Turning Faculty Into Expert Teachers: Why Forgetting About Organizational Development Is Easy but Makes Change So Difficult

• In Event: Developing a Research Agenda for Cross-Professional Development

Abstract

Many of us have vivid memories of our first attempts to train faculty, and to lead staff development workshops. Curriculum changes require that people learn how to do things in different and new ways. Clearly, faculty development programs play an important role. Investing in the development of people should result in the accomplishment of new competencies and new motivation. However, why is it that we may learn so little from faculty development workshops? Because we lack an entry point where research on organizational behavior about the development and learning in corporate organizations connects with our understanding of how expertise is acquired in a wide range of professions. There is untapped wealth of knowledge in both worlds of research which can help us further in the design of staff development practices for professional education. The present contribution will present a series of recent studies which demonstrate how organizational support mechanisms contribute to professional learning. We conducted our studies in the fields of Finance and Accounting, Management Training, and Teacher Training. Results were remarkably similar across different fields of study. Organizational structure and processes determined substantially to how professionals acquire and maintain expertise in their field. Next, it also determined whether training faculty in workshops was more or less effective in helping them become good teachers.

Author

• Wim H. Gijselaers, Maastricht University