Faculty and Students at the Center: Faculty Development for General Education Courses

On college and university campuses nationwide faculty are rethinking the structure of their curricula (Astin, 1993; Boyer, 1990; Pascarella & Terenzini, 1991). General education requirements have come under specific scrutiny, with task forces and study groups actively reshaping the scope and mission of entire programs and individual cores (Association of American Colleges, 1988, 1994; Smith, 1992). The atmosphere of educational urgency that surrounds curricular reform and innovation often leads to a faculty development program of some sort (Angelo, 1994; Mosely, 1992). The faculty are the most enduring and valuable resource that any institution has. Creating and sustaining a sense of shared educational purpose and zeal for teaching among the faculty is of paramount importance in times of change and fiscal stringency. Faculty who regularly share personal and intellectual effort can become energized members of the college or university community. Their commitment to each other and to the institution increases. Students who are well-taught are more likely to persevere to graduation and do well in their lives after their degree. Satisfied students are good alumni. Viewed this way, faculty development, done well, is not a luxury but a necessity as higher education faces the 21^st century.

Regrettably, the results of well-intentioned faculty development programs can often be of uneven quality because one or more critical factors was overlooked. Several courses in the State University of New York at Buffalo's new general education curriculum, adopted in 1991, were available for students as pilot courses from as early as 1988. Continuously from that time to the present, we have experimented with a variety of faculty development initiatives for these interdisciplinary, general education courses. Some of the initiatives have been successful, but others were not. We certainly had access to the extensive literature on faculty development in higher education (Eble & McKeachie, 1984; Katz & Henry, 1988; Lacey, 1983; Nelson & Siegel, 1980), as well as guidance from colleagues who had coordinated or participated in faculty development initiatives. No doubt much of what we subsequently learned was already available or was communicated to us, but perhaps we did not appreciate the significance of what we were reading or what was being said. We had to learn by doing. What follows is a discussion of our experiences—what worked and what did not—and a set of ten general principles for successful faculty development for general education courses. These principles represent what we now see, in looking back, as what would have been most useful to understand and appreciate as we embarked upon our faculty development initiatives several years ago.

What Worked for Us, What Didn't, and Why

We were suddenly drawn into faculty development by the momentum surrounding the reform of our general education curriculum, which included several new courses with new content. Foremost among these were an interdisciplinary, two-semester World Civilization course, which introduces students to the development of work civilizations from prehistory to the present, and an interdisciplinary American Pluralism course, which focuses on the changing nature of American society, examining the rich diversity of cultural experiences in America and issues associated with that diversity (Meacham, 1993). The participants in our faculty development programs were almost all senior faculty with good reputations as teachers, who were interested in and committed to undergraduate education, and who had volunteered to give much time and effort to preparing and teaching one of the new courses in our emerging general education program. After our initial efforts at course implementation, one thing was clear. Although these were new courses with new content, the content was being delivered with the same old teaching methods. Under pressure from the curriculum reform process to rapidly implement and perfect several new courses, we quickly tried three quite different models for faculty development on our campus. The first two were not successful...