Grand Challenge 3:

What roles do different types of professional development experiences play in promoting, facilitating, and sustaining ongoing evolution in geoscience instructors' teaching practices over time?

Rationale

Geoscience educators have a rich palette of ways to learn and improve their practice. On-campus centers for teaching and learning typically involve participants from many disciplines, and typically focus on general teaching knowledge (Pallas, Neumann, & Campbell, 2017) and other issues that cross disciplines. Geoscience-specific learning opportunities, including those offered by NAGT, GSA, AGU, and NSF-funded programs (e.g., Manduca et al., 2017), typically focus on challenges and opportunities specific to the geosciences, including pedagogical content knowledge such as common misconceptions, pathways students follow in becoming geoscientists, and approaches to guiding geoscience learning (Pallas et al., 2017). In-department graduate teaching assistant training (Bitting, Teasdale, & Ryker, 2017), on-campus STEM centers (NSEC, 2017), and communities of transformation such as SENCER and PKAL (Gherke & Kezar, 2016) include a variety of hybrid models. Collaborative activities (e.g., co-teaching) and informal learning from peers interact with formal professional development (Condon et al., 2016). Over the arc of a career, instructors are likely to participate in multiple types of professional development and gain different benefits from each. Investigation into this mosaic of impacts will clarify the differential roles of each as well as the interaction effects that promote continual learning and growth underpinning improved practice (Figure 4).

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Figure 4: During one’s career, learning about teaching & learning may take place via many types of experiences, including on-campus interdisciplinary professional development (PD) programs, national disciplinary programs, hybrid disciplinary-and-general teaching and learning programs, and peer interactions. These and other factors may influence instructor conceptions and practices in non-linear and complex ways, resulting in non-linear and complex changes.

Provenance: Kelsey Bitting, Elon University
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Pathways through the change process (much like the rock cycle) can be non-linear and multi-directional (DiClemente & Velasquez, 2002). One instructor may participate in many different professional development experiences before deciding to experiment with a new practice, while another may incorporate small incremental changes based on each professional development experience as their thinking about teaching evolves, and another may transform their practice substantially after only one professional development experience. Future work must explore how teaching knowledge and practices change over time in non-linear ways (Manduca, 2017).

Recommended Research Strategies

1. In collaboration with and drawing upon existing work of educational psychologists, especially those who study K-12 teacher beliefs, conduct a longitudinal study following early-career geoscience instructors (graduate teaching assistants and early-postgraduates) for 10+ years to explore participants' growth and evolution in both teaching conceptions and practices, how they make decisions to pursue learning opportunities, and why they consider, adopt, and abandon or sustain changes in their practice. This strategy may be pursued in conjunction with longitudinal studies proposed under Grand Challenge 1, but those addressing Grand Challenge 1 would need to go beyond early-career instructors to capture the full range of identity and career characteristics that may be relevant.
2. Collaborate across institutions and disciplinary societies to develop and deploy common end-of-program instruments to identify different learning outcomes for instructors participating in professional development. Iteratively redesign these instruments at three- to five-year intervals, as hypotheses about relationships are formulated and reformulated with progressive analyses of the combined datasets. Using this dataset, analyze the pathways that instructors follow through multiple experiences, and the range and variety of characteristics of changes they choose to make as a result.
3. Design protocols for follow-up interviews and classroom observations with program attendees for use before and three, six, or 12 months after participation. Seek to determine how participants connect what they learned during the professional development program to their prior thinking and practice, whether they have implemented changes, and what elements of the program most strongly influenced their motivation, learning, and decision-making regarding the implementation of new practices.

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