Reshaping teaching and learning: The transformation of ...depts.washington.edu/comgrnd/ccli/papers/Major...Reshaping teaching and learning: The transformation of faculty pedagogical

Reshaping teaching and learning: The transformation of faculty

pedagogical content knowledge

CLAIRE H. MAJOR1 & BETSY PALMER2

1The University of Alabama, 315 Wilson Hall, Box 870302, Tuscaloosa, AL 35487, USA

(E-mail: [email protected]); 2Montana State University

Abstract. A qualitative study of faculty members participating in a campus-wideproblem-based learning initiative examined the process of transforming faculty

pedagogical content knowledge. Researchers found that faculty existing knowledgeand the institutional intervention influenced new knowledge of faculty roles, studentroles, disciplinary structures, and pedagogy. Communicating new knowledge solidi-

fied the transformation.

Keywords: college faculty, faculty knowledge, higher education, instructional change,instructional intervention, organizational change, pedagogical content knowledge,

pedagogical reasoning, problem-based learning, scholarship of teaching.

Introduction

Thirty years ago, the academy casually functioned via the myth thatcollege and university faculty only needed expertise in their disciplines inorder to be good teachers. Beginning in the 1970s this myth was chal-lenged by various sectors both within and without the academy. Sincethat time, the professional development of faculty emphasizing theimprovement of teaching has been on the increase (Gaff and Simpson1999). The creation of campus teaching and learning centers, grantsfrom public and private sources specifically focused on teaching initia-tives, publications dedicated to teaching-related research, and nationalconferences and workshops dedicated to improving teaching are allexamples of the burgeoning interests in the development of teachingcompetence in faculty beyond simply subject matter expertise.

Accompanying this changed climate surrounding faculty teachingability is a change in the research on faculty. In the past, research in thefield of higher education has frequently focused on faculty workloadand has operationalized faculty teaching in terms of number of coursestaught, number of student-hours generated, or number of hours spent

Higher Education (2006) 51: 619–647DOI 10.1007/s10734-004-1391-2

� Springer 2006

on teaching. Other studies have focused on the effectiveness ofparticular teaching strategies or skills. A number of innovations havegiven rise to research that provides a deeper examination of the schol-arship of teaching, including Boyer’s 1990 publication of ScholarshipReconsidered, new directions of research in cognitive psychology andinstructional design, and research on teacher knowledge in secondaryschools. Researchers have now begun to examine college facultymembers’ pedagogical beliefs, decisions, and judgments during teachingin a systematic way (Fernandez-Balboa and Stiehl 1995).

This paper contributes to the growing body of research describing thescholarly work of faculty in their teaching roles. In particular, it focusesupon how faculty knowledge and beliefs about teaching are affected by alarge-scale initiative designed to promote a non-traditional pedagogicalapproach. Specifically, to answer the primary research question of howfaculty knowledge changed as a result of a specific teaching intervention,with a specific focus on what kinds of changes took place, we designedthis qualitative study to explore how a group of faculty across diversedisciplines and departments describe their own development as teachersas the result of participating in a deliberate campus effort to transformteaching. We found that Shulman’s (1986, 1987, 1991) theoretical workon pedagogical content knowledge provided an excellent starting pointfor our exploration, serving as a useful conceptual framework.

Theoretical and research foundations

Pedagogical content knowledge

Shulman’s groundbreaking work (1986, 1987, 1991), which originallyprovided a framework for understanding K-12 teacher knowledge, isalso a useful model for thinking about post-secondary faculty teaching.Shulman postulates that teacher knowledge is comprised of severallayers of knowledge, including both subject knowledge and pedagogicalknowledge. Subject or content knowledge encompasses the theories,principles, and concepts of a particular discipline. In contrast, generalpedagogical knowledge consists of knowledge about teaching itself, suchas principles and strategies of classroom management and organization(Shulman 1987). This general pedagogical knowledge has been the focusof most of the research on teaching (Grossman 1990).

Some scholars are beginning to see a close connection betweensubject matter knowledge and pedagogical knowledge, believing that

CLAIRE H. MAJOR AND BETSY PALMER620

they, along with teacher knowledge, are inextricably linked (Quinlan2001; Shulman 1986, 1987, 1991). In fact, Shulman (1986) writes of a‘second kind of content knowledge’ (p. 9), which he calls ‘pedagogicalcontent knowledge’ suggesting that it ‘goes beyond knowledge of sub-ject matter per se to the dimension of subject matter knowledge forteaching’ (p. 9). Shulman describes pedagogical content knowledge as:

the most regularly taught topics in one’s subject area, the most usefulforms of representation of those ideas, the most powerful analogies,illustrations, examples, explanations, and demonstrations—in aword, the ways of representing and formulating the subject thatmake it comprehensible to others. . .[it] also includes an understand-ing of what makes the learning of specific topics easy or difficult (p. 9).

The process of pedagogical reasoning and action

There are several aspects of pedagogical content knowledge thatShulman (1987) identifies as a model of pedagogical reasoning; in par-ticular, he describes development, application, and communication ofpedagogical content knowledge, which are interrelated concepts.

Developing pedagogical content knowledgeResearchers have described how pedagogical content knowledge devel-ops among novices (Lenze and Dinham 1994, 1999), and research dem-onstrates that experienced teachers know their subject matter differentlythan their less experienced colleagues (Grant 1988; Hashweh 1987;Leinhardt and Smith 1985). Their knowledge is practical, as it hasdeveloped over the years through accumulated ‘wisdom of practice’(Shulman 1987). Research also shows that acquiring pedagogical contentknowledge and developing methods different from what teachers them-selves experienced as students requires learning opportunities for teachersthat are more powerful than simply reading and talking about newpedagogical ideas (Ball and Cohen 1996). Teachers learn throughstudying, by doing and reflecting, by collaboratingwith other teachers, bylooking closely at students and their work, and by sharing what they see.

Applying pedagogical content knowledgeThe idea of pedagogical content knowledge implies that teachers’ con-tent knowledge has been transformed into something different fromwhat it was before, a form that has practical application in teaching,and discussions of faculty knowledge have focused on this transfor-

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mation. Stark (2000), for example, found that faculty members’ disci-plinary beliefs about knowledge in their disciplines were the strongestinfluence on planning at the course and lesson levels. In a reciprocalfashion, teachers’ expectations about how students learn and what theyshould learn directly affect their teaching approaches, even within atightly defined subject matter context (Martin et al. 2000).

Grossman et al. (1989) identified two components that facilitate thetransformation process. First, they describe ‘dimensions of subjectmatter for teaching’. These dimensions are overlapping and partly inte-grated and include ‘content knowledge for teaching’ (which is defined as‘‘‘the stuff ’ of the discipline: factual information, organizing principles,central concepts’’, p. 27), ‘substantive knowledge for teaching’ (whichrefers to Schwab’s 1978 term ‘substantive structures of the discipline’,which are the theoretical frameworks that combine, organize, and givemeaning to knowledge within disciplines), and ‘syntactic knowledge forteaching’ (which refers to ways of working in the discipline and the testsof truth of the knowledge). Second, they describe a component they call‘beliefs about subject matter’. They claim that teacher beliefs about thesubject matter combined with their beliefs about students, schools,learning, and the nature of teaching ‘powerfully affect their teaching’(p. 31). These beliefs legitimate or exclude a range of pedagogical strat-egies that teachers feel are appropriate or inappropriate for teaching theirsubject matter to a given group of students (Grossman et al. 1989).

Communicating pedagogical content knowledgeShulman (1986, 1987) suggests that an essential feature of pedagogicalcontent knowledge is that it is something communicated. McEwan andBull (1991) are aware of and are sympathetic to the idea that knowledge ispedagogic; however, they argue that there can be no content knowledgewithout a pedagogic dimension because the understanding and com-munication of an idea is itself a pedagogic act. They go on to say that ‘‘tounderstand a new idea is not merely to add to the existing stock; it is alsoto grasp hold of its heuristic power – its power to teach. Explanations arenot only of something; they are also always for someone’’ (p. 332).

Context

Our research took place at Private University, in the southeasternregion of the United States. Private University is a comprehensive,religiously affiliated university founded in the mid-1800s and located in


a suburban southern city. For its size, Private has a large number ofcolleges and schools: arts and sciences, business, divinity, education,law, music, nursing, and pharmacy, and offers many degree programsand majors. The university has an enrollment of approximately 4500.Private students must complete a minimum of 128 credits for gradua-tion, and students earn at least 40 credits of that total in junior- andsenior-level courses; they must earn at least 25% at Private. The typicalfull time load is three courses, each of which carries four credits.

Private University has a history of innovation that is germane to thisresearch. At the time of our study, the University had recently under-gone a major curriculum revision aimed at developing a more inter-disciplinary liberal arts curriculum that could help students developcritical thinking and problem-solving skills. In addition, the Universityis known for its efforts in the late 1980s and early 1990s for applyingTotal Quality Management to academic processes, rather than admin-istrative structures. Perhaps in part because of this history of changeand innovation, Private received a major grant to conduct a 3-yearproject, beginning in the 1998/1999 academic year, that involved inte-grating problem-based learning (PBL) across the undergraduatecurriculum.

PBL is an approach to learning in which complex and compellingproblems serve as the catalyst for learning. Students receive a problemand work in teams to try to identify the nature of the problem and theresources they will need to solve the problem. In teams, they work todevelop viable solutions to the problem that they communicate in anauthentic way. PBL is thus an innovative educational approach that isphilosophically different from traditional instruction as it dramaticallyalters the roles of content, faculty, and student (Barrows 1996;Gijselaers 1996).

Because of research that has been conducted in medical schools sincethe origination of the method at McMaster’s Medical School in the late1960s, we have some information about the affect on faculty. In par-ticular, faculty members who are familiar with PBL favor it over othermethods (Albanese and Mitchell 1993; Vernon and Blake 1993). Manyfactors influence the degree of faculty satisfaction; for example,Dahlgren et al. (1998) found that instructor perception of their rolesinfluenced their levels of satisfaction and that faculty who perceivedthemselves as supporters emphasized the responsibilities of the students,spent more time on group process, and were more satisfied with the PBLexperience than their peers who viewed themselves as directors. Inaddition, PBL can improve faculty members’ learning of subject matter


(Turpie and Blumberg 1999). Turpie and Blumberg (1999) found thatfrom their PBL experiences, faculty tutors believed that they hadlearned about their subject from students’ discussion, particularly inareas outside of their fields of expertise. They also developed new waysto learn subject matter from these experiences, such as conductingliterature searches and using the Internet.

The Private project involved implementing this newmethod, PBL, in acourse-by-course approach, ultimately ending with conversion of severalcurricula to PBL. Faculty members who participated in the project for-mally documented their efforts in a culminating course portfolio. Theproject also called for Private to become a clearinghouse of informationon PBL in undergraduate education. The course-design phase of theproject involved several specific steps toward instructional redesign oftraditional courses to include PBL. First, teams of three people rede-signed each course taught. Second, on-going faculty development effortsincluded workshops for training faculty in PBL problem-design, facili-tation skills, group work skills, and assessment and evaluation in a PBLclassroom. Finally, faculty members sought and gained regular feedbackon teaching from students, staff, and external experts.

Methods

We selected a basic qualitative design (Merriam 1998) in order to ex-plore our primary research question: how did faculty pedagogicalcontent knowledge change as a result of this major teaching interven-tion, the PBL initiative? The academic year-end completing the 3-yeargrant period marked the period of our initial interviews. We believedthis time presented an excellent opportunity to talk with faculty whiletheir impressions and perspectives on their pedagogical contentknowledge were still fresh.

The primary data sources were 1:1 interviews with faculty who par-ticipated in the PBL initiative. The interview protocol contained ques-tions about how faculty described their knowledge of teaching beforeand after the PBL initiative, with particular attention on knowledge offaculty roles, students, content, and pedagogies. In addition, we hadaccess to faculty-developed course portfolios that allowed for data tri-angulation. The potential number of participants was 47. We attemptedto contact all 47 and were originally able to schedule interviews with 31participants. We terminated additional sampling attempts when wereached saturation. Faculty rank ranged from assistant to full professor;


faculty came from a variety of disciplines including English, mathe-matics, biology, physics, nursing, business, pharmacy, and education.

The semi-structured interviews with faculty lasted from 45 min to1 h. We sometimes used neutral prompting to clarify explanations andto encourage additional responses. The raw data as recorded weretranscribed verbatim. We coded the data using QSR NUD*IST Vivo(NVivo) software. We analyzed data by standard qualitative techniquesincluding constant comparison (Glaser and Strauss 1967). The experi-ences our participants described in interviews were compared to others,and in this way, we developed tentative themes. We then referredclusters of themes back to the original descriptions to allow for reflex-ivity. Member checks provided additional validation. Data interpreta-tion, through the inductive analysis of transcripts, was based in theexperiences and perspectives of the participants with reference toprevious theory and research.

While both researchers were equally involved in interviewing andanalysis of the data, we approached the data from different perspectives,which added an additional layer of triangulation. The primary author ofthis paper was affiliated with Private during the grant-funded project,although she had left the institution by the time we conducted theinterviews. Thus, the first author provided an insider perspective addingto our ability to understand the context and nuances of the data. Thesecond author of this paper was not affiliated with the institution, andthus provided an outsider perspective that helped to ensure thetrustworthiness of the data analysis.

In the next section of this paper, we present the findings from ourstudy. The themes that we present in this section are those that wereprevalent across the majority of the participants we interviewed, andthese themes occurred with striking consistency and similarity of re-sponses. Therefore, in this paper, we do not present themes thatemerged from a small number or minority of the participants, but ratherfocus on these major themes. We believe that this consistency occurredat least in part because of the ongoing conversation about teaching andPBL that occurred on Private’s campus during the PBL initiative.

Results

What emerged from the data we collected was information about howthese faculty members developed pedagogical content knowledge asthey sought to change their courses to use the PBL pedagogy. Based


upon our interviews with faculty participants, we propose the followinggrounded conceptual model to describe how faculty pedagogical contentknowledge was transformed through implementing PBL during PBLproject (see Figure 1).

Existing pedagogical content knowledge

As a starting point for this transformation, faculty frequently describedthe ‘state’ of their pedagogical content knowledge prior to the trans-formation, a theme we labeled ‘previous knowledge’. Faculty describedmany aspects of their previous knowledge that were instrumental ordetrimental to the eventual transformation of their thinking. Factorsthat indirectly fed into this area were number of years teaching at thecollege level, the number of times the person had taught the particularcourse, and the formal training in teaching received during graduate orprofessional school. Frequently, faculty commented that their decisionsabout how to teach a particular subject were influenced most by howthey had been taught, which was most frequently in a traditional lecturemodel. As one faculty member explained it:

I think we all start out teaching modeling ourselves after our favoriteteachers. And in some cases that was the lecturers who put theoutline on the board so that we knew what was expected on the test,and then for others it was the Socratic method where the teacher

Figure 1. The pedagogical content knowledge change process.


could ask questions in a way that would engage all the class withoutthe questions sounding just rhetorical.

Both indirect and direct factors such as these influenced the startingpoint of faculty knowledge and thus influenced the readiness as well asthe ability and facility to broaden or deepen the knowledge base.

In a similar way, the structure of the discipline, in particular the morehistorical or traditional methods of teaching in the discipline alsoinfluenced faculty’s knowledge and choice of initial teaching methods.Teachers within science disciplines, for example, frequently describedlecture/lab course structures just as teachers within the humanities fre-quently described teaching that incorporated discussions and writing.As one English faculty member explained:

But the traditional way of teaching creative writing is to have studentssimply write poems. They just write them. A lot of time they have beenwritten ahead of time and they bring them to class, copies of them,and distribute them to students and I get one and then we come intoclass the next morning and we sit there and just talk about their poem.

Faculty indicated strong links between the subject matter and themethod for teaching, often suggesting that a particular discipline,whether their own or another’s, should be taught in a particular way.These notions of disciplinary structure also influenced a faculty mem-ber’s readiness and willingness to broaden their pedagogical knowledgebases. In a more nuanced way, some faculty based their teachingmethods on how they, themselves, had learned the material. A physicsprofessor told us about how he arrived at a decision about methods:

But the real question came up was that I went through that training,and I guess I learned and in that classmy number one goal,my numberone guidance for how to teach that class was being able to reflect uponhow I learned it myself. That was the number one guidance.

This is somewhat different from the traditional notion of ‘teachersteaching as they were taught’; the Private faculty also suggest thatteachers teach as they had learned.

The faculty members’ perceptions of the learning context also drovetheir early knowledge as well as their instructional choices. Facultymembers expressed an understanding of the time in class, the class size,and the student population, or audience. Faculty, then, designed coursesto be taught at that particular institution, in that particular credit hourstructure, for their particular student populations. For example, a fac-


ulty member would specifically design a course as a general educationrequirement, as an upper division major requirement, or as an electiveand would design it as a course for first year undergraduates, students inthe major, or for pre-professional students. As one faculty memberexplained his course:

And the problem with any introductory, general education course ismost students see it as their hurdle to get on to what they reallywanted to do in the first place when they came to college. You know,to get their business major, be pre-med, or whatever. So we saidwe’re looking for ways to make this, this work that they do, moremeaningful. ’Cause we can tell them, you know, communicationskills are so vital and we can quote all the employers who say this isone of the most important skills anyone can bring to the job, but itjust kind of goes over the head of the freshmen. So there has to beintrinsic value in the course for them. And that’s hard to do.

Thus, faculty member understanding about course level, placement, andtarget participant group influenced their thinking and ultimately theirdecisions about what kinds and what degrees of change to effect incourses.

Finally, a subgroup of our faculty sample were familiar, throughprevious faculty development workshops, conference presentations, orscholarly reading, with other formal pedagogical theories that hadinfluenced their knowledge bases. These faculty were, in many ways,several steps ahead of their colleagues even before the formal PBLinitiative began. These faculty referenced their earlier explorations intothe conscious evaluation of pedagogy as a sort of stepping stone into thePBL transformation. They had struggled with issues surroundingteaching in-depth, and the PBL experience allowed them to continuethis process:

So, 10 years ago, a little more than 10 years ago I guess now, 1990, Iwent through an intensive summer with the national writing project.That’s when I got into the process writing and that sort of thing.That did a lot to change my paradigm about teaching and learning,and it really made me focus more on process, and it made me focusmore on teacher as facilitator and mini-lessons and that whole idea.Um, so, then that whole change of philosophy was really, I guess,what made my whole teaching so compatible with problem-basedlearning.


The level of expertise these faculty members had greatly influenced theircomfort and facility with learning about and experimenting with newpedagogical techniques.

Institutional intervention

Our faculty sample commented on several aspects of the supportivestructures at Private that particularly affected the process of peda-gogical transformation. We labeled this theme ‘institutional inter-vention’. The actual pedagogical transformation for this group offaculty happened within the structured period of time demarcated bythe Pew grant. Within this period, the institution promoted thetransformation to a PBL pedagogy in multiple ways that facultymembers identified as important: summer salary for course develop-ment, release time from a course, guest speakers, faculty developmentworkshops, monetary support for classroom resources, and supportfor travel to observe at other institutions. These structures wereimportant to faculty members as they developed their pedagogicalcontent knowledge.

For some faculty members, the pursuit of knowledge about PBL gavethem confidence in their abilities to try something new in the classroom.As one faculty member explained:

Well, I did a lot of studying before I designed my first course andtaught my first course. I really did a lot of studying aboutproblem-based learning, had been to a lot of conferences, work-shops, reading, whatever, you know, so I knew what I was doing.

For others, workshops that were models of good practice conducted byteaching experts provided additional assurance that the faculty were onthe right track. As one faculty member put it:

The biggest person that helped me with that was Barbara Duch fromDelaware. Because she teaches in physics, and when she came andpresented to us, what she did is really what I – not exactly, but a lotlike what I was doing, and she was one of the supposedly peer PBLpeople at the beginning.

As they developed their pedagogical content knowledge bases, trainingand knowledge in this particular pedagogy whether through indepen-dent research or through watching demonstrations provided faculty


members with reassurance and affirmation necessary to enable them tomove forward in their efforts.

This supportive environment also granted faculty one of the mostprecious resources – time – giving them the ability to focus on issues ofteaching in ways that they had not done previously. One faculty membersaid:

But, it does, in the phrase that somebody’s used about being areflective practitioner, certainly PBL has done that. It has givenme, first of all when you’ve got release time to do these things, itgave me the luxury of time to think about my class and thinkabout ways of doing it differently, that I had these ideassimmering around in the background. I had some good ideas,but no time to do it. I mean, I have all these good ideas but yeah,this class is in half an hour, I’ve got to go. And PBL, the releasetime especially, gave me the luxury of developing some neat stufffor the class.

For others, though, the feeling of institutional support encouragedthem. One faculty member told us that

A positive to me was that I got a lot of support from the university. Igot to hear their grads speak on the topic, I had resources available,I was allowed to go to workshops, I was allowed to go toconferences. I got a tremendous amount of backup and support,which I found valuable, very good. And I think when I went to theMontreal conference, those were tremendous experiences. It gave meconfidence and I think the other thing is I was trusted by the wholesystem that I could do it.

The institutional support also gave faculty members the opportunitiesto try things that might not work, without fear of retribution. As theyexperimented with PBL methods, they learned in classrooms whatworked and what did not. As one faculty member who is also anadministrator and had a large role in the project told us,

And the second time I taught this course it went much better for meand for the students. And, that was true of our PBL work in general.The first year we had some notable flops and word on campus was‘PBL is going to hurt you’. And we had some pretty hostile studentreaction. I think a lot of that, after the second year, died down. And,I don’t think it was just the students, you know, became, you know,resigned to being beaten up in class (laughs). I think we just got


better at it, and I think any time the faculty move to something new,they’re going to make mistakes.

Strong institutional support and encouragement were necessary toencourage faculty members to try new things, to learn from what theywere doing, and to move forward in their work.

For others still, the opportunity to work so closely with disciplinaryand interdisciplinary colleagues that the project provided was importantto the change in their knowledge bases. With so many faculty membersparticipating in the project, there was a natural peer group available todiscuss the process of transformation. In addition, the grant structureactually called for faculty members to work on teams to redesign theircourse. These promoted collaboration and exchange of ideas andinformation about teaching. As one faculty member commented:

It also, I think, works around the loneliness of teaching. We do talkwith our colleagues somewhat about what we do, but there are fewplaces more private than that classroom, that interaction that youhave with your students. And, so I think it’s nice to be able to gettogether with other faculty and say ‘So, how did you do this, andhow did it work out for you?’ And it sort of makes it more of acollaborative enterprise, and I think that’s a real healthy thing.

This kind of collaborative effort gave faculty confidence in what theywere doing and allowed for faculty to teach each other as theyprogressed together through a common experience.

New knowledge

Faculty prior knowledge coupled with the intentional institutionalintervention led faculty members to a new place in their pedagogicalcontent knowledge. We labeled this category ‘new knowledge’. Wefound that the items we coded as ‘new knowledge’ very much parallelother literature on components of pedagogical content knowledge; inparticular, these components comprise knowledge about the purposes ofteaching, the subject matter, students, instructional methods, and thecurriculum (Fernandez-Balboa and Stiehl 1995; Grossman 1990;Shulman, 1987). Details about the dimensions of these components areof particular importance to this study. Some of these components weremore influential than others for a particular context and in some casesthese factors are interdependent.


Faculty rolesOne of the primary changes evident in our faculty interviews was theirheightened awareness of themselves as teachers. They were consciousthat their roles in the classroom had shifted, and many of them talkedabout relinquishing more authoritative positions to assume positions as‘facilitators’ or ‘guides’:

And what I can tell you is that that course went from probably 75 to80% lecture, we had some lab work, I wouldn’t call it problems butwe did some labs, and then it completely flipped. So now it’s 75 to80% problem-based learning. And obviously the biggest change thatoccurred there is that you remove yourself from the position of beingthe sole deliverer of information and being the lecturer who stands infront and dispenses, and you really have to give up and sacrifice yourcontrol over the class in that way. So not walking in prepared todeliver a lecture, I shouldn’t say not being prepared, but notexpecting to deliver it and having the pieces of the problem that youwant them to work on is a very different mindset each time you go inthe classroom.

Going through the institutional intervention and ultimately using PBLin their courses encouraged faculty to learn about different roles thatmight be assumed in different pedagogical contexts.

StudentsThe new roles and responsibilities of faculty members quite obviouslycaused a shift in the roles and responsibilities of students, and facultymembers described how they tried to let students assume someresponsibility for their learning. It also caused faculty to become more‘student-centered’. As one language professor explained:

Because it’s more of it’s like you can teach a class and you can kind offactor out the students, I mean you can, and at least with PBL youcan’t factor out the students, you can’t, if you want it to be successful,anyway, you can’t. And I think a class, like a regular class can besuccessful or you can think that it’s successful without factoring in thestudents or factoring in their perspective or their opinion.

Their experiences with the project and with PBL gave faculty a verydifferent perspective on student learning; within the new pedagogicalcontext, student learning became a more important part of the peda-gogical design for faculty members (Major and Palmer 2003).


As they began to focus more on the students, they began to see morepotential. One faculty member in nursing described how the PBL ap-proach to teaching allowed her to see positive aspects of her studentsthat she did not see using traditional pedagogical approaches:

It gave them some autonomy that I don’t know that I had with theold format where you just gave them a test and so much relied onthat, that you never got a chance to see creativity or graphic skills orcomputer skills or that kind of thing. . .

She went on to describe how the undergraduate students in her courseswere now routinely presenting research projects at regional and nationalconferences, an important skill in her field. This faculty member hadbegun to think of her students as professionals.

In addition, as faculty completed their initial experiences with PBL,they also eloquently described the new knowledge they had gainedabout and from their students.

There’s nothing hard to understand about marketing, so theyunderstand the subject at one level already because they’ve been atarget of marketing communications for their entire lives. And so Ireally expect to learn from them and how they view what’shappening to them in a marketing environment, how they wouldact as a marketing manager, you know, how do they perceive aparticular situation. It’s relevant to me as an instructor but also as aresearcher to see how they think. So, I tend to expect that I will learnas much from them as they would learn from me.

The project and their new teaching methods changed faculty views ofstudents; they became much more aware of students as people and asco-learners in the new pedagogical context.

Disciplinary knowledgeAs they engaged in the process of transforming their courses, manyfaculty members began to perceive their disciplines in new ways. As anEnglish professor told us:

I think that was a major shift for me as a teacher and as a studentmyself, because I began to, I don’t know how I did it, but I began torealize something about my discipline that I never realized beforeand that was the complexity of it. I created the problem not knowingwhat it was going to do, and then the first time I did it with studentsI started seeing all these questions coming up that even I had neverthought before.


Their experiences changed faculty members’ thinking about their dis-ciplines, encouraging them to begin to see subtleties within fields; in thisway, the faculty members became rejuvenated.

The process of intentionally designing courses added to the depth oftheir knowledge in their content area and frequently changed their ideasabout how to teach the content of their discipline. The change in per-spective frequently occurred in two ways, as a breaking down of arti-ficial boundaries within the discipline and in breaking down barriersacross disciplinary areas. An education faculty member describes how,in redesigning her course, she began to work across artificial structureswithin her discipline:

But for instance, if you do a thing like public policy, normally youcan take a textbook and you work it through from one corner to theother. Here the public policy component may come back in the uniton employer’s duties and employees’ rights. It will come back inyour [unit on] adolescence, so it kind of is woven through the entirecourse. So it’s not that demarcated. The watertight compartmentsseem to break down, but that’s good because that’s how real life is.

The faculty member’s comment also highlights another importantoutcome of the course redesign process; rather than rely on textbookauthors or previous instructors for the organizational structure of aparticular area of content, she as the teacher in PBL would create herown structure of the important content in the course, a process whichfrequently led to an extended evaluation of ‘‘what is really important formy students to learn?’’

A similar process occurred for many instructors who began to breakdown the artificial barriers across disciplines:

That’s why I’m using it so much. I have really started to learn thedepth of my own discipline in a way that I had not understood. I hadunderstood it as a student, but I have started to see my discipline inmultifaceted ways that I haven’t seen it before, as connected to otherdisciplines in ways that I haven’t seen before, because my education,probably like yours, was so discipline oriented. I studied literatureand now I’m able to see what I do as a writer and what I do as ateacher and student of literature in just multiple ways. In seeingliterature intersecting with science in my CP class, seeing literatureintersecting with philosophy, so PBL, this is for the most selfish ofreasons, I think, it has helped me be a better student and I have got tobecome a student again. That’s why I’m excited about it.


Again, the faculty members were rejuvenated by a return to the role oflearner that learning a new way of teaching required as they began to seenew and different aspects of their own disciplines, namely throughrecognizing connections with other disciplines.

PedagogyAs participants in a structured teaching initiative, faculty for a brieftime became students of this particular pedagogical approach. As theybegan to own this learning, they moved out of the novice role and beganto learn at a deep, rather than surface level, about pedagogy:

But what I’ve learned about teaching and what’s really evolving inme is I have a much greater awareness of the pedagogicalliterature, the teaching and learning strategy literature, andassessment, which was really new to me when I became the schoolfacilitator. To think about how to assess whether or not my scoreswere reliable. I do demand (inaudible) but I’m still kind of amazedwhat all of these faculty members have no idea of. You know theytalk about assessment and they use student tests. It’s not assessingtheir course.

Their experiences had changed faculty members’ understanding ofpedagogy; it became something worthy of study and something to beclosely linked with the discipline and with student learning, as well asthe assessment of that learning. The faculty members also noted a dis-tinct change in the way that they think about their teaching, indicatingthat because of their participation in the project, it became importantfor them to examine their teaching and their outcomes in a moreintentional way. As one faculty member put it:

You know, I really don’t think it would matter if it were PBL orservice learning or focus on collaborative teaching or collaborativework in the classroom. It makes the faculty go through and reassess,‘‘What are my goals in this course? What do I hope to accomplishwith students? How do I know that I’m actually accomplishingthat?’’ And PBL certainly did that for us, because we had somerequirements on us based on a grant and the program to do someserious assessment of outcomes. So you just become more inten-tional about that part of what you’re doing. It’s easy enough topoint to a success story here and there and say, ‘‘See, so I’m doing agreat job.’’ And I think when you’re involved in this kind of work, it


makes you look at the big picture. Maybe you’d be more honest thanyou were ready for. You have to look at some of the negatives thatcome out of these things as well.

Experiences with the project and with their own efforts in applying PBLin the classroom made faculty members become more keenly aware thatthere are consequences for the pedagogical decisions that they make andthat these consequences may be examined in an intentional way that canbe used for long-term improvement.

The faculty also described learning specific instructional skills, andwhile some of these skills were generic teaching skills, some werespecific to PBL. Classroom management skills, for example, becameimportant:

The challenges for me have been very positive ones. They’ve beenthings I’ve needed to work on in my teaching already, like managingthe classroom better, keeping up with details, keeping up withassignments and making sure that the assignments are very orderedand purposeful and detailed. So that’s been the main thing that I haveneeded to get out of PBL and that it has served me well in doing.

As another faculty member explained, facilitation skills became veryimportant:

So by dealing with these problems and the fact that they are oftentimes very open-ended, no right or wrong, you begin to recognizeall the different outcomes and possible decisions and things thatcan go on within that class. So you may have a group that presentsto you some solution you’ve not even considered, and it makes yourevisit the area and give thought. And then students dig up lots ofinformation and they come back with things that can be right orwrong and so it certainly provides you an opportunity to helpthem, steer them, in that direction, so I think that’s been ateachable thing for me to see how they’re finding stuff and wherethey’re getting it and why they’re getting it and what’s going on intheir brains. And also, it’s a way of me being in touch with eachstudent a little more directly by circulating through, so that I knowwhere they’re stuck, when they’re stuck, why they’re stuck, andwhat I can do about it.

Other skills such as problem design, group management skills, andquestioning techniques also became important.


Expression of knowledge

Faculty members shared with us several ways in which they wereexpressing their new knowledge, so we labeled this theme ‘expression ofknowledge’, and this application took several forms signaling anentrenchment of new knowledge. We found several sub themes relatedto how faculty express their knowledge.

Expression of knowledge in the classroomFirst and foremost, as faculty took their new knowledge into theclassroom, students became consumers of their new methods andtechniques. At the point we interviewed these faculty, they hademerged from the formal structure of the grant and were moving intothe next phase of pedagogical transformation. At this point, they hadtried PBL and were making decisions about whether or not to con-tinue with this new pedagogy. Most of our respondents indicated thatthey would continue with PBL, although many suggested that theywould modify their methods in particular ways, using the parts of themethod that worked for them and modifying or abandoning thosethings that were not working. These discussions highlight the com-plexity of learning that took place for these faculty. It is at this pointin the process that faculty truly ‘own’ their new pedagogical contentknowledge. During the transformation process, faculty were expectedto ‘perform’ PBL at an ‘acceptable’ level. They had been schooled inthe theory and practice of PBL, they were paid for this performance,and they were required to document how they performed in variousways. Once the formal grant period ended, however, the institutionalpressure to perform PBL was released and faculty could return totheir usual status of ‘academic freedom’.

For those faculty who had previous knowledge of other non-traditional pedagogies, the newfound pedagogical knowledgesurrounding PBL was frequently translated into a blended or fusedpedagogy. These faculty took the best of both pedagogies and created ahybrid method suited to their particular discipline, students, and con-text. One English professor who developed a hybrid of PBL and servicelearning told us even more about the fusion of theories in the classroom.

A lot of composition theory stresses collaborative learning andcooperative arrangements and group work and peer review and allthese kinds of things. And all of that is sort of bound up in the PBLlanguage as well. So it would be hard for me to say, you know, how


the PBL is a, you know, completely separate strand from the rest ofwhat we’re doing.

Several fused pedagogies emerged including PBL and team learning,PBL and service learning, PBL and lecturing, PBL and technology, etc.While PBL provided the basic theoretical frame, the other methods wereused as ancillaries to help accomplish specific instructional goals.

Informal expression through conversations with colleaguesFaculty noted that they could communicate with one another aroundissues of teaching in a more complex and productive manner, and whileunusual at first, conversations about teaching and learning becameregular fare. As one pharmacy faculty member explained:

We laughed when we first started this about going to lunch at theHoliday and talking about assessment. It’s like ‘‘Can you believe weare sitting here talking about assessment’’. This is not something thathad ever happened before.

These faculty also possessed a shared language with which to commu-nicate about pedagogical ideas. Faculty members’ language andvocabularies became very sophisticated. They began to use terms like‘learning cycle’, ‘assessment’, ‘reflective practitioner’, ‘teachable mo-ment’, ‘collaborative learning’, and ‘pedagogical shift’; their vocabu-laries included terms found in the field of teaching and learning inhigher education. Some of the faculty, of course, knew these termsbefore the project, but this vocabulary became a regularly used languageshared by faculty members through their participation in the initiative.

Expressing knowledge through teaching other teachersFaculty members also expressed their knowledge in formal ways to theircolleagues, sometimes becoming comfortable enough with it to assumeroles as consultants and teaching others about or demonstrating whatthey had learned:

. . . and one of the things I’m actually pretty excited about is I’mgoing to be doing a workshop in June that’s for practicingpharmacists that’s on teaching skills to people who want to owntheir own community pharmacy. I’m going to do the HR portion ofthat, but I’m going to teach it in PBL, and it’s like a one-day thing. Idon’t know if they’ve ever had a seminar like that, but I’m kind ofexcited to see how some of these folks will respond to that.


While some of the faculty, like the one cited above, did consulting workoff campus, many other faculty members took a teaching role for otherfaculty members on campus, serving as hosts of peer teaching circles,workshop leaders, and facilitators for the project. Many of the faculty,then, had owned the new knowledge in a way that allowed for theirexpression of it through teaching others to use the PBL method. Thus,the knowledge became formalized for them as they shared it with others.

Expressing teaching as scholarly inquiryPrior to the PBL project, very few of our faculty participants had donepapers or presentations on their teaching and therefore the expression oftheir pedagogical knowledge had been primarily in the classroom andfor the most part not ‘public’. However, upon completion of the projectfaculty seemed to be expressing a new kind of understanding aboutteaching; that is, they began to see teaching as something that had aknowledge base, that could be discussed with peers, that could be sub-jected to peer review, and that could be disseminated in the same waysthat more traditional research could. As one faculty member told us:

You know, my focus in research before this had mainly been onclinical problems and clinical interventions and I really hadn’t givena lot of consideration to, you know [teaching], we just went in andtalked. I think overall I’ve done more thinking about what makes agood teacher, a teaching/learning experience. And, I have, I guess,again, put more emphasis on reading about teaching. And then, ofcourse, we’re sharing what we’re doing,. . .

In more formal ways, these faculty members communicated their newknowledge to their peers, such as workshops, conference presentations,journal articles, course portfolios, and new research projects. Thus, wesaw that faculty have begun to think of pedagogy and teaching in theirfields as scholarship. As one faculty member put it:

. . .I was trying to explain to the faculty the kind of research that Iexpected to come out of this program, cause I did say ‘‘I don’t wantthis to be just about teaching. I think there ought to be this nice giveand take between what we do in the classroom, what we do in theway of our research and scholarship’’. And particularly forcommunication arts, a lot of faculty are English degrees and theirscholarship probably has been in the area of criticism andinterpretation, which doesn’t always relate real directly to a courselike communication arts. And, so I wanted them to think about their


work with the students as something that had a research angle to it. Ithought if I’m going to say that, then I need to show that. So I tooka student paper from this course, before we did the problem-basedlearning and set up the assignment to doing that, and then I tookone from a student who had written a paper with the problem-basedlearning assignment and compared those two to say ‘‘Whathappened differently in these two assignments?’’, which were, infact, the same assignment structured in different ways – one withoutproblem-based learning, one with problem-based learning. But as Ianalyzed those two, I think they began to see the differences thatwere going on in them and how problem-based learning has a realeffect on the outcome, in this case the students’ piece of writing.

. . .It was certainly helpful to me because I sort of had an audiencenow that needed to hear this. So I think these kinds of pedagogicalshifts provide these opportunities for us to talk about what we dowith other people. And, in my case, hopefully, becomes a model forthem to continue doing this sort of research.

Other faculty members had a more practical reason for the dissemina-tion of their work. As a geography professor explained:

So, yeah, and for myself, I made the decision that if I’m going to dothis, I’ve got to make it count, so I’ve written a couple of things. I’vedone presentations at conferences, I’ve done some consulting and allof that kind of stuff, and I figure if I’m going to be spending time onthis rather than doing something else, I’ve got to have something toshow for it. So yeah, professionally it has made a difference that way.

They have chosen to view teaching as worthy of scholarly attention,with all faculty developing course portfolios, with almost every facultymember presenting about his or her work at disciplinary or teachingconferences, and with many publishing about their work in discipline-specific or teaching-related, peer-reviewed journals. The formalexpression in writing of pedagogical knowledge (especially in the port-folio projects) helped faculty to solidify their knowledge as theyorganized and articulated it.

Discussion

Our findings have close connections with research and theory in the fieldof teaching and learning in higher education. These faculty members’


pedagogical content knowledge serves as a unifying element for severalthemes and issues found in this literature.

Knowledge about how to teach in a particular discipline

Prior research on pedagogical content knowledge shows that it hasseveral components. Grossman suggests these components includeknowledge and beliefs about the purposes of teaching, knowledge ofstudents’ conceptions and misconceptions of a topic, curricularknowledge of kinds of materials available, instructional strategies, orrepresentations for teaching particular topics (Grossman 1990). Simi-larly, Fernandez-Balboa and Stiehl (1995) identified generic componentsof pedagogical content knowledge that include knowledge about thesubject matter, knowledge about students, knowledge about instruc-tional strategies, knowledge about teaching context, and knowledgeabout teaching purposes. The results of our qualitative analysis concurwith these earlier studies. Our faculty demonstrated pedagogical contentknowledge through their descriptions of their roles, their students’ roles,their disciplines, their pedagogical techniques, and assessment. Ourfindings extend these previous findings by suggesting that pedagogicalcontent knowledge can be transformed and that the transformations areto some extent based upon the level of expertise with which the facultymember begins the process.

Instructional and institutional interventions

Recent research shows that some instructional interventions may beeffective in helping faculty improve teaching (Annis 1989; Eble andMcKeachie 1985; Rorschach and Whitney 1986; Weimer and Lenze1991). Among other things, instructional consultations and workshopshave been shown to be very effective, while grants, colleagues helpingcolleagues, and resource materials need to have additional researchconducted to determine effectiveness (Lenze 1996). Faculty who par-ticipated in the initiative had released time and summer stipends, andthey also participated in workshops, grants, collegial collaborations,resource materials, and consultations. Faculty rarely discussed theseaspects of the intervention in isolation; rather, they commented on thecombined, complementary impacts of various institutional strategies.They did not address which interventions they believed were the most


effective; rather, they focused on the opportunities that the interventionscreated, such as time to think about and do reading and research ontheir teaching, to have opportunities to talk with peers in their own andother disciplines, and to get outside advice. We can suggest based on thevoices of our instructors, that the process was effective and that at leastin part what made the process so effective was the blending of severalinterventions to create an atmosphere of collegiality, support, andscholarly respect for teaching.

Thus, our findings suggest that a widespread, long-term institutionalintervention can serve as a catalyst for taking existing pedagogicalcontent knowledge, and in a cross-campus intervention, help facultybroaden and deepen it. Institutional support can give faculty membersencouragement, security, and confidence to strike out into new territoryin their teaching and learning so that they may have the wisdom ofpractice, opportunities to exchange ideas and information with col-leagues, and role models for teaching that Shulman suggests is soimportant for deepening that content knowledge.

Focus on learning rather than teaching

Barr and Tagg (1995) suggested that the paradigm in higher education isshifting from a focus on teaching to a focus on learning and intimated achange in the view of teaching as an intellectual activity. They suggestthat a focus on learning means a change in faculty roles, in whichteachers are not only transmitters of information but also are designersof learning who work to develop students’ competencies and who en-gage in the challenging and complex tasks of empowering studentlearning. In this way, faculty are the designers of learning environments;‘they study and apply best methods for producing learning and studentsuccess’ (p. 24). In our faculty’s discussion of enabling student learning,we can see that they have begun to see teaching for the primary purposeof enabling student learning, which according to Barr and Tagg ‘is asmall change that changes everything’ (p. 25). This marks a fundamentalchange in their knowledge bases; they have changed perceptions of theirdisciplines, their students, themselves as teachers, and teaching itself.

Expressions of teaching as scholarship

Boyer (1990) describes the full range of functions that faculty performas scholarship, stating that intellectual work required for teaching is on


par with the intellectual work required for research. In this work, Boyercoined the term ‘Scholarship of Teaching’, of which he stated:

The work of the professor becomes consequential only as it isunderstood by others. . .When defined as scholarship. . .teachingboth educates and entices future scholars. Indeed, as Aristotle said,‘Teaching is the highest form of understanding’.

Teaching necessarily integrates the scholarship of discovery (traditionalresearch), integration (conducting research at the place of convergingfields), and application (application of research to solving practicalproblems) (Boyer 1990). Edgerton et al. (1991) stated that teaching, likeother scholarly activities, relies on a base of scholarly expertise thatshould be identified, made public, and evaluated. They further argue thatfaculty are the oneswhomust be responsible formonitoring their teachingas scholarship and can do so through a variety of forms including courseportfolios. Our findings showed that our faculty had begun to think oftheir teaching as scholarship. In particular, they had gained a vocabularyto discuss teaching with their colleagues and with a national audience;they all had begun to present and to publish about their work in teaching.This articulation of knowledge signaled ownership of it.

Participants were overwhelmingly positive in their descriptions ofhow the project helped them develop their knowledge of and thinkingabout teaching. We believe that they must have faced challenges alongthe way, or difficulties with implementation or outcomes, but perhapsbecause the focus of this project was on their thinking and developmentof teaching, these difficulties did not surface in the interviews. What didemerge is that participants believed that the PBL initiative helped themgrow and develop their knowledge as teachers.

Conclusion

Across the country, institutions have funded centers for teachingimprovement and other faculty development efforts in an effort tochange how post-secondary faculty teach their students (Gaff andSimpson 1999). We are only now beginning to understand how and whysome of these efforts are successful while others fall short. The PBLproject provides one model of a successful effort to challenge andtransform a group of faculty. Our findings suggest that this effort cre-ated a culture that supported faculty efforts to learn about pedagogy,providing a detailed example of the type of powerful experience that


Ball and Cohen (1996) suggest that teachers must undergo if they are totransform their pedagogical skills beyond the recycling of theinstructional techniques they experienced as students.

Through this culture, the PBL initiative transformed what facultyknow and do as instructors. Faculty implementation of PBL, as anon-traditional instructional approach, encouraged a critical examina-tion of the teaching and learning process. In particular, our facultyparticipants reexamined their understanding of their roles as theinstructor, of their students’ role as learners, of the structures of theirdisciplines, and of the pedagogical strategies they used for the initiative.Through this process, they attempted to align these various beliefs into aworkable and exciting learning experience that would maximallyachieve a variety of learning goals. As our participants reflected on theirexperiences, the combined effect of time, resources, support for risk-taking, and collegial discussion presented an unusual gateway for thedeep transformation of their pedagogical knowledge and practice.

Our examination of the experiences of faculty at Private Universityprovides insight into pedagogical content knowledge transformationacross multiple disciplines, but given the specific context of this study,the results also raise some interesting questions. In particular, theinstitutional intervention was exclusively focused on implementing PBL.Other higher education institutions have implemented similar inter-ventions focusing on distinctive pedagogical approaches and it would beuseful to compare the experiences of faculty who were initiating a dif-ferent form of teaching innovation. Would their pedagogical transfor-mations follow a similar course? In a similar vein, many institutionssupport pedagogical innovations in various forms simultaneously and itwould be reasonable to ask, for example, whether faculty discussions ofpedagogy are less helpful in situations where they are more genericrather than specific to a single approach. Similarly, because of thepre-existing institutional culture at Private which historically valuedteaching innovation, future research in this area might also focus ondifferent institutional contexts, such as at research universities where theinstitutional culture may not be so clearly supportive of teachinginnovation, to examine the unique challenges that faculty mightencounter under less favorable climates. Finally, as suggested above,this study did not attempt to differentiate between various aspects of theinstitutional intervention to determine if particular aspects of thiscontext, release time versus collegial discussion for example, were moreimpotent strategies for supporting deep level changes in faculty peda-gogical knowledge. Since few institutions can afford the full complement


of strategies implemented by Private University, future research similarto the study by Lenze (1996) might help discern the effectiveness ofsingle or combined faculty development strategies in instigating truepedagogical transformation.

Our results suggest that pedagogical content knowledge is a complexconcept that includes knowledge of learners, knowledge of subjectmatter, previous experiences, ideas about pedagogical practice, andcontextual cues in a dynamic iterative process and that can be supportedand encouraged through institutional intervention. Like any trulymeaningful learning, faculty learning of pedagogical content knowledgebegins by connecting to what the learner already knows, produces atransformation, and then continues to be modified as the learnerencounters additional related experiences, and like any truly meaningfullearning, it must be supported and encouraged. The kind of pedagogicallearning that these faculty members engaged in requires on-going effortand attention. As one pharmacy instructor suggests, this type of deeperlearning means that you must continually stray away from thecomfortable and known and into the unknown:

That came from, I guess the guts to do that came from one of mygraduate advisors, John O’Neal, the Temple School of Medicine,who suggested that I not be like a man looking for his keys at night,but only staying under the lamppost. The odds are the keys aren’tthere anyway. Wander into the darkness. But it’s a vast darkness.I’m still trying. I’m still looking for ways and things to do in theclassroom that will work, that will be good for students.

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Address for correspondence: Claire H. Major, The University of Alabama, 315 WilsonHall, Box 870302, Tuscaloosa, AL 35487, USA

Phone: 1 205 348 1152; Fax: 1 205 348 2161; E-mail: [email protected].


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