tion on each cohort is being conducted to see how many have put the techniques to use in their classes in the year following their attendance.

Most critically to the future of the program, one participant said: “I’m going to start to recommending this workshop to all new faculty.” We will only succeed in making our desired cultural changes if we can draw in a critical mass of new faculty at these institutions. If a second-year professor tells a new hire or a former graduate student colleague heading off to the professoriate, “This is worth your time, you should go,” we will have our most effective recruitment device.

Creating a Cohort for Change

Real change takes time. If our workshops continue to be successful, we will see change coming as new faculty advance and share their new perspective on teaching with their colleagues. As the CS New Faculty Teaching Workshop continues, our CS faculty will be adept at facing challenges in teaching by having adopted evidence-based teaching practices and by having a scholarly attitude about teaching.

 

References

1. Freeman, S. et al. Active learning increases student performance in science, engineering, and mathematics. In Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 111 23 (2014), 8410–8415.

2. Henderson, C. Promoting instructional change in new faculty: An evaluation of the Physics and Astronomy new faculty workshop. American Journal of Physics

76, 2 (2008), 179–187.

3. Leslie, S.-J. et al. Expectations of brilliance underlie gender distributions across academic disciplines.

Science 347, 6219 (2015), 262–265.

4. Porter, L. and Simon, B. Retaining nearly one-third more majors with a trio of instructional best practices in CS1. In Proceedings of the 44th ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education, ACM

2013, 165–170.

5. Simon, B. et al. How we teach impacts student learning: Peer instruction vs. lecture in CS0. In

Proceedings of the 44th ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education, ACM 2013, 41–46.

Leo Porter ( [e-mail]) is an Assistant Teaching Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of California, San Diego.

Cynthia Lee ( [e-mail]) is a Lecturer in the Computer Science Department at Stanford University.

Beth Simon ( [e-mail]) is an Associate Teaching Professor in Education Studies at the University of California, San Diego.

Mark Guzdial ( [e-mail]) is a Professor in the School of Interactive Computing at Georgia Institute of Technology.

The CS New Faculty Teaching Workshop is supported through a grant from the National Science Foundation DUE-1432830.

Copyright held by authors.

Workshop Content and Focus

Emphasize best practices underrepresented groups. New research faculty want, and need, to hear about the importance of evidence-based teaching practices from respected research faculty, not just from a bunch of education researchers (us). We were delighted that a well-recognized researcher and leader, Ed Lazowska, was willing to give the keynote address to kick off the workshop. Lazowska is the Bill and Melinda Gates Chair in Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Washington. At each workshop, his keynote perfectly articulated his own deep passion for teaching and the case for caring about teaching, striving to improve teaching through practice and from the education literature, and for balancing teaching with other faculty responsibilities.

The workshop included sessions
interleaving standard know-how and
practical starting materials with more
advanced methods and evidence from
the research literature. And as work-
shop organizers, we practice what we
preach—not just lecturing but involv-
ing participants with a variety of en-
gagement techniques. One particularly
lively activity involved faculty attempt-
ing to rank various pieces of career ad-
vice participants might hear at the wa-
ter cooler as “definitely a good idea,”
“sometimes a good idea,” or “not a
good idea.”
Topics discussed included student-
centered teaching, syllabus develop-
ment, academic integrity prevention
and response, TA management, essen-
tial tools for teaching at scale, creat-
ing an inclusive classroom, scientific-
minded teaching, peer instruction,
and other forms of active learning, ex-
am-writing strategies, creating videos
and other online content, and how to
balance teaching and research respon-
sibilities. Most critically for addressing
the challenges of today’s computing
classrooms, the pedagogies taught are
able to scale to large classrooms and
the tips for creating an inclusive class-
room can broaden participation.

Early Results

We have been very pleased with the
success of the two annual CS New Fac-
ulty Teaching Workshops we have run
so far: A pilot year with eight attendees,
scaled up to 22 attendees in the second
year. A critical metric of success was
the increasing number of applications
for our second workshop. This tells us
that department chairs at our targeted
research-focused institutions are not
only getting the word out to their new
faculty, but are communicating the
value of the CS New Faculty Workshop
to junior faculty members.
Additionally, survey highlights from
participants in the 2016 workshop in-
dicate:
˲89% found the workshop to be
“very valuable” (with the remaining
11% indicating it was minimally or
moderately valuable);
˲ The most highly rated session was
on “Research on Active Learning” with
95% indicating it was moderately or
very valuable; and
˲ 100% said the workshop techniques
would help improve their teaching.
The most commonly mentioned
take-away from the workshop was
that participants planned to imple-
ment some form of active learning
in the classroom. We were pleasantly
surprised that in such a short time so
many participants came to express the
importance of working toward engag-
ing students with more active learning
in their classrooms. Consider that par-
ticipants had just eight or more years
of higher education where they likely
never saw active learning modeled for
them in any of their classes. After less
than two days of exposure, they were
convinced of the importance, and felt
they were given enough concrete guid-
ance and examples that they could
start using active learning techniques
in their classrooms. Follow-up evalua-
A critical metric
of success was
the increasing
number of
applications
for our second
workshop.