Insights from the Physics and Astronomy New Faculty Workshop: How do new physics faculty teach?

Abstract

Effective faculty professional development must be participant centered; tailored to the needs and interests of the faculty who engage in it. In order to better understand those needs and interests, we investigate how knowledge, attitudes, beliefs, and teaching practice vary among new physics faculty, using surveys of a large sample (n=442) of participants in the Physics and Astronomy New Faculty Workshop (NFW). The “innovation-decision model” guides our understanding of the evolution of faculty teaching practice, and “self-determination theory” and the “theory of planned behavior” inform our understanding of necessary preconditions for that change. We find that most new physics faculty are aware of published teaching approaches, but that this awareness has not increased compared to a decade ago [C. Henderson and M. H. Dancy, Phys. Rev. Phys. Educ. Res. 5, 020107 (2009)10.1103/PhysRevSTPER.5.020107] and is lower than the experienced faculty in our sample. New physics faculty also value student-centered instruction, are interested in using it, and feel that there is peer support for using student-centered instruction. Some new faculty have experienced student-centered instruction as a student or teaching assistant, as well. They are not confident of their ability to enact such practices, however, showing that self-efficacy is an important target for faculty learning. New physics faculty also reported high levels of use of student-centered practice which were similar to experienced faculty in this study and similar or higher than a study from a decade ago. Overall, our results suggest a continued shift in norms in the physics community, such that most new physics faculty enter the professoriate needing minimal encouragement to try student-centered instruction, having already experienced and experimented with such techniques. We do find, however, that about 20% of new faculty are not as open to student-centered instruction and have not yet experimented with it, and that more of these faculty are at Ph.D.-granting institutions. We propose that the innovation-decision model might be best imagined as cyclical, with faculty moving forward and backwards along stages of the cycle as they experiment with their teaching. We recommend those creating professional development experiences for faculty explore opportunities to support faculty as agentic learners engaged in a process of lifelong learning by helping them develop self-efficacy, agency, and metacognition. One way to accomplish these goals might be to focus professional development on faculty choosing something new to try, and (critically) learning from the experience. We also encourage the field to move away from focusing research and professional development on specific, branded teaching practices.