A Teaching Conference of One’s Own: Inviting Faculty into the Scholarly Work of Teaching

Recruiting a Conference Planning Committee

To address these concerns, I began to experiment with our faculty development day in 2009. I drafted a call for committee members to serve on a planning committee. To nominate themselves, they completed a basic information form indicating their areas of teaching expertise and their experience with teaching presentations or conferences. The form clearly indicated that lack of prior experience would not disqualify an individual from serving on the committee. I also opened committee membership eligibility to any member of the teaching faculty, including adjunct faculty members.

In that first year, the planning committee’s work was limited to reviewing proposals. In subsequent years, the committee was involved in most stages of the conference’s planning and execution. Beginning in year two, they met with me to redesign the call for proposals (CFP). Later they reviewed proposals, suggested topics for the plenary session, served as moderators and timekeepers at conference sessions, and reconvened after the conference to review it and suggest changes for the future.

Many committee members have never attended another teaching conference and some have never even attended a panel on pedagogy at their own disciplinary conferences. For most, designing the CFP, reviewing proposals, and evaluating a conference on teaching engaged them in entirely new professional activities. These activities required them to think about the breadth of topics that would be useful in a conference focused on teaching. They needed to think about how to determine the quality of proposals—and how much quality control they wanted to exercise. When discussing the relative merits of various proposals, they needed to consider the significance of the problem or question addressed by the proposal, the quality of the evidence on which the project was based, and the relevance of the proposal topic to the concerns of other college teachers and to the campus teaching culture and institutional issues. In short, serving on the planning committee for a teaching conference was itself an exercise in scholarly approaches to teaching, one that few would otherwise have the opportunity—or have taken the initiative—to do.

Designing the Call for Proposals

Over the years, the CFP for the conference has undergone substantial changes. Experience has taught us that the CFP has to be carefully crafted if it is to attract instructors who have never before participated in a teaching conference or even a pedagogy oriented panel at a disciplinary conference.

One of the key challenges to inviting faculty into a teaching conference is helping them to understand what types of presentations are appropriate for such a conference. In the first year, we requested proposals that fit six themes, because we anticipated that faculty would need direction about topics. While this impulse was correct, the strategy was not. By limiting them to such a small number of themes, we unwittingly discouraged many potential proposals.

In subsequent years, we fixed some mistakes and made some new ones. For example, we quickly realized that in order to encourage the widest possible participation in the conference, we would need to remove restrictions on the range of topics. However, we wanted to emphasize that the conference still was rigorous, even if its scope was not narrowly defined. This led us to overemphasize how research oriented these presentations needed to be and caused confusion about what sort of work counted as “scholarly.” Some instructors walked away from the CFP with the perception that only controlled, double blind experiments were eligible for inclusion, or that only topics on the cutting edge of educational technology were welcome. Humanities professors seemed particularly hesitant about the perceived emphasis on social science research methods—a problem that has plagued SoTL more generally (Chick, 2012).

After several years of experimentation, we finally crafted a proposal that we felt invited the widest possible participation while still providing direction about key needed qualities. We have been using this CFP, with minor modifications, ever since.

While iterating the CFP, we resolutely kept one feature the same: the peer review requirement. Each year, we have made the following statement: “Proposals will be masked and then blind reviewed by the Symposium Planning Committee—a committee of faculty from across the university’s schools.” Peer review has significantly improved the quality of the conference, not only by enabling us to reject low quality proposals but also by enabling us to invoke the “revise & resubmit” option. This option has enabled us to coach proposal authors on how to craft their subject for a teaching conference. Because the proposals go through a blind peer review, getting into the conference now counts; it carries weight when presenters list it on their curricula vitae or as part of their annual reviews. And it gives the reviewers valuable experience in learning about a wide variety of scholarly approaches to teaching.

Presentation Formats

After specifying a range of invited themes, our CFP outlines the available formats in which presentations can be made. Currently, we offer seven formats beyond the plenary session:

• Short presentation sessions (30 minutes);

• Long interactive sessions (50 or 60 minutes);

• Extended length interactive sessions (75 or 90 minutes);

• roundtable sessions (60 minutes);

• poster presentations (the poster session runs 1.5–2 hours); and

• resource fair displays.

Instructors may indicate their top format choices, but the committee sometimes suggests that another format might better fit the proposal. In addition to these session formats, I, with some help from the committee, also plan an opening plenary session.

These formats emerged in response to a variety of needs. We created the short sessions to provide more options for faculty members who were intimidated by the idea of leading a 50 or 60 minute session. We also found that it often appealed to newer or adjunct faculty members, who might not be well enough connected on campus to find co presenters for a panel or joint presentation. These instructors needed a more concise format so that they could present as a single presenter on a more limited topic.

On the other end of the spectrum, some faculty had developed complex interactive games or simulations. They wanted the opportunity to discuss the theory and research on their approach while also giving participants a taste of actually playing the game or doing the simulation. But it could be hard to run a complex game in the context of a scholarly discussion in 30 or even 60 minutes. So, extended length formats eventually made their way into our list of options.

Roundtables remain one of the most frequently requested formats. Their popularity reveals the importance of creating spaces for college faculty to raise questions that do not have simple answers—issues for which reflective, varied, and informed discussion may prove more valuable than any suggested solution. These discussions are still usually informed by scholarship and instructors’ own inquiry into the issues, but the deliberative format foregrounds the importance of intellectual exchange, reflection, and community, rather than definitive datasets or recommended “best practices.”

Whether faculty are familiar with poster session formats will depend on their disciplinary background. Humanities scholars rarely request this format. But some faculty members are not only familiar with the format, but they also prefer it. It eliminates the need to prepare a formal oral presentation and instead enables the presenter to have many one on one discussions with those who stop to view the poster. We usually have at least as many of these as we do the 30 minute sessions.

In short, we found that providing a variety of presentation options was a key strategy for making the conference inclusive, a strategy that was at least as important as the CFP’s language and guidelines.

The Value of a Plenary Session

We have found it valuable to reserve a premium time slot, one without any competing sessions, for topics of widespread interest. This enables all of the conference attendees to converse about a shared concern, a conversation that then becomes a touchstone for the rest of the conference. In the first several years, our plenary session focused on local issues—the general education program, the acquisition of a nearby wilderness preserve as a teaching and research space, and our campus’s global learning initiative. But most recently, the conference planning committee has chosen topics of national concern in higher education, including the current debates about the value and meaning of a college degree or the ways that online education and technological tools are changing the face of higher education. By focusing on current national conversations about higher education, we nearly doubled the attendance at the plenary. Faculty expressed gratitude for the opportunity to collectively reflect on these pressing questions about the meaning of their work in our society. It seems clear that, at the beginning of a new school year, faculty are eager for opportunities to step back from the details of their syllabi and assignments and think about the overall goals of higher education in American society and the changing nature of the profession. Rather than detracting from the conference’s primary focus on teaching and learning, these broader issues place that focus in a meaningful context.

Maintaining Focus and Quality

In the early years of our conference, we found ourselves responding to misconceptions about the event and attempts to insert activities or sessions that did not fit our goals.

• Some proposals seemed to approach it as a show and tell affair—a parade of interesting, but not obviously transferable, anecdotes about assignments or teaching activities. These authors were enthusiastic about something they did in their own course and wanted to tell others about it. However, the proposals did not show how their approaches could be adapted by others—in others’ fields, or even in another course in the same field. They often did not identify the underlying teaching and learning principles that made their approach successful. We do allow—even encourage—faculty members to share what they do in their classrooms. But the CFP pushes them to frame their work in terms of its learning value for others, the evidence they can provide about student learning, and the existing literature on their pedagogy or discipline.

• A number of support offices on campus saw our event as an advertising opportunity for their programs and services. Instructional technology, student life programs, the library, academic support services, the writing center, disability services, and other programs requested regular sessions in the conference. However, most of these organizations wished to advertise their programs, not to engage in inquiry about effective teaching. We eventually solved this problem by creating a resource fair.

• At the same time, we have had to make it clear that some groups or issues simply do not belong at such a conference. This is not the site for sexual harassment training, warnings about phishing emails, or Excel workshops. A well designed CFP will make clear that only teaching related topics are eligible for inclusion, and since we first introduced the CFP, we have stopped having to respond to these sorts of requests.

• We have had to show that a wide range of “scholarly” approaches to teaching are welcome. Most college faculty at teaching oriented institutions like ours are not conducting ready to publish SoTL research, but many assume that a conference on teaching and learning can only include presentations on “rigorous” original scholarship. Over time, we have tweaked the wording of the CFP to invite them to consider inquiry into their own classroom as a valid basis for offering a presentation, discussion, or workshop for other faculty.

• We also have had to make clear that the conference is not only focused on new or “innovative” teaching strategies. In fact, some of our most popular sessions have been devoted to topics of longstanding concern to college faculty: leading effective discussions, using visuals to create interaction with students in a lecture, creating a democratic classroom space, and working with students on undergraduate research, for example.

• In our experience, many proposal authors struggle to think clearly about their target audience: college faculty outside their area of specialization. Few small or even mid size universities have multiple faculty members working in the same area of specialization. As a result, most presenters need to translate their topics and strategies for a broader audience. In the later versions of our CFP, we offered additional guidance about this issue. But we also recognize that this is always a component of SoTL: making one’s work public, in writing or in oral presentations, always requires thinking carefully about one’s audience and learning to communicate with it.

Reviewing Proposals

Proposals are blind reviewed by the planning committee members, who evaluate them according to a common rubric and then assign one of three recommendations: accept, revise and resubmit, or reject. We convene to discuss the reviews and achieve consensus about each proposal.

We have found the revise and resubmit decision to be a particularly useful tool for providing guidance to faculty whose proposals could potentially be valuable but are not yet appropriate for a teaching conference. But providing such direction to fellow faculty—one’s own colleagues—can be a tricky social negotiation. Planning committees can sometimes be fearful of appearing over critical. Conversely, committees can become overzealous about offering direction. We have seen proposal authors withdraw their proposals entirely rather than submit to extensive revision requests. Nevertheless, this option provides a helpful escape valve from a common dilemma: accepting weak or inappropriate proposals (and thus damaging the reputation of the conference in the eyes of the faculty) or, on the other hand, rejecting many proposals with potential (and thus scaring away potential proposal authors).

Instructors and Administrators Who Attend

In the most recent year for which we have data (2013), 137 faculty and staff signed in as attendees in at least one conference session and 43 faculty and staff appeared on the conference program as presenters.[i] Among those attending were 40% of the university’s 240 full time faculty and 7% of our 269 adjunct faculty members. The opening plenary session alone attracted 97 attendees.

Since our first conference, we have collected surveys from all conference attendees. We have long known from the surveys that those who attend find the conference valuable. When asked if the session “covered topics I wanted to learn about”; “provided useful information, ideas, or resources for my teaching”; “was effectively organized and led”; “facilitated valuable conversation with other faculty”; or “helped me feel supported in my teaching,” the average response across sessions for each measure is a 4.4 or 4.5 on a 5 point scale, where 1 represents “strongly disagree” and 5 represents “strongly agree.”

While we always hope that instructors who attend the conference learn about the topics of the sessions themselves—their ostensible reason for attending in the first place—we also hope that the conference shifts their thinking in other, less obvious ways. We hope that they gain an understanding of how conference sessions on teaching can work. We want them to experience first hand how teaching and learning questions can be worthy in their own right of serious academic discussion. We want them to get a taste of the corpus of published scholarly literature that these discussions draw from and to realize that engaging with others on teaching questions can lead to new understandings of one’s own teaching. Finally, we want to give them partners for their ongoing learning about teaching. At the conference, instructors from often very different disciplines meet colleagues who share interests with them, leading to informal networks where faculty exchange experiences, ideas, and reflections about teaching. These networks sometimes lead to collaborations on new sessions in following years.

The conference has also provided a way to help administrators and staff stay in touch with what is happening in the classroom at our university. Department chairs, deans, and the provost regularly attend, as do representatives from academic support units, student life offices, and marketing.

In addition, we have been able to dramatically increase the number of topics addressed by the Center for Teaching Excellence in any given year. Over the past five years, 121 sessions have been delivered to our faculty, often on topics that our director would not have thought to feature but which proved popular to attendees, such as “using humor as a pedagogical tool to address controversial issues,” the question of “how open ended should open ended projects be” in math courses, and how a game based learning approach could teach students about the conflict in Syria.

Presenters

By allowing all faculty members (part time and full time, tenure track and non tenure track) to submit proposals for the conference, we have expanded the portion of our faculty who have some experience with scholarly approaches to teaching. Over the past five years, 106 faculty members[ii] have given a conference presentation on a teaching related topic at our conference.

By proposing and presenting on teaching topics, faculty presenters gain experience in sharing their classroom inquiry in scholarly ways. The CFP itself is educative about SoTL, though it does not draw attention to that goal. Those who submit proposals must follow the guidelines of the proposal process, which encourage presenters to document a question or challenge, identify sources of evidence about that issue, present possible solutions, and ground their discussions in the previously published literature. When they attend the conference in August, they also gain practice in presenting on teaching, practice that helps to prepare them to present at regional or national conferences that include a teaching focus.

Beginning in 2011, we began surveying all presenters and planning committee members in order to glean qualitative feedback about the value that they found in the activity. What motivates them to participate in the conference, and what do they value most about the experience?[iii]

“I was invited by a colleague to take part on a panel in one of my research area specialties. I participated because I was interested in how other faculty members dealt with this issue and I enjoyed the opportunity to work with faculty outside my department/school.”

“To be perfectly honest, my main motivator was probably the need to build my professional development file for promotion. But running a close second, was my desire to help faculty from non writing departments see that students need help develop writing skills throughout their undergraduate careers and that all professors that assign writing should play a role in this.”

“I’m an innovative teacher, and I love the freedom and encouragement I have at St. Ed’s to develop my methods and play to my strengths. I was excited about a method I’ve honed over the past two years, and I wanted to share it with folks within AND outside of my discipline.”

“I am surprised by how valuable it was to be able to discuss my topic with people outside my discipline. Very validating that so many were interested in hearing about it. Also, very helpful as professional development.”

“It made me feel like contributing to the culture of education was very attainable. It’s not an environment where teaching is stagnant.”

Although our questions—designed to elicit open ended text responses—yielded a rich variety of reflections, we did see certain themes emerge from the comments. Every year, the most common motivation for participating in the conference was the opportunity to share expertise about a teaching issue or project with colleagues. In addition, five other themes routinely appeared as primary or secondary motivations for participating. Presenters cited a desire to learn more about educational research and effective teaching; a desire to learn about what other faculty members were doing in relation to a teaching issue or question; a desire to contribute to the community’s conversations about teaching; a desire to make connections with other faculty colleagues, often from other departments; and finally, many were motivated by an invitation from a colleague to co present or to participate in a panel.

When we asked, “In what ways was your participation in this year’s conference valuable to you?”—a question that offered them the opportunity to contrast their pre conference motivation with their post conference assessment—we heard a few new themes and priorities. While participants continued to frequently cite that they valued sharing their expertise about a teaching issue or project with colleagues, that response was no longer the most common. Rising to the top spot for frequency of citation were comments about making connections with other faculty colleagues. The second most frequent response cited how valuable it was to get feedback from their colleagues on their ideas or work. Four other themes were also prominent: participants valued learning more about educational research and effective teaching through the conversations prompted by their presentations or roundtable discussions; they valued the sense that they were contributing to the community’s conversations about a given teaching issue or question; and they valued forcing themselves to formulate and articulate their work on a teaching issue, do the literature review or learn more about the topic, and make a formal presentation about the topic. Finally, participants noted that they could list their participation on their curriculum vitae and count it as a valued form of professional development or service.

While I have been emphasizing the ways in which a teaching conference draws more faculty members into scholarly teaching approaches, these participants’ responses also remind us of other significant benefits. First and most fundamentally, the conference provides space for a practice that we highly value: faculty members’ efforts to continue developing as teachers. Second, and perhaps more importantly, it enables them to engage in that development in collaborative, collegial ways. Improving our teaching is not something that only has to happen in the quiet of our offices, late at night, by ourselves, as we tweak assignments, revise syllabi, or mull over our student evaluation comments. Nor is it limited to the hallways of our home department or even discipline. Ideally, it is shared work, work that is enriched by cross pollination with other disciplines and that, like those of other professions, is supported by both formal and informal networks and structures. The structure of a conference enables us to bring that often solitary teaching labor out into a lively and shared conversation.

Third, it is also work for which we can receive professional recognition: a line item on our CV, a paragraph in our annual review or tenure portfolio. Because this work matters, and because it contributes to the effectiveness of our colleagues and our whole profession, it is worthy of credit and it counts. By conducting a blind peer review, the conference has created a structure that enables the collaborative work of teaching to be recognized within formal reward systems. Receiving credit motivates faculty to continue participating in spite of many competing demands on their time.

The Planning Committee

Over the past five years, 37 faculty members, representing members of all of the university’s schools (including Education, Behavioral & Social Sciences, Humanities, Natural Sciences, and Management & Business), our general education program, as well as our school for nontraditional (adult) undergraduates, have served on the conference planning committee. One wrote, “Being part of the Steering Committee is an opportunity both to meet and work with others I might not otherwise get to know but in passing AND to become further engaged in a sense of teaching related things people are doing and talking about both around campus (Committee meetings) and in their classrooms [ . . .] VERY valuable.” This statement reflects what committee members most frequently emphasize as the value of the experience: developing closer connections with other faculty and becoming more involved in what one called “the teaching community.” Increasing their involvement in that community—and not just as teachers, but as facilitators of a culture that focuses on evidence based, inquiry driven, and reflective teaching practices—is the goal we hoped to achieve.

By enabling faculty to participate in the creation and peer review of a conference on teaching, planning committee members also learn about scholarly work on teaching and how to evaluate it. In particular, reviewers learn to apply their discipline specific scholarly training to the review of presentations about teaching and learning questions.

The Culture of Teaching on Campus

Perhaps most importantly, the conference has helped create a campus culture where scholarly presentations on, and conversations about, teaching and learning have become an expected norm. And part of that norm is that the faculty lead these conversations, not just the teaching center. The Teaching Symposium, as we call our conference, is talked about year round. (“That would be a good topic to present on at the Teaching Symposium.” Or “Perhaps next year, we can propose a session on this for the Symposium.”) New faculty to our campus are immediately met with an opportunity to meet with other faculty to learn about and discuss teaching issues and get a taste of the high value placed on teaching at our campus. Faculty members routinely report how energizing they found the conference, how they met new people, and how they discovered who was doing interesting work in areas that interested them.