Workshops Work… Sometimes

Earlier this week, Matt “Dean Dad” Reed blogged about faculty development workshops, arguing that most workshops don’t work. Since we’re in the middle of some serious strategic planning here at the CFT (with a goal of developing a five-year plan), I have been thinking about workshops lately, so I commented on Reed’s post. I thought I would expand on that comment here on the blog, as a pleasant alternative to yet another post about MOOCs.

[Aside: Hey folks, read the comments, please? And leave some valuable ones? I know there are a lot of trolls out there turning comments sections into wastelands, but hasn’t almost a century of fantasy literature taught us that we need to fight the trolls?]

Matt Reed’s argument wasn’t that workshops aren’t effective for those who attend them; rather, it was that very few people attend workshops. Why the non-attendance?

The problem is that workshops tend to presume a context of awareness in which the usefulness of what’s being offered is already clear. And most of the time, it isn’t.

This is a very important point, and one we realized at the CFT years ago. Who is going to attend, say, a hands-on workshop about teaching with clickers? For the most part, only those faculty and grad students who have already heard about teaching with clickers and are interested in experimenting with clickers in their own classrooms. Sure, there might be one or two people in the room who had never heard of clickers, read the workshop description in the campus calendar, and thought they would check it out. And if there’s free food, that one grad student from the School of Education who always shows up when there’s free food will be there. But for the most part, a workshop on clickers will appeal to those already aware of and interested in clickers.

How does a teaching center help more faculty and grad students become aware of and interested in particular ideas in teaching? Workshops won’t do the trick, but there’s another genre of come-one-come-all events that can raise awareness. In addition to teaching workshops, we host a number of conversations on teaching throughout the year. These tend to feature panels of faculty members sharing their teaching experiences along with either Q&A with the panelists or more roundtable-style discussion among participants.

Matt Reed suggested in his post an alternative to workshops:

Instead of a single channel or meeting hoping to attract as many people as possible to a relatively passive experience, the way to go is to engage some early adopters, and then encourage viral transmission. Dave sees what the program can do, and he tells Steve and Jen. Steve and Jen get on board, and each tell a few friends of their own.

I’ll point out that our workshops are never “relatively passive experiences.” We practice what we preach: active learning. But Reed’s point about relying on faculty to interest other faculty is what powers our conversations on teaching. It’s the faculty panel that draws the crowd, particularly when senior faculty are on the panel. Certainly, some of the people who come to one of our conversations on teaching are already interested in the given topic. (We had a well-attended conversation last year on leading effective discussions, something that many faculty are already aware of and interested in.) But one of the main goals of our conversations is to generate more interest among faculty and graduate students in various ideas in teaching.

So what about teaching workshops? Should we offer come-one-come-all workshops or shift to the more “viral” approach that Matt Reed suggests? These are questions about which we’ve been thinking during strategic planning in recent weeks. D. Christopher Brooks commented on Reed’s post with some compelling data arguing that workshops can indeed be beneficial to those who attend them. But how many people attend workshops? Let’s look at some CFT data.

Vanderbilt Center for Teaching Workshop Attendance 2010-13

What have we learned over the last few years regarding workshops?

Hands-on workshops focusing on the basics (lecturing, discussion leading) are often popular, as are workshops that have a clear connection to career advancement (writing teaching statements for the faculty job market, preparing for tenure review).
Controversy can draw a crowd. Our sessions on banning laptops in the classroom and MOOCs were very well attended.
Grad students make up a good portion of our workshop participants, but with the new teaching certificate program in place, many of those potential workshop participants are having their needs met through the program. Thus, we’ll offer fewer teaching workshops in the future.
The most important lesson learned? Facilitating workshops at the request of a school or department is often the best way to reach faculty. About a year ago, my senior staff started meeting individually with department chairs, asking about teaching challenges and opportunities in those departments. Many of these meetings have led to CFT-led workshops hosted at the department level. I didn’t include these “liaison workshops” in the table above, but we’ve been doing more and more of them over the last three semesters. Attendance at these events is often on-par with our come-one-come-all events. Instead of drawing 15 or 20 people from across the university to a conversation on teaching, we’ll have 15 or 20 people from a single department participate in a workshop. That’s significant reach.

As we look ahead to the next academic year, we’re planning to offer a couple of teaching workshops on topics not addressed in our teaching certificate program (like putting together a sample syllabus for the job market). We’re also aiming for about three workshops and three conversations centered on a common theme for the year. We’ve never tried a theme year, so this is an experiment for us. But I think we have a theme that’s both broadly interesting and confronts some important challenges in teaching and learning at Vanderbilt. More on that as we roll out the publicity later this summer! And, of course, we’ll be doing more liaison workshops around campus.

What are your experiences with teaching workshops? How do you go about raising awareness of and interest in teaching ideas on your campus? And how do you support those faculty and grad students who are interested and want to learn more?

Image: “Empty,” by Shaylor, Flickr (CC)

8 Responses to "Workshops Work… Sometimes"

Peter Newbury (@polarisdotca) says:

June 21, 2013 at 11:40 am

At the Center for Teaching Development at UC San Diego, we’ve had the same issues around low attendance at our weekly workshop series, with 8-10 people participating each week. A couple of interesting things about those people, though. (1) there are a few who attend every workshop so we develop a nice relationship with them (2) postdocs are the most frequent attendees. Postdocs live in a strange no-man’s land: they don’t get the support offered to grad students or to faculty, so we’re glad to provide them with teaching and learning help.

One of our biggest challenges is advertising. It’s hard to reach grad students, postdocs and faculty without looking like yet more spam. We reach out to people who’ve attended a previous workshop but, of course, that doesn’t reach new audiences. Hmm, unless we remind them to bring their friends, Steve and Jen.

One last thing that boosted our attendance, I think. We advertise on our website and ask people to RVSP with through a web form. This term, we had a single form with all the weekly workshops listed and participants selected all the workshops they’d like to attend, rather than submitting an RSVP every week for the next week’s workshop. Because people were signing up for a workshop that might not occur until much later, it was extra important to email reminders a few days before the workshop.

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1. Derek Bruff says:
  
  June 21, 2013 at 12:19 pm
  
  You make a great point about postdocs, Peter. Here at Vanderbilt, most postdocs are treated more like grad students than faculty, so we open all our grad student programs and offerings to postdocs. There are some exceptions, however. Over in math, postdocs usually stick around for 2-3 years and are treated as non-tenure-track faculty, so we invite them to our faculty offerings.
  
  I sometimes get tired of typing “graduate students and postdocs” and so I use “grad students” as a shorthand, but postdocs are indeed a large and often underserved population on campus.
  
  We used to present people with a list of all our offerings for a semester and let them sign up for as many as they wanted. That invariably led to a few people signing up for everything–and then only attending one event. So we now hide that view of our event registration system!
  
  A couple of years ago, we added a very important single column to the sign-in sheet we pass around at the beginning of our workshops. The column asks participants if they’d like to be added to our mailing list, to which we send our monthly e-newsletter. We add dozens of people to our mailing list each year thanks to this one small addition to our sign-in sheets! And since they’ve opted in, I don’t think they see the e-newsletter as spam so much.
  
  Reply
Instructional Tech Workshops: Find a Champion, Tell a Story | Eduhacker says:

June 24, 2013 at 9:16 am

[…] 6/24/2013] For more on this topic, please read “Workshops Work…Sometimes” on Derek Bruff’s blog, Agile […]

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Tim says:

June 24, 2013 at 9:19 am

Hi Derek,

What is the space like where you lead your workshops? Is it configured to do hands-on, active learning with technology?

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1. Derek Bruff says:
  
  June 24, 2013 at 9:07 pm
  
  Great question, Tim. We hold most of our workshops in our own space, which you can see in this slideshow. We have lots of technology in the space, but very little of it is digital. It’s full of moveable furniture and whiteboards, which makes it a flexible environment to support active learning.
  
  For workshops focused on educational technology, we’ll often book a particular computer lab in the science center, which has a nice side room for refreshments.
  
  Reply
Andy Saltarelli says:

June 24, 2013 at 12:37 pm

Hi Derek,

I’m glad to hear that department-specific workshops have been successful for you all. We’ve been doing something similar with offering departments a “menu” of “roadshow” workshops. We’re already scheduled to do a few in the fall so hopefully we see the same level of participation as you have in the CFT.

I suspect the real gold in the process is having the individual meetings with key stakeholders and getting personal information on needs/readiness; something we’re still struggling to do on a regular basis.

-Andy

Reply
1. Derek Bruff says:
  
  June 24, 2013 at 9:08 pm
  
  Thanks for the comment, Andy. We’ve long had a menu of workshops listed on our website that departments can request… but no one took us up on that until we started these chairs meetings. This year, we’ll continue the relationships we started with departments last year, and add a few new departments to the mix through more chairs meetings.
  
  Reply
Josh Eyler says:

June 25, 2013 at 12:34 pm

This is a terrific post, Derek, and illustrates one of the continuing dilemmas of faculty development work. We have also had some success with programs geared toward individual departments, and I expect that this is a trend that might continue. As you say, the reach of these events is quite large, and–ultimately–this may make them more effective in the long run.

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