Frameworks for faculty development

Faculty development is pivotal to improvement in engineering education. Faculty perceptions of these efforts as well as their attitudes, beliefs, and assumptions about learning and teaching, in addition to their experience and operational confidence regarding implementation of innovative approaches all impact translation of innovative approaches to actual classroom practice. Improvement efforts can be derailed due to faculty mental models that result in misunderstanding and/or misapplication of new content and pedagogy. Therefore, more understanding about the nature of faculty development activities is a necessary co-requisite for efforts to improve engineering education. The MESSAGE framework applies concepts from learning theory approaches to faculty development and offers structural factors to consider in developing learning activities for faculty members. The goal of this paper is to provide a framework for non-traditional approaches to faculty development as well as traditional approaches such as workshops and individual consultations and to explore these approaches within the MESSAGE framework