Patrick B. O’Sullivan, PhD
Director, Center for Teaching, Learning & Technology
Illinois State University
November 2008
One of the first decisions I made when I became the director of CTLT was to ban the word “training” from our vocabulary. “We don’t do training!” I declared. I’m guessing that some of my staff were a bit puzzled at this. Some (perhaps many) were thinking, “What’s wrong with ‘training’”? After all, one of CTLT’s precursor units offered software training for years. Besides, it’s a common term for programs to improve employee skills.
However, as ISU’s primary teaching support unit, our dominant focus is not generic employees but a particular type of professional unique to higher education: faculty. Faculty are atypical from most organizational employees in many ways, including the fact that they come to CTLT’s offerings highly educated in their discipline and often with considerable teaching experience. To enhance their teaching effectiveness, they need to learn more than a specific skill. They need a deeper understanding of students’ learning processes and a teacher’s role in it, so that they can make informed decisions about teaching strategies.
In my view, “training” works fine for imparting procedural knowledge, such as operating a piece of equipment or using software. But it’s woefully inadequate for supporting faculty in the subtleties of refining their teaching effectiveness. Teaching is not a set of skills and good teaching cannot be achieved by merely following procedures. At its best, it’s a scholarship-informed art that requires creativity, adaptability, and judgment applied to a dynamic process of a complex social interaction among diverse individuals.
So if CTLT doesn’t do “training,” what do we do? We “empower.” Yes, I know that sounds like something from the Dictionary of Annoying Corporate Jargon, but it fits. When I say that CTLT operates on an “empowerment model,” I mean that our offerings are designed to share research-derived knowledge that can inform faculty’s judgments about more effective ways to teach their subject matter. We are not here to tell you how to teach, but we are here to help you to determine how you can teach better. You are the subject matter expert and you know your students and your syllabus – and thus you are the one individual who can (and should) make the critical decisions about the design and implementation of your course.
We support you by distilling the scholarship about the most effective approaches for maximizing student learning, and then sharing it with you in ways that you can actually put into practice. If you understand principles of effective instruction, then you can apply those principles appropriately to your course, your students, and your subject consistent with your personality and available resources. Then we can help you to find out how well it worked and support you as you refine it for even better results next time around.
I hope to see you soon at one of our training sessions empowerment opportunities!
