ERIC Number: EJ1486762
Record Type: Journal
Publication Date: 2025
Pages: 36
Abstractor: As Provided
ISBN: N/A
ISSN: N/A
EISSN: EISSN-2334-4822
Available Date: 0000-00-00
Let's Discuss Our COPUS Together: Findings from Data-Informed Faculty Professional Development Programs across Three Campuses
To Improve the Academy, v44 n2 p162-197 2025
Structured classroom observation protocols provide instructors with data about their teaching practices, but instructors may not meaningfully engage with those data without guidance. To facilitate instructor reflection, educational developers from the Centers for Teaching and Learning (CTLs) and educational researchers from STEM departments across three campuses collaborated to design and implement a novel faculty professional development program that would promote reflection on teaching using instructors' Classroom Observation Protocol for Undergraduate STEM (COPUS) (Smith et al., 2013) data--a program we call data-informed professional development (DIPD). The program involved faculty participation in a teaching reflection, structured classroom observations from two course sessions, at least one meeting with CTL staff, an exit interview, and an opportunity to update their original teaching reflection. Through qualitatively coding the post-DIPD exit interviews, we found that instructors primarily reflected on their COPUS data with a desire to increase student engagement. Instructors also described being more open to making small changes to their courses, feeling supported to introduce changes to their teaching, and feeling that there was an important element of community-building in the DIPD program. And finally, instructors described how the DIPD experience was beneficial for promoting reflection on teaching practices, but the meeting portion was critical; providing data from the structured observations alone was not sufficient for various reasons. Our study can serve as a teaching professional development model for how educational developers and education researchers can collaborate to prompt instructors to critically reflect on their teaching practices using structured observation protocols.
Descriptors: Faculty Development, Data Use, Reflection, STEM Education, Undergraduate Study, College Faculty, Program Effectiveness, Teacher Attitudes, Observation, Minority Serving Institutions
Michigan Publishing. 839 Greene Street, Ann Arbor, MI 48104. Tel: 734-764-3417; e-mail: mpublishing@umich.edu; Web site: https://www.toimprovetheacademy.org/
Publication Type: Journal Articles; Reports - Research
Education Level: Higher Education; Postsecondary Education
Audience: N/A
Language: English
Authoring Institution: N/A
Grant or Contract Numbers: 1821724
Author Affiliations: N/A

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