Teaching start-up: Supporting new faculty members for long-term success
Session Type
Presentation
Room
Physics and Astronomy, room 148
Start Date
16-7-2025 3:30 PM
End Date
16-7-2025 4:00 PM
Keywords
paired teaching, collaborative teaching, faculty professional development, teaching support, new faculty
Primary Threads
Teaching and Learning Science
Abstract
“Teaching Start-Up” is a development program for new science and mathematics faculty to implement effective pedagogies aimed at student academic success, engagement, inclusion, equity, and retention. As their first teaching experience at our large, research-intensive university, a new hire collaboratively teaches an existing, well-structured, student-focused course with an experienced colleague, supported by a third person with expertise in evidence-based teaching practices. The program occurs at a critical career transition, lays the foundations for participants’ future teaching practice, and contributes to long-term, positive culture change around a department’s teaching. Building on a pilot started in 2014 and co-funded by the Dean’s office, the program has seen more than 60% of those eligible participating since its full implementation in 2018. For program evaluation, we have data (collected with consent and institutional ethics approval) from interviews, participants' written reflections, classroom observations, and teaching philosophy statements matched between job application and first promotion.
After introducing the program, we will share a portion of our evaluation rubric and seek feedback on our methodology and findings centred on the teaching philosophy statements. Our analysis revealed overall positive shifts in all rubric categories: goals, beliefs, teacher role, professional growth and development, pedagogy, inclusion, and reflection. The greatest changes were seen in the categories which are primary foci in the program. These results bolster our other indicators that immersive support of faculty at the very start of their job can have lasting impact.
Elements of Engagement
We plan to use a tool like Mentimeter (can reply in browser if attending online or with own device in person) to ask attendees questions (open-ended and multiple choice) about their own experiences of onboarding for teaching and the writing/purpose of teaching statements. We will show examples of our rubric applied to example text from teaching statements to provide insight into our research approach and further context for our findings.
Creative Commons License
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Teaching start-up: Supporting new faculty members for long-term success
Physics and Astronomy, room 148
“Teaching Start-Up” is a development program for new science and mathematics faculty to implement effective pedagogies aimed at student academic success, engagement, inclusion, equity, and retention. As their first teaching experience at our large, research-intensive university, a new hire collaboratively teaches an existing, well-structured, student-focused course with an experienced colleague, supported by a third person with expertise in evidence-based teaching practices. The program occurs at a critical career transition, lays the foundations for participants’ future teaching practice, and contributes to long-term, positive culture change around a department’s teaching. Building on a pilot started in 2014 and co-funded by the Dean’s office, the program has seen more than 60% of those eligible participating since its full implementation in 2018. For program evaluation, we have data (collected with consent and institutional ethics approval) from interviews, participants' written reflections, classroom observations, and teaching philosophy statements matched between job application and first promotion.
After introducing the program, we will share a portion of our evaluation rubric and seek feedback on our methodology and findings centred on the teaching philosophy statements. Our analysis revealed overall positive shifts in all rubric categories: goals, beliefs, teacher role, professional growth and development, pedagogy, inclusion, and reflection. The greatest changes were seen in the categories which are primary foci in the program. These results bolster our other indicators that immersive support of faculty at the very start of their job can have lasting impact.