Professional development is the key to institution improvement. Helping faculty garner new and skills on the job will improve student success.

Hiring qualified and experienced faculty who are willing to go above and beyond for students is the first towards improving the institution.

New faculty members should be supported. They need intense support from administrators and colleagues. A three-day orientation, monthly lunch and learn sessions, monthly 15mins meeting, and having a mentor are a few ways to support new faculty members.

There is a monthly PD calendar that goes out the first working day of the month which shows the professional development opportunities that month. For example, CRP, CSP, course design, Adobe Spark, Building a classroom community, etc.

Faculty have the opportunity to participate in online course design monthly workshops, an in depth five-week internal online course review, and an external review

Classroom observation is one way that faculty can get feedback on their teaching. Peer-to-peer observation is beneficial and safe for most faculty because they are getting feedback from their peers. The feedback is non-evaluative. Informal observation happens when I am invited into a classroom by a faculty member to observe a lesson and provide feedback on the lesson. Formal observation happens when a supervisor goes in to evaluative a lesson and provide feedback on the lesson. Irrespective of the type of observation, all observations should have a consistent format of a pre-observation, observation, and post-observation.

A part of the duties of a faculty developer is to be resourceful. Providing tools and resources for faculty is important to support the faculty to carry out their job of teaching and learning. Coaching faculty also involves helping them organize their time and being flexible as this is a characteristic of a master instructor.

Train-the-trainer model of professional development helps to build capacity. Faculty learn from other faculty members through the train-the-trainer model. For example, faculty assessment coaches are trained in assessment outcomes and assessment measures. The faculty assessment coaches turn-key this information to other faculty members to build institution-wide capacity as it relates to assessment.