Faculty development workshops on the road: What's missing?

Abstract

A common model for faculty development in higher education is what we refer to as the "visiting scholar" model. We have participated in this model for a number of years, and find it has some serious drawbacks, and is quite limited in its ability to help faculty reconsider and change what they do on a continuing basis. That is, unless a campus has an underlying structure to stimulate and support ongoing faculty growth, visiting scholars are unlikely to affect deep and lasting change in the way faculty think about learning and teaching. We describe our experiences as visiting scholars and in hiring visiting scholars for our own campus and compare our own faculty development program that provides an underlying structure for these ongoing discussions. We will then propose a model that would expand the visiting scholar model, so that innovations and organizational learning could more effectively move across and within institutions.