Page 50 - Campus Technology, January/February 2019

C-Level View
Purposeful Faculty Development
Why faculty development programs need to reflect the core values
of higher ed and provide a forum for greater insight and deep thinking. By Mary Grush
Faculty development programs often focus on operational, procedural or technical details — but they can and should do more, according to Gardner Campbell, a leader in the field of education transformation, champion of connected learning and an associate professor of English at Virginia Commonwealth University. Here, he envisions programs that reflect higher education’s fundamental values and principles, provide time and space for insight, and encourage deep thinking about higher purposes.
Campus Technology: Why should faculty development programs go
beyond technical training in specific operational policies and procedures?
Gardner Campbell: Operational policies and procedures are always very important concerns for the institution, but they are not supposed to exist for their own sake — they are the means toward an end. We should ask: What are the fundamental values and principles that should inform the way we think about our policies, procedures and the new IT strategies we are buying and deploying?
Higher education institutions are very complex organizations, and it’s easy to load up your plate with operational details. But in faculty development programs, we don’t
want to end up with a situation where we are not deeply reflective about what we want to accomplish with what we are doing.
Colleges and universities typically have very idealistic mission statements. They may include goals like preparing students for a lifetime of fulfilling work, learning and civic participation. They may delineate the institution’s role in expanding the frontiers of human knowledge. Within faculty development efforts, we need to be able to think about the values and principles that we put in these outward-facing documents and to consider whether what we are doing operationally actually aligns with them.
Faculty are by nature drawn to thinking about big ideas. Faculty development
programs can use this to jumpstart deep thinking about our roles and the higher purposes in everything we do.
CT: You’ve often spoken about insight as a higher purpose in teaching and learning. What is insight in this context and why should it be considered in faculty development programs?
Campbell: At its core, insight is about making connections: between concepts, between facts, between actions, and so on. Neuroscientists who study insight tell us that the moment of insight can
be detected scientifically, as a burst of energy in the brain that results from that
50 CAMPUS TECHNOLOGY | January/February 2019