Did you know that Sacred Heart University faculty can receive peer feedback from their colleagues to help improve their teaching style? The Center for Teaching and Learning (CTL) has a program called Faculty Peer Coaching where any full-time faculty can participate.
This program was started by Literacy Program director, Dr. Kristin Rainville, and Dr. David Title, Clinical Associate Professor. They started this program when they realized their colleagues wanted to improve the way they taught to keep students engaged in learning.
Source: Tracy Deer-Mirek, Sacred Heart University
“We began thinking about ways that we could support our colleagues no matter what college or discipline they are in and become stronger at their instruction with meeting the needs of students,” said Rainville.
The initiative of this method is to have discussions before and after classroom observations. The classroom observations are structured so faculty members are paired up with another faculty member and they observe how they teach in the classroom. This gives an opportunity for feedback before this step.
“In our first workshop I watched the personalities and interactions between the faculty and made drafts of partners based on that which has worked really well,” said Rainville.
When the observation concludes each faculty member gives feedback to the other about what was done well and what could be improved. Smaller cohorts are formed after to debrief about what was learned during these observations.
“What we do at the end of the year is come together with a debrief about how it went, what we could do better and what we want to learn more about,” said Rainville.
According to a press release from Sacred Heart, the faculty peer coaching program can help faculty strengthen their instructional practices, advance professional relationships as well as improve student learning. “At the end of the day, we believe that if faculty use research instructional practices in their classrooms, student learning will improve,” said Title.
Recently a Diversity, Equity, Inclusion and Belonging (DEIB) cohort was implemented into this program. Assistant Professor, Dr. Thomas Morgan facilitates this new cohort where there are group discussions about being more inclusive in teaching.
“This new cohort had a pre-determined focus on inclusive teaching practices. Faculty who signed up for this cohort are committed to these practices but want to do them better,” said Title.
According to the press release, this new cohort is a very important addition to this program because it shows that DEIB is a university priority.
“We knew that inclusive excellence is central to who we are and what we do at Sacred Heart and wanted to reach out to people who had knowledge in inclusive excellence to lead a cohort,” said Rainville.
The total commitment to this coaching program is 20 hours per semester. Faculty attend one-hour overview sessions and two or three hours of learning sessions. In addition, they attend and conduct a peer observation, and take part in mid- semester check-in and wrap-up sessions.
Workshops take place after some of these observations and are held by Title, Rainville, Morgan, and assistant professor, Dr. Wendy Romney.
“We have done workshops on how to run more effective class discussions and on new ways of assessing student learning other than tests, quizzes, and exams,” said Title.
The press release from SHU stated that the theory of action to this program is to engage faculty in peer coaching and have them learn effective practices so they can implement them into their teaching to help students’ learning.
“Although I have never heard of this program, I do think it is important that professors are getting feedback on their teaching styles. I think what makes a good professor is when they engage students and make sure they are grasping the content,” said sophomore Savannah Lovering.
