Instructors need solid pre-service and ongoing training, professional development and mentoring opportunities to help teach their classes at any institution.
Over the years, I’ve taught at six institutions of higher learning:
- three large, public 4-year universities
- one medium-sized public 4-year university
- one private 4-year liberal arts college
- one community college
Pre-service training varied from a very basic, one-day orientation to an in-depth and thorough three-week orientation. Orientation activities included small and large group presentations about institutional & departmental services and policies, collaborative lesson planning, shadowing of experienced instructors, recorded micro-teaching lessons with accompanying reflection essays and personalized feedback by directors.
As educators, we are now living in an educational world that offers a wide variety of instructional modalities beyond that of the traditional brick-and-mortar classroom. Are our pre-service and ongoing training programs preparing educators enough for the teaching methodologies that change according to each variable on the technology-intensive instructional spectrum?
