About the Book
In response to national concerns a decade ago, driven by research that showed that higher education was making little impact on students’ development of broad competencies and critical thinking, the provost and president of Purdue University, a research university, instituted a program whose goals were to build on the accumulated knowledge on effective teaching to facilitate student learning, improve outcomes, and change the institutional culture around teaching and learning – objectives to which many institutions aspire, but which few consistently attain, or attain at scale.This book describes the development of Purdue’s IMPACT program (Instruction Matters: Purdue Academic Course Transformation), from its tentative beginning, when it struggled to recruit 35 faculty fellows, to the present, when 350 have been enrolled and the university has more applications than it can currently handle. Overall, more than 600 courses have been impacted, many of which have seen significantly reduced DFW rates. Chantal Levesque-Bristol, whose Center for Instructional Excellence is part of an institutional team that comprises the Provost’s Office, Teaching and Learning Technologies Unit, Institutional Assessment, the Purdue University Library and School of Information Studies, and the Evaluation and Learning Research Center, describes the evolution of IMPACT, lessons learned, and the central tenets that have led to its success. The purpose of this book is notonly to describe the program, but also to highlight the importance and implications of the underlying motivational theoretical framework guiding the initiative. Having started as a course redesign program that faltered in achieving its objectives, the breakthrough came with the introduction of the fundamental motivational principles of self determination theory (SDT) followed by the applications of these principles to the research in higher education leadership and pedagogy. Giving faculty fellows the autonomy to build on their disciplinary expertise, pursue their interests and predilections, within a guided framework, and leveraging interactions with colleagues through FLCs, stimulated faculty fellows’ motivation and creativity.This book describes the core and structure of the IMPACT program, presents details of faculty learning curriculum, explains how the focus on SDT principles shaped the program’s evolution and transformation from a course redesign to a professional faculty development program, and covers the considerations behind the formation of faculty fellow IMPACT teams A concluding chapter addresses how the IMPACT program, having helped faculty pivot to emergency remote teaching when the campus closed owing to the COVID-19 pandemic, is being modified so it can be successfully sustained online if circumstances require, or as a means to expand its reach in the future.While the principles behind this initiative will be of compelling interest to its primary audience of faculty developers, several chapters will have appeal to instructors and administrators.
Table of Contents:
Foreword —George D. Kuh Preface Acknowledgments 1. Situating IMPACT 2. Understanding SDT 3. Application of SDT in Education 4. The Core, Content, Structure, and Evolution of IMPACT 5. Active Learning Strategies 6. Professional Development 7. Assessment. Documenting IMPACT’s Effectiveness 8. Learning Spaces 9. Institutional, Culture, and Organizational Change 10. IMPACT and the COVID-19 Pandemic. Implications for Faculty Development Appendix A. Faculty Learning Community Syllabus Appendix B. IMPACT Service-Level Agreement Appendix C. IMPACT Survey Appendix D. Informed Learning Scale References About the Author Index
About the Author :
Chantal Levesque-Bristol is the Executive Director of Center for Instructional Excellence and professor of Educational Psychology at Purdue University. She received her doctorate in Social Psychology from the University of Ottawa. Her primary areas of interests are teaching and learning, motivation, educational psychology, faculty development, and institutional change. She is the Principal Investigator on a First in the World Grant from the Department of Education. George D. Kuh is Chancellor's Professor of Higher Education Emeritus at Indiana University and adjunct research professor of education policy at the University of Illinois.
Review :
From the Foreword:
“Espousing the value of deep, relevant student learning and effective teaching is one thing. Creating the institutional conditions that encourage and reward the use of promising approaches to scale and sustain such work is quite another. This is what sets Purdue University’s ‘Instruction Matters: Purdue Academic Course Transformation’ (IMPACT) apart from many well-designed faculty development and institutional improvement efforts.
Effective professional development programs do not just happen. Considerable planning and expertise are required to determine what instructional staff ‘need’ (as distinguished from what they may ‘want’) to improve their performance. But poor implementation can derail the best devised plans. The planning, implementation activities, and perceived benefits must be relevant and meaningful to sustain the interest and participation by university faculty who are highly autonomous skilled professionals. In these regards, there is much to learn from IMPACT and this book about how to successfully deliver timely, substantive high quality professional development experiences to a particularly discerning audience.”
George D. Kuh, Chancellor’s Professor Emeritus of Higher Education
Indiana University
“John Thibaut was Kurt Lewin’s last student and talked of walking along the Charles with him. He was my advisor. It’s great to read a book so grounded in Lewin’s maxim that there’s nothing so practical as a good theory.
Chantal Levesque-Bristol and her colleagues at Purdue University West Lafayette employed Self-Determination Theory (SDT) to operationalize environments for faculty and their students characterized by autonomy, competence, and relatedness. They designed, implemented, and assessed this powerful program of professional development entitled 'Instruction Matters: Purdue Academic Course Transformation' (IMPACT) to transform particular courses, which is proving transformational for the campus. Levesque-Bristol and her colleagues have clearly put an important theoretical approach to work in supporting student learning and achievement. Equally powerfully, she reports how she and her colleagues modified the program for Emergency Remote Teaching (ERT) in response to the pandemic, and the success of that program in continuing support to faculty and thus students through very difficult times. This raises interesting long term possibilities for remote faculty development.”
Scott Evenbeck, Founding President
Guttman Community College, and Founding Dean and Professor Emeritus at IUPUI
