In the article What we say is not what we do: Effective evaluation of faculty professional development programs. Ebert-May and her five coauthors reveal that after attending a workshop and learning about inquiry-based learning 75% of attendees were not using what they had learned in the workshop but were still using traditional styles of teaching. The study looked at:
1) How learner-centered was the pedagogy that faculty implemented following PD? and,
2) What variables predict teaching practice by faculty following PD? Videotapes of faculty teaching were analyzed using the Reformed Teaching Observation Protocol (RTOP), a reliable instrument that defines and assesses learner-centered teaching.
What is preventing these college faculty from implementing student centered learning. Participants in the survey reported:
that having insufficient time was the main impediment to their revising their teaching.
This issue of faculty not having enough time to implement effective teaching strategies keeps on coming up and yet very few people have really explored how we deal with this issue. If faculty need more time to be able to develop effective teaching strategies then what can we do to make this happen? Perhaps we need to look at just how much time traditional instruction takes compared to student centered learning. I know from personal experience that active, inquiry, and project based learning environments will take more time to develop initially but once they are up and running they are much more efficient than traditional methodologies. Perhaps we need to look at our educational systems as a whole and start asking questions that will result in radical change as opposed to looking at ways to improve our current system which many argue is fundamentally flawed.
