Transparency in Faculty Development Collaboration at a Minority-serving Research University
Abstract
The Transparency Framework has guided teachers, students, and faculty developers in designing teaching and learning materials that maximize equitable opportunities for students to succeed in college. This chapter examines how the framework can guide broader institutional practices to connect collaborators’ educational development work, through shared language, resources, and goals, in support of an institution’s strategic plan priorities. It introduces the idea of scaling applications of transparent design to increasingly larger contexts in higher education. A group of over 30 staff, faculty, and students collaborate voluntarily to provide faculty development services at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas (UNLV). These collaborators represent every college and school and more than 10 administrative units, spanning academic affairs and student affairs. The Transparency Framework has helped the group address important challenges ¬ that any large team from across institutional units might face, such as the following: • The need for a shared language that invites easy communication across disciplines and areas of expertise • The codification of shared measures of success for the group, when each individual unit must also meet its own specific performance measures • The adoption of a single, accessible planning tool for combining skills and resources across units in an equitable way and for assessing collective success This chapter describes how the UNLV group applied the purpose-task-criteria Transparency Framework to their work in a variety of ways that enabled a robust faculty development program built by many contributors.