Professional Development

Professional development opportunities are critical to the successful implementation of Problem Based/Case Based (PBCB) pedagogy. The experiences of faculty who have worked on the various CITE initiatives illustrate an emerging developmental progression as they move from traditional teaching methods to adopting across time the elements of this new pedagogy. Several factors are emerging as essential components for professional development activities.

Initially faculty is attracted to case based approaches because they see the merit in projects. They may have used projects in their teaching and especially for senior level courses, projects act as a capstone event for applying the knowledge learned during the course of study. Understanding more deeply the differences between short term, hypothetical project assignments and true contextual learning opportunities where cases and problems are addressed semester long and taken from the context of actual business cultures, is one of the first steps in taking on a new pedagogy. The consequences for teaching and learning practice are complex and often not immediately apparent.

Faculty needs multiple opportunities to communicate their concerns and find support for their new efforts. We have found that in our workshops, faculty needs time to reflect, share their experiences, and learn from each other. For a pedagogy that requires a radical shift in “control” in the classroom, it is imperative that faculty know they are making progress and that the full orchestration of a problem based learning environment comes with repeated opportunities and iteration

It is also necessary to provide faculty with multiple opportunities to learn for themselves the conceptual assumptions that ground these new pedagogies. After 20 years of empirical work on factors that contribute to good learning outcomes, we have a research base from which to draw applications to the design of learning environments (Bransford, Brown, & Cocking, 1999). IT faculty are not familiar with this research, largely from the field of cognitive psychology and the learning sciences, and they will require repeated efforts in professional development events and support during their implementation experiences to construct their own understandings around the value of the new approach to teaching and learning.

Incorporating what we know about how people learn and what can be abstracted from cognitive, socio-cognitive and constructivist theory, we are developing a professional development model that has the following assumptions:

• Learning occurs across time
• Learning occurs in context
• Learning requires active participation
• Learning rests on social foundations
• Learning endures with reflection and application

Following from our assumptions about student learning, we must continue to model in our support to faculty the very methods that enhance deep and lasting understanding. We will continue to articulate and discover additional scaffolds to that end as we work to sustain faculty initiatives.

In our recent professional development activities (Reframing IT Learning: Real-time business problems for developing adaptive expertise, CSS Projects Workshop Proceedings, November, 2003), we have addressed much of this but we need to refine our approach and develop further the model we’ve designed. Our goal is to articulate the critical features of a professional development model that will both recognize the developmental trajectory of faculty moving to change their teaching and learning practice and provide the commensurate scaffolding for keeping faculty empowered in their new role and supporting them as they enlist others along the way to institutionalizing case based contextual learning. As in most things that matter, reforming teaching will take time and a concerted effort to learn together through iteration on the professional development model.

As faculty collaborate with each other and other scholars in the learning sciences they begin to recognize the power of these approaches and begin to articulate and advocate the conceptual foundation to their peers (Sekeman, personal communication, March, 2004; CSS Workshop Faculty Panel Discussion, March, 2004). More important, they begin to see the learning outcomes for their students and share that at departmental faculty meetings and conferences. These events serve to spread the ideas and as a result new faculty are interested in using the approach. Continuing to document the effects of these approaches and enlisting administrative support will allow us to describe what it takes to truly sustain and institutionalize this kind of reform