Enhancing your Teaching and Developing New Leadership: Impact of the On the Cutting Edge Professional Development Program

The goal of the On the Cutting Edge faculty professional development program is to improve geoscience education by keeping geoscience faculty up to date with changes in content and teaching methods. Six workshops each year focus on emerging themes in pedagogy and content; teaching upper division courses in the major; course design; teaching, research and career management for early career faculty; and preparing for an academic career. To date over 500 faculty, post-docs, and graduate students have participated in one or more workshops. To determine the impact of the workshops and associated websites, evaluators interviewed 54 of the program's participants and conducted an online survey for which nearly 50% of all participants responded. The interviews and related survey indicate four major areas of impact: 1) a change in participants' focus from "what do I teach" to "what are they learning"; 2) introduction of new teaching methods into courses; 3) increased emphasis in course content on emerging geoscience research (emerging theme workshop participants) and connections between geoscience and humans; 4) increased confidence, new skills, and new connections that enable participants to expand their sphere of influence and take on leadership positions in a wide range of venues (e.g. campus, regional, national, international) and in new professional areas (e.g. geoscience education, teacher preparation). Both the workshops and the associated websites are viewed as important resources in enabling these changes. The websites have played an important role in allowing participants to share what they have learned with colleagues both on campus and beyond. In sum, most participants believe that the workshops are of high value and can articulate important changes in their professional work that resulted from their participation.