Barriers to Faculty Pedagogical Change: Lack of Training, Time, Incentives, and…Tensions with Professional Identity?

By Sara Brownell, Kimberly Tanner. CBE - Life Sciences Education, 2012

720 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Recent calls for reform, such as Vision and Change: A Call to Action, have described a vision to transform undergraduate biology education and have noted the need for faculty to promote this change toward a more iterative and evidence-based approach to teaching (American Association for the Advancement of Science [AAAS], 2011). A key challenge is convincing many faculty—not just a handful of faculty scattered across the country but the majority of life sciences faculty in every institution—to change the way they teach. Few would disagree that this is an ambitious goal. Change is difficult in any setting, but changing academic teaching appears to be especially tricky. Calls for change imply that the pedagogical approaches our own professors and mentors modeled and taught us might not be the best way to engage large numbers of diverse populations of undergraduates in our discipline. This effort potentially also involves telling faculty that what they have been doing for the past 5, 10, or even 30 yr may not the most effective approach, especially for today’s students. Widespread change in undergraduate biology teaching—or in any of the sciences for that matter—has been documented to be difficult (Hender-

Subfields: Education, Information Systems and Management

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/721f23f56778d2694e65fb628db06e02f8fdab0e

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Education

Citations in the corpus

It's not about seat time: Blending, flipping, and efficiency in active learning classrooms (2014, background): “For the purposes of this study, though, we recognized that not all instructors have the support to introduce robust active learning activities that can be adequately monitored in an extremely large course, so we limited the instructor's involvement to recorded lectures (Brownell & Tanner, 2012).”
Course-Based Undergraduate Research Experiences Can Make Scientific Research More Inclusive (2014, background): “However, the reward structure for principal investigators often does not mirror these larger institutional goals (Boyer, 1990; Wilson, 2010; Brownell and Tanner, 2012).”
Undergraduate STEM Achievement and Retention (2016, background): “Unfortunately, many STEM faculty are resistant to changing their teaching approaches (Brownell & Tanner, 2012).”
Adopting an active learning approach to teaching in a research-intensive higher education context transformed staff teaching attitudes and behaviours (2016, background): “A significant body of research is focused on barriers and obstacles to instructional transformations in such disciplines as biology and physics (Brownell & Tanner, 2012; Henderson & Dancy, 2007).”