Building a Faculty Community

Each year the Center for Learning Design and Technology hosts the Faculty Forward Academy, an intensive blended faculty development program, available to all faculty at Johns Hopkins University. To date, we have had 81 graduates of the program from five schools across Johns Hopkins University and the Applied Physics Laboratory (APL).

PROBLEM OF PRACTICE (POP): A question posed around a problem, challenge, or gap in practice. After developing the PoP, faculty participants craft a plan of action. The plan includes the problem, questions around the problem, the research on the problem, the possible solutions to the problem, and a plan to implement the problem.

Featured Faculty 1 – Dr. Treven Wall, Principal Professional Staff, JHU (Johns Hopkins University) Physics Laboratory, faculty in Applied and Computational Mathematics, Whiting School of Engineering

Dr. Wall has taught since 2001 during his graduate school days at Cornell. He started teaching at Johns Hopkins in 2010 after he joined the Applied Physics Lab in the summer of 2009. Wall has taught at Cornell as a graduate student, at the University of Edinburgh (in Scotland) as a post-doc, at Syracuse University as a post-doc, on Johns Hopkins main campus in the Applied Math and Statistics department, and in the Engineering for Professionals program.

Wall stated his problem of practice as: “My current assessment methodology is primarily high-stakes, summative assessments. What additional assessment strategies can I employ to deepen my students’ learning? Can I, using assessments, encourage more beneficial cooperation among my students? What low-stakes assessments can I use to encourage the students to be prepared for class ahead of time? How can my assessments factor in the principles of interleaving and spacing to help improve retention? How do I explain the assessment strategy to my students, so they can understand the benefits of more frequent assessments?”

He produced these solutions to address the PoP:

• Provide low-stakes self-checks of main ideas from reading
• Provide low-stakes, informal assessments summarizing the reading for other students
• Option for students to submit corrections on select proofs for additional credit
• Provide a discussion forum on additional and optional homework problems
• Use interleaving, in which a mix of homework exercises from earlier chapters are included through the course

Wall said, “I joined the fellowship program in order to learn about new developments in pedagogy, regarding both online and in-person delivery, and to concentrate some time on improving my teaching.” Treven reflected that his main takeaway from the program was the encouragement that research has backed active learning, frequent testing, and “embracing difficulties” as conducive to learning. He said, “It was encouraging and energized me for the coming semester to try some new things!”

Featured Faculty 2 – Dr. Nagma Zerin, Lecturer, Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, Whiting School of Engineering

Dr. Zerin has taught for five years in four different countries. She joined the Whiting School of Engineering as a full-time lecturer in the Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering department in December 2021. She decided to participate in the Faculty Forward Fellowship program because she was interested in learning about strategies for effective online teaching and improving student engagement in the classroom. She also sought the opportunity to network with fellow educators.

Zerin reflected, “It was interesting to learn about different educational theories and their implications for teaching practices. I think learning based on social constructivism is valuable as it enhances the learning experience by promoting collaboration and peer interactions. I applied the idea in my course through weekly group sessions for problem-solving, group projects, and group presentations. The group projects and presentations were based on real-life engineering problems. These group activities also promoted active learning and provided students the opportunity to avoid illusions of knowing.”

Zerin’s PoP focuses on improving student engagement in the course discussion boards. In her previous teaching experience, she noticed that it was challenging for her students to connect personally via the online discussion boards. From her observations, students seemed hesitant and/or uninterested to participate in the online discussion, especially if there was no grade assigned to it. However, they were more open to share their opinions in anonymous surveys. During the program, she learned about the tool, Padlet, which she will use in future semesters. The tool allows students to post anonymously, which she believes will help them feel more comfortable at the start of the semester.

She said, “I learned more than I thought I would [in the program]. I especially enjoyed learning about active learning methods, retrieval practices for developing students’ metacognition, and formative assessment. I am going to implement them in my future courses.”

Featured Faculty 3 – Dr. Cassandra Crifasi, Associate Professor, Department of Health Policy and Management; Deputy Director of the Center for Gun Violence Prevention and Policy; faculty member in the Center for Injury Research and Policy

Dr. Crifasi is an Associate Professor within the School of Public Health since 2015. She has always wanted to teach and has even taught martial arts and snowboarding. She learned about the program through her school’s teaching and learning center and was excited to join the program to connect with others across JHU who are excited about teaching. Crifasi teaches several courses and was challenged with making changes to an existing course and a new course, which was her PoP.

As a solution to her PoP, Crifasi decided to make these changes to her existing course: Expanded use of polls throughout lectures, reweighting active learning activities and summative assessment to reduce weight of final, and including more explicit use of spacing and interleaving. For her new course, she planned to include heavy use of spacing and interleaving, peer assessment/feedback on assignment components, and the use of reflections throughout each lecture.

Crifasi said, “I must admit, I had some pretty strong assumptions about the science of learning… which weren’t really based on science at all! But, as I discovered through this program, there are evidence-based tools and strategies that enhance learning. Two of my new favorites are the concepts of spacing and interleaving. If you aren’t sure what those are, you should sign up for the Fellowship!”

Learn More

The faculty featured in this article strengthened their teaching expertise and created meaningful connections within the JHU community by identifying and implementing solutions to their PoPs and participating in the Faculty Forward Fellowship Program. The opportunity to participate is open to all JHU faculty. The application is open now at http://facultyforward.jhu.edu/. Apply today or reach out to Olysha Magruder for more information at [email protected].