Abstract

Since 2009, our center for teaching and learning has offered an intensive Course Design Institute (CDI) several times each year, which has now been completed by more than 600 teaching faculty, staff, and Graduate Teaching Associates from The Ohio State University. To better understand the impact of participating in a CDI on participants’ teaching, this study utilizes qualitative data drawn from five years of participant feedback gathered on the last day of each CDI, as well as from focus groups conducted with CDI graduates in the years following their participation. The results show that participating in the CDI helps instructors become more expert teachers, primarily through improving their metacognition about teaching. Closely examining the nature of the CDI suggests that the structure and content together may be particularly instrumental in helping participants develop their metacognitive abilities. Taken together, this research suggests that course design may be a highly efficient method for the long-term development of expert teaching.

Keywords: collaboration, instructional development, teaching and learning

Introduction

Students’ intellectual growth is often charted in terms of a transition from “novice” to “expert” (Ambrose, Bridges, DiPietro, Lovett, & Norman, 2010; Bransford, Brown, & Cocking, 2000). However, while much has been made of this transformation as it is manifest in students, comparatively little attention has been paid to investigating what it might mean for an instructor to evolve from a “novice teacher” to an “expert teacher.” There is no established definition of expert teaching (see Tsui, 2003, for summary); although most college teachers are experts in their disciplines, pedagogical expertise is not the same as disciplinary expertise (Shulman, 1987). Even though teachers are able to exhibit characteristics that signify expertise (Bransford et al., 2000) within their disciplines, such as an ability to notice meaningful patterns, a sophisticated organization of knowledge, and “conditionalized” knowledge that allows them to quickly determine which knowledge is most applicable in a given situation, they are not automatically able to transfer this sort of “expert” thinking to their pedagogical work.

Furthermore, most college level teachers have not received extensive training in pedagogy or learning theory (Arreola, 2000; Serow, Van Dyk, McComb, & Harrold, 2002; Theall & Arreola, 2006). As Fink (2013) discusses, many teachers instead reach a reasonable level of success with a gut level approach based on honing their interactions with students in the classroom and an intuitive sense of what is effective or ineffective over many terms of teaching. As a result, knowledge about teaching is often constructed from trial and error in response to obvious problems with student learning outcomes. As student learning needs are often more complex than is readily visible in the classroom, these superficial reactionary changes in teaching may not drive the deeper reflection on the practice required to improve learning (Reddish, 2003). Thus, this reactive approach to teaching development does not always result in experienced teachers becoming “experts” in teaching.

One essential characteristic of the deeper reflection exhibited by experts is metacognition. Like McAlpine, Weston, Berthiaume, Fairbank Roch, and Owen (2004), we "see parallels between reflection and metacognition, since metacognition provides cognitive constructs for explaining how people are able to intentionally evaluate and make change to their decisions and thus their actions in relation to their goals” (p. 338; see also McAlpine, Weston, Beauchamp, Wiseman, & Beauchamp, 1999; McAlpine & Weston, 2000). The term “metacognition” was coined in the 1970s by John Flavell for developmental psychology and has since been defined and applied in many iterations, often varying by discipline (Tanner, 2012). The definition we find most applicable for our purposes is: “the ability to orchestrate one’s own learning [teaching]; to plan, monitor success, and correct errors where appropriate…[and] the ability to reflect on one’s own performance” (Bransford et al., 2000). While the term has been applied primarily to learners, recently, it has been used more broadly to describe the type of reflective thinking necessary for becoming expert teachers. Kramarski and Michalsky (2009) have described teacher metacognition as “essential for teachers’ professional growth” (p. 161), yet Wilson and Bai (2010) note that “limited research has been done to explore teachers’ explicit awareness of their metacognition and their ability to think about, talk about, and write about their thinking” (p. 269; see also Lin, Schwartz, & Hatano, 2005; Marchant, 1989). Our research directly addresses this gap by exploring the role of metacognition in teaching development. Although expert teaching surely requires more than metacognition alone, it is a crucial element in the development of expertise.

Given the importance of metacognition in teaching development, most CTLs engage in a variety of methods designed to encourage reflection in teachers, often in one on one consultations and group workshops that build relationships over a long period of interaction. This type of programming typically aims to help teachers move away from limited, surface level reflections on the teaching and learning relationship and gain increased metacognitive awareness of broader teaching practices. However, in our experience, this type of transformation requires many interactions with our center over a long period of time—sometimes as long as several years. Furthermore, one on one consultations and workshops may not be the most effective methods for facilitating this change. One off workshops generally do not effect large scale changes in individual teachers (Chism, Holley, & Harris, 2012), and repeated one on one consultations require a considerable time commitment from both teachers and teaching center staff. Given the limitations of these other methods, Plank and Mares (2013) instead proposed that multiple, intensive interactions over a limited period of time may be a more effective way to both effect fundamental change and to encourage teachers to continue working with us in other ways, including one on one consultation. In line with this, one approach used by our center to help teachers become more metacognitive is the Course Design Institute (CDI).

The Course Design Institute

The CDI is an abbreviated and intensive learning community in which participants meet face to face over 5 three hour meetings to design or redesign a course. We chose the structure of an intensive institute in order to provide a high impact opportunity for community building and buy in for future interactions. We chose the topic of course design because we had observed an increasing number of requests for consultation on the topic. We hoped that the CDI would maximize staff time and resources while offering some of the advantages typically associated with individual consultation, such as personalized attention and tailored feedback, combined with the well documented benefits of learning communities (Beach & Cox, 2009; Cox, 2013; Cox & Richlin, 2004). In particular, at least one study has shown that professional learning communities increase teacher metacognition (Prytula, 2012), and although our CDI is shorter in duration than a typical learning community, it utilizes many of the same facilitation and planning principles. We now describe the CDI in more detail to help provide context for the current study.

The content of the CDI follows the basic steps of Backward Design (Wiggins & McTighe, 2005)—articulating goals, which reflect how students should be different at the end of the course, as well as objectives, which describe the knowledge, skills, and abilities that students will need to demonstrate in order to meet the course goals. The CDI also incorporates content about learning theories, classroom assessment techniques, and course and curriculum level assessment. We cover assignment development, rubrics, and teaching strategies, working toward having an integrated course plan in which each of the aforementioned elements are aligned as a final product at the end of the 15 hours.

We invite applications from anyone who teaches on campus, so faculty, staff, and graduate students from every college on campus populate the CDIs. This inherent interdisciplinarity enriches participants’ frequent formal and informal interactions, another defining feature of the CDI. Participants interact one on one or in small groups with the majority of their peers during each CDI. These interactions serve several purposes. For example, through these interactions, participants learn a great deal about the goals and structures of the courses being designed by others in their cohort. Pairing participants, all of them disciplinary content experts, with peers from outside their disciplines also allows peers to serve as “accomplished novices” who can challenge expert ideas on instruction (Cognition and Technology Group at Vanderbilt, 1997; see also Bransford et al., 2000, p. 44). Engaging with teachers who hold different pedagogical perspectives can deepen participants’ understandings of the complexity and contingency of teaching. It can also help them identify and weigh new pedagogical possibilities—particularly when the peer network established in the institute operates as a trust based community that encourages shared reflection (Kitsantas & Baylor, 2001; Prytula, 2012).

Guided reflection is a central component of the CDI. At several points throughout the process, facilitators invite participants to reflect privately, in small groups or pairs, and as part of group discussion. Generally, these reflections begin individually. Participants are asked to write a list of goals or lay out a set of assignments that align with a set of learning objectives. These personal reflections are almost always followed up by conversation between participants, with a facilitator, or among the group as a whole as a way provide feedback and to discuss any questions or realizations that may have arisen during that step of the design process. During the CDI, facilitators make a point to emphasize the iterative nature of course design, encouraging participants to continuously revise and refine decisions made during the course design process that takes place within the institute and to continue that process as they experience and make sense of teaching their course when the institute is done.

The Current Study

We are pleased to report that the outcome of our CDI has far exceeded our initial expectations regarding the institute’s ability to move participants toward expert teaching. During the preliminary planning, we did not anticipate that providing participants an opportunity to reflect on the course design process would create change of this magnitude. We received informal, anecdotal evidence from participants indicating that the relatively brief CDI experience facilitated a level of reflection we had previously observed only in working with individuals over several terms. Several participants (many of whom have abundant college level teaching experience prior to attending) remarked upon the profundity of the change in the way they thought about teaching as a result of the CDI, and these comments became the impetus for our research. Thus, to better understand the long term impact of the CDI on participants’ teaching metacognition, this study was designed to answer the following research questions:

  1. Do past participants exhibit a metacognitive understanding of and “expert” approach to their course design and teaching after completion of the CDI?

  2. Which aspects of the CDI appear to contribute to this change?

Method

Participants

All participants in our study had successfully completed our CDI and were faculty members, graduate students, administrators, and staff members from our university. A few individuals from outside of the university community have participated in the CDI, but these participants were excluded from the data.

Procedures

Two sets of data were collected to address our research questions in accordance with institutional IRB protocol.

First, participant feedback was collected using our center’s formal CDI Program Evaluation tool, which is an anonymous online survey for all participants given on the last day of each CDI. From this larger survey, participants’ anonymous responses to two short answer questions—“What is the most valuable thing you think you will take away from this program?” and “Did you have an ‘ah ha” moment?”—were used in the current study. A total of 279 CDI participants responded to the survey (83% response rate).

We also conducted focus group interviews with participant alumni of CDIs, the source of the second set of data (Table 1). Participants were selected to represent a range of disciplinary backgrounds, career stages, and roles mirroring the diversity of experience and background found in most CDI cohorts. The 19 participants represented 7 of 16 total CDIs that had taken place at the time of the research and were divided into four focus groups, made up of four or five participants each. The focus groups were semi structured, with opening questions and then prepared prompts to deepen responses (see Appendix for focus group questions). Focus groups were audio recorded and transcribed.

Table 1. Demographics of our CDI Participants from 2009 to 2013
CDI Participants (2009 to 2013)CDI Focus Group Participants
Total number of participants33619
Stage of career

176 Faculty

72 Graduate students

68 Teaching staff

7 Other

11 Faculty

2 Graduate students

6 Teaching staff

Number of departments (AKA TIUs1)104/~25018
Number of colleges/units21/2412
Total number of CDIs369
Average interdisciplinarity282.9%NA
Average time between participation in CDI and participation in focus groupNA11 months
1

Tenure Initiating Units—specific academic units responsible for making the initial recommendation on a faculty member’s tenure status.

2

Total participants divided by total departments per CDI.

Data Analysis

The data for the two research questions were analyzed differently. Because our first research question focused on changes in participants’ metacognition and development of expert teaching, constructs with existing theoretical bases, we chose to take a deductive approach to coding and data analysis. Specifically, before analyzing the data, we developed a set of provisional codes (Miles & Huberman, 1994; Saldaña, 2015) that reflected Bransford et al.’s (2000) definitions of expertise (notices meaningful patterns, sophisticated organization of knowledge, and conditionalized knowledge) and of metacognition (orchestrates one’s own teaching, plans for successful teaching, monitors success, and corrects errors) (see Table 2).

Table 2. Coding Scheme for the Two Research Questions
Research Question 1
ConstructsProvisional Codes
Expert teaching (Bransford et al., 2000)Notices meaningful patterns
Organizes knowledge in a sophisticated way
Exhibits conditionalization of knowledge
Metacognition (Bransford et al., 2000)Orchestrates one’s own teaching
Plans for successful learning
Monitors success
Corrects errors when appropriate
Research Question 2
CategoryEmergent Themes
Aspects of CDI StructureStructure of the CDI

  • Protected time and space

  • Interdisciplinary community

Content of the CDI

  • Backward design process

Our second research question, focused on the aspects of the CDI that supported teachers’ development, did not rely on existing theoretical constructs, so we chose to take an inductive approach (Thomas, 2006) to coding and data analysis. This involved reading through the data, identifying themes in the aspects of the CDI that participants mentioned as particularly valuable, and grouping these themes into emergent categories (see Table 2). For both sets of data, two investigators independently coded all the data and then discussed any points of disagreement until consensus was reached.

Results

Research Question 1: Teachers Exhibit Expert Teaching Behaviors

Participants were not asked directly about their development toward expert teaching or their metacognition, but their responses to the evaluation questions and in the focus groups nonetheless reflected all three aspects of expert teaching behavior and the four dimensions of metacognition.

Components of expert teaching

Participants in all four focus groups were able to provide a rationale for one or more pedagogical choice(s). In doing so, they articulated ways in which their prior observations about student learning crystallized into meaningful patterns, which they could now act upon using the sophisticated organization of pedagogical knowledge they had begun developing in the CDI. For example, one participant noted in the CDI program evaluation that “I realized the order of content needed changed from the way I had in my mind. By working on the assignments, I realized that I needed a few specific topics up front to prepare students for project work.” The comment suggests that the instructor now sees where students were struggling with their learning before and how to improve their learning experience moving forward. Another participant in the evaluation came away from the CDI thinking about teaching in a much more nuanced way after having had the realization “that really any content would be an effective vehicle for the course goals. The flexibility will allow me to make changes, and keep ‘fresh” without redesigning everything.” This way of thinking about the relationship between course goals and content reflects a more sophisticated organization of pedagogical knowledge. Frequency of this type of comment was high in one of the focus groups (11 mentions) and moderate in three groups (6, 6, 3 mentions). In open ended questions on the CDI Program Evaluations, 10% of participants expressed a perceived increase in their own ability to identify a rationale for pedagogical choices.

Participants in all four focus groups also demonstrated conditionalized knowledge by commenting on how they were applying new knowledge learned during the CDI to their own teaching in specific ways. For some participants, the CDI provided a range of new ways of thinking about and implementing aspects of their teaching. For example, one participant explained in the evaluation that the CDI “expand[ed] my ideas about what I could do as activities, assignments, learning methods, as well as understanding more about general curriculum/course design.” Other participants described how they had been able to use very specific material. A focus group participant mentioned, “We talked about rubrics and I built this rubric and honestly I’m giving, I think, better advice to the students, big picture advice, and yet I’m not taking so much time.” Participants’ comments about being able to apply general CDI concepts in their own specific teaching contexts were highly frequent in one focus group (9) and moderately frequent in three groups (3, 4, 5 mentions). In open ended questions on the CDI Program Evaluations, 10% of participants commented that they felt they would be able to apply specific knowledge learned in the CDI to their own teaching.

Components of metacognition

In addition to the aforementioned characteristics of expertise, our analysis revealed substantial evidence indicating that participants become more metacognitive in their awareness of their teaching as a result of completing the CDI. For example, participants described feeling more empowered or more effective in their teaching as a result of being able to orchestrate their own teaching. This type of comment was frequent in two groups (15, 13), moderate in one group (4), and low in one group (1) and occurred in 40% of the end of CDI evaluations. As one focus group participant elaborated:

It was nice to go into my class and think, ‘Okay, I actually thought through what I’m going to do.” I’m not just, you know, throwing it together day by day or looking at what people have done in the past and saying, ‘Okay, that looks good, that doesn’t look good, I guess I’ll decide to do this.” It was like, I went in knowing this is what I want, you know, from the students and I’m confident in presenting it this way so that they get something out of it.

Many participants noted that this planful approach stood in stark contrast to their prior way of teaching. A participant in the CDI evaluation described it as “order from chaos. I was able to order my thoughts and ideas into a less frantic framework.” Another emphasized that “I’ll never approach a new course or re designing a course merely based upon trials and errors.” Thus, the CDI appeared to help participants approach course design in particular and their teaching in general in a more intentional way, and they felt empowered by the new sense of control they were able to exercise.

In addition to reporting a new or enhanced ability to orchestrate their own teaching, participants also demonstrated an ability to plan for their students’ successful learning. In other words, not only did they take a planful approach, but this approach was also student centered rather than teacher centered. This was evidenced by numerous comments indicating that participants had used backward design in one or more of their course designs to help ensure particular outcomes for students. A clear example of this was given by a participant in the CDI evaluation who reported having the valuable realization that “how a course is designed will impact—DICTATE—the outcome of the course for students. The backward design and assessment of strategies were eye opening.” A participant in the focus group described recognizing how this change in his thinking continues to impact his approach to teaching:

I happened to have my first day recitation open, and I was thinking, ‘okay what am I going to do that day? Ok, we could do this activity.” And then I stopped myself and said, ‘What are my learning goals? How would this activity help me achieve learning goals?”…Because of that institute, I reverted from my normal drop, kick, and go to ‘let’s think about the learning goals and work backwards from there.”

Many participants referred to their use of backward course design more than once in each focus group session. Frequency of this type of comment was high in all groups (10, 11, 12, 8) and occurred in 57% of the end of CDI evaluations (open ended questions).

Participants in the focus groups also described ways by which they were able to monitor for success in their teaching. Because CDI evaluations were collected at the end of the institute, before participants had a chance to implement changes in their course planning and teaching practice, their responses did not reflect this aspect of metacognition. For the focus group participants, monitoring for success most often took the form of collecting and responding to student feedback. As one participant described:

I feel like I’m more responsive. And maybe it’s because I’m looking for it more now…looking for that sort of ‘do they understand,” ‘do they get it,” ‘are we going at the right pace,” so I’d feel like I’m more responsive to it. … I’m more in tune with what’s going on rather than sometimes just plowing through it because we need to get to the next thing.

Another participant described having internalized some of the reflective questions facilitators use to help participants think about how they can monitor their students learning: “I go through the quarter, and I can hear [the facilitator’s] voice saying ‘how are you going to measure that learning goal?” So… these questions that you brought up… kind of stayed with me.” Thus, not only did participants report feeling more prepared when they entered the classroom and planning for their students’ learning, but they also collected formal and informal feedback to help them assess and adjust. Frequency of this type of statement was high in two focus groups (11, 6 mentions), moderate in one (3 mentions), and low in the fourth group (1 mention).

Finally, participants demonstrated the ability to correct errors when appropriate, articulating changes they made to their teaching practice based on their new abilities to orchestrate their own teaching, plan for student learning, and monitor their success. One focus group participant described how her new awareness helps her make adjustments to her teaching in the moment:

Have you ever [used] a GPS that says that ‘you have made a wrong turn…make a U turn at the most convenient opportunity” and you can’t? [It will then say] ‘recalculating…” You don’t have that option when you’re right in the middle of a class. So thinking from that goal backwards helps with that recalculating button not being there.

Correcting errors was mentioned in all four focus groups (9, 6, 6, 3) and in 40% of the CDI Program Evaluations.

Taken together, these data strongly suggest that graduates of the CDI demonstrate the characteristics of expert teaching, especially those of metacognition, both immediately after the institute and after significant time has elapsed.

Research Question 2: CDI Components that Support Expert Teaching

Our second research question focused on determining which components of the CDI were the most influential in prompting the transition toward expert teaching. In our analysis of the data, the content and the structure of the CDI emerged as the most salient overarching categories, and the two in combination seemed to be particularly instrumental in moving participants toward expert teaching. Participants in all of the focus groups discussed aspects of structure (3, 5, 16, 18 mentions) and content (2, 5, 6, 11 mentions) as being important to their perceived changes. Likewise, in the CDI Program Evaluations, 52% of participants mentioned various aspects of structure, and 88% mentioned components of the content as being important to the success of the CDI.

Within the broad category of structure, participants mentioned the time commitment and interdisciplinary community of the CDI in particular. The “breathing space,” as one participant described it, that the CDI provides seemed key for the development many participants reported. One focus group participant elaborated, “I saw it as an opportunity to really concentrate that I don’t get any other time… When I was here there was nothing else competing for my time.” In the context of instructors’ otherwise chaotic work lives, having time set aside to focus on one task is a luxury. However, participants seemed to feel that the time spent was well justified, as exemplified by one comment in the evaluation that “having this dedicated time really helped me think deeply about the nature of what I’m teaching.” Thus, participants appeared to perceive this aspect of the CDI structure as particularly important.

Participants also mentioned the interdisciplinary community aspect of the CDI as playing a role in the valued outcomes of their experience. For some participants, interacting with others helped them think more clearly about what they were trying to accomplish in the classroom. For example, a focus group participant reflected,

“[I]t was useful to be in the CDI with people from all different schools across the university. I mean, just partially having to explain what you’re doing in terms to someone who’s not in your field is really helpful to me because you can get so caught up in the vocabulary or jargon of your own field that it’s sort of obscure to what you’re actually trying to do.”

Reiterating this observation, a participant noted in the CDI evaluation that “working with others here made me realize that I haven’t really thought some of this through. I have had to go back and rethink what I said I was looking for.” As these examples demonstrate, the interdisciplinary community of the CDI seems to be linked with participants’ metacognitive development, particularly planning for students’ successful learning. Between providing a dedicated time and facilitating interaction with others, the structure of the CDI clearly contributed to the development of participants’ teaching metacognition.

The second primary aspect of the CDI that appeared to contribute to participants’ development was the content, focused on the backward design process. One participant in the focus group contrasted his previous approach to teaching based on content with the newfound understanding of teaching as planning for student learning that he developed during the CDI:

“I think intentional and backwards are two of the key concepts. When you’re…strictly used to presenting material, presenting material, and then evaluating whether that material is learned…the intent to get them to understand that material or to succeed in those evaluations, I guess, hit home…Old ways are hard to die.”

Another focus group participant had a similar realization about the shift in his thinking about teaching over the course of the CDI:

“Coming up with goals and objectives for the course is much more difficult than one would think. And…thinking about where you want the students to be at the end of the course…as opposed to just pushing towards that when you set up a syllabus, and going through the ‘here, we’re on this topic,” ‘we”re on this topic’…is a different way of thinking about the teaching.”

For this participant, the content of the CDI seemed to help him feel better able to orchestrate his own teaching using goals and objectives as a road map, which in turn helped him better plan for student learning. Participants mention this sort of transformation in their thinking over and over again, describing ways that learning about the backward design process helped them develop key aspects of metacognition, such as the abilities to orchestrate their own teaching and to plan for student learning.

Several participants mentioned the structure and content together, suggesting that the space provided by the CDI to engage deeply enhanced the benefits of the backward design content. For example, one participant recounted, “the ah ha moment was how to write the goals for my course. It took a while, but eventually I was able to move from objectives to goals. It came because of the help I had in the institute.” This participant attributes an important realization—one that reflects metacognitive development—to the structure of the institute. Another participant echoed this sentiment, suggesting that

“The characteristic that popped out the most was just having that sustained time with a group of other people that were all doing the same project…we tend to all work on these things alone, by ourselves, and so having that concentrated space and time along with the content, the outcomes based approach, make it kind of a unique time.”

As this quote suggests, the time and interactive nature of the CDI structure, in combination with the content, were defining qualities of the CDI experience. Taken together, these data exemplify the connection we see between the combined structure and content of the CDI and participants’ movement toward expert teaching.

Discussion and Conclusions

One of the central goals of educational development work is to help instructors become more expert teachers. Metacognition around teaching plays a foundational role in the development of expertise, but it can take an extensive amount of time and guidance to develop. Fortunately, our results suggest that the CDI can efficiently facilitate growth in instructors’ teaching metacognition. It is clear from the data we collected that both the structure and the content of the CDI are critical to the outcomes that we observed among our participants. Neither of these components is new to the educational development field; backward design is a standard of practice for course design, and learning communities, similar in structure to the CDI, have a long track record of success (Beach & Cox, 2009; Cox, 2013; Cox & Richlin, 2004). However, at the time we were designing the CDI, it was not common to blend these practices into one integrated and coherent program. What we have found in combining these two concepts is that we can effect fairly profound changes in our teachers in a relatively short period time with much less time spent by the center staff, leading to a much more significant and efficient change model than we have seen with any other program our center has offered.

Based on a study of metacognition increase in professional learning communities, Prytula (2012) argues that in order to increase teacher metacognition, teachers must be given the time and space to practice metacognitive skills, including self regulation, planning, and revision of knowledge structures. The CDI appears to provide that time and space, as well as powerful content linked with planful teaching, for developing and practicing these skills. The curriculum of the CDI is grounded in setting goals and objectives not just for student learning related directly to content but also for classroom environment and basic learning theory. As such, the explicit project of course design actually engages teachers in the practice of metacognition throughout the experience, providing repeated opportunities for instructors to practice planning, monitoring, and self assessing their teaching.

Furthermore, providing a protected time and space for teachers to engage in course design in the context of an interdisciplinary community appears to enhance the transformative qualities of this content. In particular, the interdisciplinary community allows content experts to work with accomplished novices and engage in collective problem solving. This type of peer engagement, when sustained over a period of time, leads to the creation of new knowledge and results in lasting change (Chism et al., 2012; Prytula, 2012). Our data suggest the socially situated encouragement and challenges from peers during the CDI interactions both supported and catalyzed changes in participant thinking, as well as provided opportunities for deeper reflection and self regulation.

These findings have important implications for educational development practice. First, the results indicate that the combination of a learning community model and backward design is a high impact practice that is well worth implementing. This is particularly true given the relatively low cost of the CDI. In our center, we choose not to pay participants. Additionally, the staff hours required to facilitate a CDI are minimal compared to what would be required for individual consultations for the same number of teachers, especially relative to the gains participants experience. Furthermore, because metacognition and an awareness of backward design principles are such foundational aspects of expert teaching, CDI participants’ burgeoning teaching metacognition opens the door to their further development as teachers. Accordingly, Plank and Mares (2013) found that participants who first engaged in an intensive program like the CDI were more likely to reengage with their teaching center and more likely to reengage in a variety of programming, compared to other participants whose first interaction with the center was a “one off” workshop. Plank and Mares (2013) hypothesized that “those who have engaged in an intensive program first will bring a larger context to individual workshops that increases their impact.” In other words, participating in a CDI and developing teaching metacognition may position teachers to gain more from the other services our teaching center offers.

These results suggest rich directions for future research. As a starting point, connecting the development of expert teaching, more explicitly the large body of research on metacognition, could be used to help educational developers deepen their understanding of the work they do. This may also lead to the identification and development of other practices that are particularly effective in helping teachers develop metacognition.

Another possibility for further investigation lies in exploring and fostering participants’ development after the CDI. We have anecdotally observed that awareness does not always translate into ability. Former participants often share that articulating goals and objectives or aligning assignments is still a challenging process for them, so their backward design skills are still developing. In the last two years, we have begun offering, at CDI graduates’ requests, a new year long learning community intended to provide further support in honing course design skills through design and implementation of course level assessment. These communities will provide us with an opportunity to monitor graduates’ development of course design skills alongside continued progression toward expert teaching.

On a broader note, additional research might explore in more detail how CDI graduates continue to use their backward design skills as well as how those skills might have changed how they function in their department and the university in general. As the current research does not include a pre /postmeasure of individual growth, future research will include this type of quantitative assessment. We are also interested in comparing our graduates’ experiences with those of other institutions’ CDIs as well as learning about opportunities other institutions have designed for their graduates’ further post CDI development.

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Appendix A: Focus Group Questions

A.

Opening questions will include the following:

  1. How would you describe your experience in the CDI to someone else?

  2. What have you been teaching since the CDI? What are you doing with that?

  3. Has the CDI had an effect on the way you think about teaching generally?

Possible follow up questions include the following:

  1. Has the CDI had an effect on the way you will go about designing courses?

  2. What changes in the way you design your courses have you noticed or do you expect?

  3. Has your experience with the CDI affected the way you feel about yourself as a teacher?

  4. Since taking the CDI, what additional changes have you made in your teaching?

  5. How effective has your new course design been? How have you assessed its effectiveness?

  6. Have you been in touch with or had continued interaction with any other participants from the CDI that you attended or who attended a different CDI?