2016 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

The SIMPLE Design framework for ongoing faculty development includes six research-based principles that have emerged from our work with engineering faculty and are now extended to other STEM disciplines. In this paper, we explain how the principles guide the organization of teaching development groups and describe the research behind their development. We will describe and discuss how the SIMPLE principles operate across diverse teaching development groups.

The six principles are as follows:
1.Sustainable, ongoing, small groups – The support is provided in discipline-driven
groups of 4-6 faculty who meet regularly
2.Incremental change – Participants agree to make at least a small change
or innovation in their teaching, a change that fits their course and comfort with trying new
practices.
3. Mentoring - The small group structure provides a comfortable environment for
sharing ideas, learning others, giving and receiving support for trying new teaching practices
4. People-driven - The groups are organized around the needs and interests
of STEM faculty. They are designed to meet their needs for teaching in interactive
learning environments in order to improve the quality of student learning and engagement in STEM
5.Learning Environment- Work is focused on the design and integration of more interactive
learning environments for students moving beyond transmission pedagogies or direct instruction models toward
6.Design– Participants agree to document their process of creating interactive teaching
practices by creating a design memo that explains the innovation, the constraints and affordances of its use and examples of its application in the classroom. This creates a sharable, external product and focuses their work on the design of teaching.

Teaching development groups have been created in six STEM departments including engineering. Groups varied in participant roles (tenure-track faculty, teaching faculty, graduate students), size (4 to 10), and frequency of meeting. Perhaps most interesting, the groups varied significantly in the structure and content of their meetings. Driven by the interests of participants, some groups adopted a journal-club style format, while others used books on teaching to scaffold discussion, and others invited speakers with expertise in learning technologies. The paper will describe how the participants defined the structure of the groups and how a diverse representation of the principles emerged.

The data comes from two separate NSF-funded projects in faculty teaching development. In the first project, we worked exclusively with electrical engineering faculty to study how ongoing teaching development groups can broaden the use of evidence-based teaching practices. An initial version of the design principles emerged from this project. In the second project, we have expanded the faculty development groups to other STEM fields and used the SIMPLE principles to guide the groups. To understand how the principles have been used in practice and are operationalized by the diverse teaching development groups, we have collected survey and interview data from group leaders and group participants. Monthly meetings of the group leaders have also been recorded for analysis. Summaries of data analysis will be included in the full paper.