Processes of Adaptive Integration in Scaling Professional Development for Community College Developmental Mathematics Faculty

• In Event: Improving "Go to Scale" Efforts Through Adaptive Integration: Lessons From Carnegie's Networked Improvement Communities

Abstract

The Pathways approach includes profound changes to curriculum and instruction, shifting toward student-centered, collaborative instruction using challenging tasks grounded in authentic contexts. The Pathways Faculty Support Program (FSP), a professional development program delivered by Carnegie for new network faculty, prepares and supports faculty to teach in these ways. The FSP design principles are derived from findings from research on effective professional development, including sustained and ongoing learning opportunities and activities that are job-embedded, support emergent problems of practice, are context- and discipline-specific, support collaborative reflection, and are centered on artifacts of classroom practice (Hunsicker, 2010; Guskey, 2002; Garet, et al, 2001; LeMahieu, Roy & Foss, 1995).

The Pathways network enrollment has grown three-fold over the past four years. As the network continues to scale, colleges need to play a greater role in providing support for their Pathways faculty. However, the support colleges have provided to date varies widely. To address this variation, a team of Carnegie staff and network faculty have developed a process through which colleges build local capacity for supporting faculty implementing components of the FSP. This paper reports on this process of adaptive integration, highlighting two key tools: the Local Faculty Support Handbook as a central resource for adaptation and a measurement system for assessing and learning from adaptations.

The Local Faculty Support Handbook is a set of resources documenting structures, processes, and protocols based on the FSP for building upon and improving colleges’ capacity to provide local support to new faculty reliably at scale. Rather than asking colleges to adopt structures and activities with “fidelity”, the protocols in the Handbook help colleges make decisions about necessary changes and additions based on their local needs. Additionally, to improve the Handbook, routines and protocols for debriefing local support with colleges have been developed that inform the FSP team about their efficacy. The Handbook also details a system of measurement for colleges to assess the quality of their local faculty support system. This measurement system, consisting of system-level measures organized around five quality dimensions, provides a common definition of quality faculty support within the Pathways. It allows colleges and the FSP team to assess changes colleges make when adaptively integrating the FSP into their local context. Together with the FSP’s design principles, this measurement system helps colleges avoid or learn from “lethal mutations.” This paper will describe what the FSP team has learned about colleges’ adaptive integration of the FSP into their local contexts, the changes that colleges make when doing so, and analyses of the quality of these changes over time using the FSP’s measurement system.

Authors

• Ann R. Edwards, Carnegie Foundation

• Carlos Sandoval, The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching

• Haley McNamara, Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching