Section 8.3 Providing resources for planning and teaching courses
To ensure that new faculty members have ample resources for planning and teaching in new ways, give them binders and electronic files with the previous faculty member's syllabus, course notes, directions for activities, and homework assignments; provide access to the previous faculty member's course website; and prepare a guide to additional resources.
Giving a new faculty member a binder and electronic files with previous faculty member's syllabus, course notes, directions for activities, and homework assignments.
Provide multiple resources from which the new faculty member can draw in planning a course. Retain multiple versions of handouts, assignments, and activities that document how these have evolved over the years. Such multiple versions can illustrate the progression of an experienced faculty member's pedagogical decision making. Perusing these can serve as a vicarious apprenticeship for a new faculty member interested in seeing such evidence of improving instructional materials through on-going revisions.
Giving a new faculty member access to the previous faculty member's course website.
Receiving a thick binder and/or many gigabytes of course files from which to select from among a multitude of materials from various versions of a course can be overwhelming. Also provide access to a prior instructor's course website for the students. Such a website can be extremely helpful as this provides a coherent and organized template with which the new faculty member can build a new course website for immediate use with the new students in the new faculty member's first assignment to teach the course.
Preparing a guide to additional resources.
People differ in their prior experiences, interests, skill levels, and time available to peruse resources. Prepare a guide that alerts new faculty members to what resources exist for learning about teaching and how they can be accessed. Such resources might include a department website describing courses and curriculum, papers describing the reformed curriculum and/or studies of student learning particular topics, videos of class sessions, and a program website providing details about specific teaching strategies and activities. If feasible, create a teaching ‘café’ to encourage informal access, a protected place within the department where faculty can easily go to meet to chat about teaching with one another, find and watch a video together, read a paper, browse a website, with the guide available to facilitate choosing and locating such resources.