Faculty Development Program

Special Programs

Responding to the ongoing needs of clinician and research faculty, the OFA’s Faculty Development Program has developed new programs that aim to customize faculty development and training needs for departments and their faculty. 

If your department or program is interested in a program customized to the needs of your faculty, please contact faculty.development@umassmed.edu in the Office of Faculty Affairs.  Site logistics for faculty development at affiliated UMass sites is the responsibility of the requesting site.  A computer lab is required for all BLS Vista 4 sessions.

Customized Department and Program Faculty Development & Training

I.     The Scholarship of Teaching and Learning Program:
        Achieving Scholarship in Your Teaching and Educator Roles

This program is intended for faculty who are doing scholarly work related to their teaching and educator roles, and on the path toward developing a scholarly project.

The aim of this program is to support the development of a scholarship of teaching and learning that fosters significant, long-lasting learning for all students; enhances the practice and profession of teaching; and brings to faculty members' work as teachers the recognition and reward afforded to other forms of scholarly work.

Educational scholarship refers to any material, product or resource originally developed to fulfill a specific educational purpose that has been successfully peer-reviewed and is subsequently made public through appropriate dissemination for use by others.  The SoTL is the perspective that faculty can approach their teaching as a form of scholarly work.  According to Hutching and Shulman (1999), the scholarship of teaching and learning is more than simply teaching well, it leads to particular kinds of outcomes.

By the end of this program, faculty will be able to:

• Use concepts related to teaching and educational scholarship to reflect on and enhance faculty performance and achievement as teachers and medical educators.
• Identify appropriate venues for publishing permanent products of  teaching and educational activities
• Use criteria for assessing educational scholarship to develop and refine the processes and products of faculty teaching and educational activities
• Assess and prepare educational material for publication submission and peer review

 II.   Preparing Your Teaching and Academic Portfolio for Promotion

This customized program will explain what a teaching/academic portfolio is and how it is used in the promotion process. It will bring faculty through the steps of creating a portfolio, including what documents and materials should be included, and will share practical approaches to help faculty capture the complexities of their work. The session will also help participants work through the challenges faced by clinical and basic science faculty members in effectively documenting their teaching in light of the varying settings and conditions under which they teach.

III.  Teaching with Technology

1.  BLS Vista 4 is the University of Massachusetts' Learning Management System. Instructional Technology offers an introductory course in using BLS Vista 4 as part of an academic program. This is a hands-on session during which participants will have the opportunity to interact with the tool as a course instructor and designer, making use of the system's powerful suite of course development and management tools.

2.  Wimba Live Classroom is a real-time meeting environment that allows instructors to personalize online courses with live, online class sessions, office hours, guest lectures, webcasts, and meetings. Instructional Technology assists faculty and staff wishing to utilize Live Classroom in their instruction or virtual meeting efforts, combining state-of-the-art interactive technologies such as voice, video, application sharing, polling, and whiteboard, with traditional best practices of instruction.

3.  Respondus 3.5 is a powerful tool for creating and managing exams that can be printed to paper or published directly to your BLS Vista 4 course. Respondus LockDown Browser is a custom browser that locks down the testing environment within BLS Vista 4. Instructional Technology offers customized deskside support to all UMass users of both of these products.

Innovations in Teaching & Technology

Launched in AY 06-07, this series of brown bag colloquiums provides opportunities for users of BLC Vista 4 and emerging academic technologies to take teaching with technology to a higher level. It is a natural extension of the BLC Vista 4 Best Practices sessions, tool trainings, and deskside training initiatives provided throughout previous academic years. Topics include timely issues pertinent to teaching, course design, and online course administration (e.g., with BLC Vista 4), as well as suggested topics of interest from participants based on their work. 

Proposed topics for this year’s community of learners will include virtual microscopy; FERPA; Apreso lecture capture system; advanced use of the audience response system; BLC Vista 4; personalizing PDFs for student learning; and using Wimba Live Classroom to personalize online sessions; Adobe Presenter & Adobe Meeting.  The series will continue its format of what’s new in teaching with technology, faculty showcase, tips & tricks and Q & A.

Innovations brown bags take place from 12:30-1:30 on the last Wednesday of each month in S2-321 -- drop in as you have time and pickup and/or share an idea.  

Faculty Development Advisory Council

This Council was established by the Director of Faculty Development Programs to work in an advisory capacity to continue to develop and enhance programs that will be of value to faculty across the three schools.  During the past several years, the Director has worked in collaboration with a variety of departments, offices and programs across the schools to sponsor and co-sponsor a range of professional development activities.  The establishment of this Council is a step toward further formalizing those relationships.  The Council has a core of eight members, representing the SOM, GSBS, GSN, undergraduate and graduate medical education, Instructional Technology, the Library, and the Memorial campus, as follows:

General Programmatic Themes

Teaching -  Workshops related to teaching cover a variety of topics and include those that will assist faculty in developing their medical simulation enhanced teaching; clinical and classroom teaching; presentation skills; scholarship in their educator roles; and their academic portfolio for promotion.    

Using Technology to Support Learning - A variety of workshops on ways to effectively use technology to support teaching and learning are offered.   These sessions will be of particular interest to faculty seeking to enhance technology skills valuable for teaching, research and publication. 

Research - Research workshops for faculty are designed to provide opportunities to develop or advance the skills and knowledge needed to become a successful researcher.  Workshops cover topics that include research design, data collection and analysis; funding sources; writing a research proposal; and community-based research.    

Leadership - Developing skills for leadership is an important aspect of career development. The Office provides workshops intended to help faculty develop skills to enhance their leadership competencies. Topics covered include working in teams, negotiation, communication styles and conflict resolution.