Using Learning Principle in Faculty Development Workshops

There is an urgent need for those in national leadership positions in biology, and in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics at large, to incorporate strategies that truly promote learning into their professional development programs. Not only because the audiences will learn/remember more, but also because transforming what happens in undergraduate classrooms requires faculty assumptions to be challenged regularly and new models for behavior to be presented. I recently attended a workshop run by a national organization with a long history of bringing innovation to undergraduate education. All of the plenary sessions were PowerPoint presentations of more than 50-min duration that largely repeated information from our homework assignments. I was surprised and disappointed. Yes, I found some gems in the lectures. Yes, the workshop format meant that my institutional team spent a great deal of time working on an action plan. Yes, I networked with colleagues and came away with many ideas. But I left feeling as though a great opportunity had been missed. The chance to model ways that align what is known about how people learn with pedagogical methods was completely overlooked. The plenary speakers did not engage our misconceptions or begin with our existing knowledge; we were not given a chance to apply or reflect; we were not asked to interact with our peers. We could have been given minilectures or quick readings and then asked to apply the content to problems at our home institutions. We could have been the ones drawing conclusions from the evidence or building the arguments needed to persuade others. We were not even asked