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Board 136: Resources for Faculty Development: Implicit Bias, Deficit Thinking, and Active Learning

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Conference

2019 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Location

Tampa, Florida

Publication Date

June 15, 2019

Start Date

June 15, 2019

End Date

June 19, 2019

Conference Session

NSF Grantees Poster Session

Tagged Topics

Diversity and NSF Grantees Poster Session

Page Count

15

DOI

10.18260/1-2--32246

Permanent URL

https://peer.asee.org/32246

Download Count

850

Paper Authors

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Robert C. Martin Texas A&M University

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Cynthia Lang Texas A&M University

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Cynthia Lang is a third-year graduate student in the School Psychology Ph.D program at Texas A&M University. She earned her BA in Psychology from The University of Texas at Austin in May 2016.

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Sin-Ning Cindy Liu Texas A&M University

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Ph.D. student in Industrial/Organizational Psychology at Texas A&M University.
M.A. Educational Psychology, 2016 - Baylor University
B.A. Psychology, 2014 - Baylor University

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Carolyn L Sandoval University of California, San Diego

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Dr. Sandoval is the Associate Director of the Teaching + Learning Commons at the University of California, San Diego. She earned a PhD in Adult Education-Human Resource Development. Her research interests include adult learning and development, faculty development, qualitative methods of inquiry, and social justice education.

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Mindy Bergman Texas A&M University

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Dr. Bergman is a Professor in the Department of Psychology and Executive Director of Interdisciplinary Critical Studies at Texas A&M University. She earned her PhD in industrial-organizational psychology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Her research interests include workplace safety, occupational health, and fairness and mistreatment in the workplace and in STEM classrooms and programs.

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Jeffrey E. Froyd Ohio State University Orcid 16x16 orcid.org/0000-0002-4426-2681

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Dr. Jeffrey E. Froyd is a Professor in the Department of Engineering Education at the Ohio State University, College Station. He received the B.S. degree in mathematics from Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology and the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in electrical engineering from the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis. He was an Assistant Professor, Associate Professor, and Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology. At Rose-Hulman, he co-created the Integrated, First-Year Curriculum in Science, Engineering and Mathematics, which was recognized in 1997 with a Hesburgh Award Certificate of Excellence. He served as Project Director a National Science Foundation (NSF) Engineering Education Coalition in which six institutions systematically renewed, assessed, and institutionalized innovative undergraduate engineering curricula. He has authored over 70 papers and offered over 30 workshops on faculty development, curricular change processes, curriculum redesign, and assessment. He has served as a program co-chair for three Frontiers in Education Conferences and the general chair for the 2009 conference. Prof. Froyd is a Fellow of the IEEE, a Fellow of the American Society for Engineering Education (ASEE), an ABET Program Evaluator, the Editor-in-Chief for the IEEE Transactions on Education, a Senior Associate Editor for the Journal of Engineering Education, and an Associate Editor for the International Journal of STEM Education.

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Abstract

The Improving Student Experiences to Increase Student Engagement (ISE-2) grant was awarded to Texas A&M University by the National Science Foundation, through EEC-Engineering Diversity Activities (Grant No. 1648016) with the goal of increasing student engagement and retention in the College of Engineering. The major component of the intervention was a faculty development program aimed to increase active learning, improve classroom climates, and decrease implicit bias and deficit thinking. Faculty teaching first- and second-year Engineering courses participated in the ISE-2 faculty development program, with the first cohort (n = 10) in Summer 2017 and the second cohort (n = 5) in Summer 2018. This paper describes the content of each of these components of the faculty development program and provides access to a Google drive (still in development at the time of the abstract) with resources for others to use.

The faculty development program consisted of three workshops, a series of coffee hour conversations, and two deliverables from the participants (a teaching plan at the conclusion of the summer training and a final reflection a year following the training). Anchoring the program was a framework for teaching in a diverse classroom (Adams & Love, 2009). Workshop 1 (early May) consisted of an overview of the ISE-2 program. During the first workshop, faculty were introduced to social cognitive biases and the behaviors that result from these biases. During this workshop, the ISE-2 team shared findings from a climate study related to the classroom experiences of students at the College of Engineering. Workshop 2 (mid-May) focused on how undergraduate students learn, provided evidence for the effectiveness of active learning strategies, and exposed faculty participants to active learning strategies. Workshop 3 (early August) integrated the material from the first two workshops as faculty participants prepared to apply the material to their own teaching. Prior to each workshop, the faculty participants were provided with pre-workshop readings to familiarize them with some of the content matter. Coffee hour conversations—informal discussions between the participating faculty and the ISE-2 team centered around a teaching topic selected by participants—were conducted on a near-weekly basis between the second and third workshops. Handouts and worksheets were provided at each coffee hour and served to guide the coffee hour discussions. After the last workshop but before the Fall semester, faculty participants created a teaching plan to incorporate what they learned in the ISE-2 program into their own teaching. At the end of the academic year, the faculty participants are tasked with completing a final reflection on how ISE-2 has affected their teaching in the previous academic year.

In this paper, we will report the content of each of the three workshops and explain how these workshops are related to the overarching goals of the ISE-2 program. Then, we will discuss how each of the coffee hour conversation topics complement the material covered in the workshops. Lastly, we will explore the role of the teaching plans and final reflections in changing instructional practices for faculty.

Reference Adams, M., & Love, B. J. (2009). A social justice education faculty development framework for a post-Grutter era. In K. Skubikowski, C. Wright, & R. Graf (Eds.), Social justice education: Inviting faculty to transform their institutions (pp. 3-25). Sterling, VA: Stylus.

Martin, R. C., & Lang, C., & Liu, S. C., & Sandoval, C. L., & Bergman, M., & Froyd, J. E. (2019, June), Board 136: Resources for Faculty Development: Implicit Bias, Deficit Thinking, and Active Learning Paper presented at 2019 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition , Tampa, Florida. 10.18260/1-2--32246

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