There’s an ongoing national debate among educators about teaching and learning. Is it enough to know a discipline extremely well, then walk into a classroom expecting to teach?
Some would argue: yes. Learn a discipline well, present it to the students, and if they pay attention, study hard and complete assignments, then they will learn the material.
Increasingly, however, educators are understanding that seldom are things so simple.
Ron Toll, FGCU’s provost and vice president for Academic Affairs, entered the classroom for the first time as a teacher 31 years ago. A newly minted Ph.D., Toll’s training was comprehensive and his knowledge of his discipline extensive. But he’d never received a single day’s training on how to teach. “I literally had no idea about how to pass on the knowledge I’d learned to my students,” says Toll.
It took years learning teaching techniques by trial and error before Toll felt he had mastered how to manage a classroom. And over those years, he decided that someday he would do something to address the issue. Someday came in 2009, when Toll spoke with Linda Serro, a professor in FGCU’s College of Education, about designing a teaching and learning center at FGCU.
“I was asked to design the curriculum for an academy designed to train new faculty in teaching techniques, classroom management, learning theory, assessment, and understanding the FGCU culture and the students they would be teaching,” Serro says.
She solicited ideas from faculty across the campus. Topics came into focus: lesson planning, grading strategies, use of technology, designing materials, course development, creating a syllabus, delivering an effective lecture and other effective teaching techniques.
FGCU’s New Faculty Academy launched in fall 2013. The course, “Reflective Pedagogy in Higher Education: Finding Joy and Success in Teaching,” represents a couple of decades of thought and the collaboration of some of FGCU’s best faculty.
“The New Faculty Academy is one of the few such academies at any university in the United States dedicated to preparing new faculty to succeed in the classroom,” according to Toll.
“The original idea for the academy was to enroll new faculty with less than two years of full-time teaching,” says Serro.
The inaugural class had a range of teaching experience – some with years overseas, some with years as visiting professors, some with very little classroom experience.
“What they all share is that they are new to FGCU and to the students who choose to attend our university,” Serro says.
- Read a more in-depth look at this program in Pinnacle.