outnumber full-time tenure-track colleagues by nearly four to one. Like teaching and learning centers elsewhere, our center approaches faculty development as an ongoing reflective practice for all faculty at all stages of their career, not simply as remediation for faculty in difficulty nor reserved for faculty new to teaching. In doing so, we address the principles and practices of teaching at the individual, departmental, curricular, and institutional levels, facilitating communication within and across departments and helping to foster an academic community that supports the scholarship of teaching and learning. More concretely, this means that wherever possible, we create and support occasions for faculty to learn from each other. We design CTE workshops and seminars with collaboration in mind; that is, with ways for faculty to participate as facilitators, leaders, and initiators. Perhaps more significantly, we promote a culture of collaboration through our joint faculty development endeavors with key departments and programs across the college. Such an approach is driven both by principle and by practical necessity. With more than 120 academic programs and nearly 11,000 students, Columbia College Chicago is the largest and most diverse private arts and media college in the nation. There are currently 328 full-time and 1,250 part-time faculty members, many of whom are professionals active in the fields they teach. The CTE is staffed by the acting director, the associate director, and an administrative assistant. We offer weekly workshops or seminars throughout the semester, and cosponsor many workshops with other offices and departments. In addition to partnership opportunities, small centers like ours can strengthen our impact on campus by identifying and cultivating faculty members who are committed to faculty development and willing to take leadership roles. As the key examples below illustrate, faculty collaboration that fosters faculty development can be structured in many ways, but its success depends on faculty having a sense of ownership over the process and outcome of their efforts. Collaboration for a Common Curriculum The New Millennium Studies (NMS) Teaching Academy was conceived and is convened in conjunction with the development and three-year progressive launch of the First-Year Seminar curriculum, which will be fully implemented and required for all first-year students at Columbia in fall 2008. As an interdisciplinary course, NMS is an integrative learning experience that provides the educational scaffolding for connecting authentically liberal learning with reflective and creative practice in the arts and media. Organized around the central theme of identity and culture, NMS ties the close study of media in a variety of genres to questions about identity, creation, responsibility, and artistic voice. The course asks students to consider their artistic and creative impulses in light of larger, self-conscious modes of inquiry and results in the creation of an NMS Portfolio, a body of work that is the culmination of a semester of reflective analysis and thinking. Co-convened by NMS and the CTE, the Teaching Academy currently has more than sixty full- and part-time faculty from across the disciplines who meet frequently in small groups, at least twice as a whole each semester, and at a two-day retreat in the summer. Led by the director and staff of NMS-who also teach the course-the academy not only prepares NMS instructors to teach the course successfully, but provides a context for meaningful curricular and pedagogical connections between NMS and other Columbia courses. Meetings address a variety of topics such as learning objectives and goals, stages of student learning and development, and evaluation. …