Faculty Development: Creating a Collaborative Culture in Community Colleges

Faculty Development: Creating a Collaborative Culture in Community Colleges addresses how faculty developers work with changes and challenges in teaching within the community college context. Using a multi-case study design based on semi-structured interviews, document analysis, focus groups and surveys, the book examines faculty development within six community college contexts. Three of these case studies, conducted before the Covid-19 pandemic, attended to how the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL) and Faculty Learning Communities (FLCs) were pillars for faculty development. The other three case studies feature the pivot that faculty developers and faculty made at their institutions in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. In these cases, it is seen how faculty development shifts from long-term, sustained initiatives such as SOTL and FLCs to just-in-time (JiT) faculty development, as well as virtual and collaborative faculty development. As teaching models continue to evolve and faculty development takes hold in community colleges, this book features the role of collaboration as an essential component of faculty development, as well as what supports exist within the community college context to provide faculty with continual professional development.

Heidi L. Hallman is Associate Professor, Department of Curriculum and Teaching, University of Kansas, USA.