Improving Teaching at the Institution Level with Lindsay Masland

Back in September 2023, Beth McMurtrie published an article in the Chronicle of Higher Education titled "Americans Value Good Teaching. Do Colleges?" The piece explores some of the ways that the policies and practices at colleges and universities don't live up to the promises those institutions make concerning their teaching missions. While the article is mostly bad news for those who care about teaching and learning, McMurtrie also lays out a kind of roadmap for teaching improvement, or at least a useful set of questions:

• How can we better prepare and support faculty for what is, in most cases, their primary professional responsibility?
• How can we improve the labor conditions within higher ed so that instructors have the time and resources to teach well?
• How can we improve the evaluation of teaching in ways that promote good teaching?

These were some of the questions that were explored at the 2023 National Higher Education Teaching Conference (NHETC) sponsored by ACUE, a conference that McMurtrie and I both attended and, I think, was one of the reasons she wrote that article.

This past summer I had the chance to present at the 2024 NHETC with a session titled "Faculty Development as Change Agent: Impacts and Ingredients." I argued that faculty development initiatives, like those offered by centers for teaching and learning, can help us answer some of those big questions, particularly when the initiative goes beyond just working with individual instructors. And I explored with session attendees some of the ingredients that are often present in faculty development initiatives that can effect these changes.

While I was preparing for my NHETC session, I went looking for stories of faculty development initiatives that had outsized impacts. On the Intentional Teaching podcast's first episode of the year, I talked with Beate Brunow of Penn State and Shawn Simonson of Boise State about frameworks developed on their campuses for assessing teaching and thus promoting good teaching. Those efforts are still in early days, however, and I wanted to know if there were similar efforts at other institutions further along.

That led me to Lindsay Masland, interim executive director of the Center for Excellence in Teaching and Learning for Student Success at Appalachian State University. Not only did Lindsay help shape the new Teaching Quality Framework at App State, but she also launched a grant program that has helped multiple departments do some really important work aligning their programs and policies and procedures with the framework. Lindsay was kind enough to talk to me about the efforts at App State and to go "on tape" so I could share those stories with my podcast audience.

Lindsay shared our interview on LinkedIn, and I appreciate what she wrote about it:

​You can listen to my conversation with Lindsay Masland on the Intentional Teaching podcast website, or just search for "Intentional Teaching" in your podcast app.

Thanks for reading!

If you found this newsletter useful, please forward it to a colleague who might like it! That's one of the best ways you can support the work I'm doing here at Intentional Teaching.

Or consider supporting Intentional Teaching through Patreon. For just $3 US per month, you can help defray production costs for the podcast and newsletter and you get access to Patreon-only interviews and bonus clips.