Improving Teaching at the Institution Level with Lindsay Masland

This is a story about institutional change. The product of that change—a new framework for assessing teaching quality now in use at Appalachian State University—is important, but the process that led to that change is just as important because it's by analyzing change processes that academic leaders can affect change on their campuses. 

In this episode, I talk with Lindsay Masland, interim executive director at the teaching center at Appalachian State University in North Carolina, who not only helped shape the new teaching quality framework at App State but 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. 

Episode Resources

·       The Teaching Quality Framework at Appalachian State University, https://cetlss.appstate.edu/teaching-learning/teaching-quality-framework-0

·       Lindsay Masland on LinkedIn, https://www.linkedin.com/in/lindsay-masland-25b04511/ 

·       “Assessing Teaching with Beate Brunow and Shawn Simonson,” Intentional Teaching episode 27, https://intentionalteaching.buzzsprout.com/2069949/episodes/14189134-assessing-teaching-with-beate-brunow-and-shawn-simonson 

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Chapters

• 2:04 Meet the Educator
• 4:38 Teaching Quality Framework
• 12:14 Use of the Framework
• 17:40 TQF Grants and Their Impact
• 24:58 Teaching Centers as Change Agents
• 37:36 Outro

Transcript

Derek Bruff (00:05):
Welcome to Intentional Teaching, a podcast aimed at educators to help them develop foundational teaching skills and explore new ideas in teaching. I'm your host, Derek Bruff. I hope this podcast helps you be more intentional in how you teach and in how you develop as a teacher over time. This past summer, I gave a conference talk titled Faculty Development as Change Agent Impacts and Ingredients. While preparing for that Talk, I went looking for stories of centers for teaching and learning whose work had an impact beyond individual instructors on their campuses. I wanted at least one story that pointed the way to better methods for assessing and evaluating college and university teaching 10 year promotion and reappointment processes are, in my view, the rudder that steers the ship of higher education. So if we can improve the evaluation of teaching within those processes, we can do a lot to improve the teaching mission of institutions.

(00:59):
And I was looking for teaching centers that had played a role in that kind of change on their campuses. I reached out to Lindsay Masland, interim executive Director at the Teaching Center at Appalachian State University in North Carolina. She had mentioned at a conference last year something about a new teaching quality framework at App State. It turns out that Lindsay not only helped shape the new teaching quality framework there, but also launched a grant program at the Teaching Center that has helped multiple departments do some really important work aligning their programs or policies or procedures with the new framework. This was just the kind of story about faculty development as a change agent. I was looking for my talk, and I'm grateful for Lindsay for going on tape so I could share this story here on the podcast. This is a story about institutional change. The product of that change, the teaching quality framework that App State now uses is important, but just as important as the process that led to that change. That's where other institutions and academic leaders and faculty can learn how to affect change on their campuses by looking at the story of change on Lindsey's campus.

(02:06):
Lindsey, thank you so much for being on Intentional Teaching. I'm very excited to have you on the podcast. Yeah, thanks for being here.

Lindsay Masland (02:12):
Yeah, I'm looking forward to our conversation.

Derek Bruff (02:15):
Me too. So I'll start with my usual opening question. Can you tell us about a time when you realized you wanted to be an educator?

Lindsay Masland (02:25):
Well, it's funny because I think the evidence that I should be an educator was present well before I realized that that was true. As a kid, I was always thinking it was going to be a pediatrician, and when a precocious little girl says that, they get a lot of warm feedback. So in my head, I was like, okay, clearly that's the right answer to that question. And took that all the way into my first couple years of, but when I was 10 though, one summer I to use my time, decided to create a summer camp for the kids in my neighborhood. We had a neighborhood where all the kids ran around together and stuff, and usually a 10-year-old is going to summer camp. But I was like, no, no, I've done that. Now I'm ready to create a summer camp. And so I found in our basement these books about child development and different skills that kids should master at different ages.

(03:34):
So I built my summer camp. I was 10 around that, right? So I'm, I'm essentially doing curriculum mapping and developmentally appropriate practices. So clearly upon reflection, this was always going to be the path. It just took me a while to realize it. And I think I first really realized it when I was getting a master's degree in experimental psychology, and one of my mentors said, Hey, will you come guest lecture on your research topic or thesis topic, which was student motivation? And so I said, sure. And I never done that before. And just the feedback I got from her and from the students' afterward, they were all like, you've been doing this for years, haven't you? Or do you do this somewhere else? And I was like, no, this is the first time. And so that was the first time that I really thought, oh, okay, maybe this is actually what I am supposed to be doing with myself.

Derek Bruff (04:29):
That's a great story. Wow. As a 10-year-old, I know old you were doing human development psych. Yeah, pretty much. That's great. Well, let's get into that. Let's talk about the teaching quality framework at Appalachian State. What is the teaching quality framework and how did that come to be?

Lindsay Masland (04:49):
So the Teaching quality framework is something we try to use to structure all of our conversations about quality teaching at App State. And I say try because it's not like everybody is a hundred percent. Yes, we love the Teaching Quality framework, but I think we are really using it to guide both conversations and actual decisions, and in some places moving into policy space. But where it came from. So back in 2019, faculty Senate actually convened a task force, not about teaching per se, but about online instruction. Pre pandemic Upstate was not a huge contributor in the online space. Now, some programs were fully online. Some programs had courses that were offered in multiple modalities, but there was no concentrated effort to really put us on the online map. And so as more and more people were teaching classes, there was this, I think, common possibly unfounded concern that online teaching is going to be worse than what we were of course at the time, just calling face-to-face. And so they wanted a task force to dig into it and figure out, okay, what are the required components of an effective online learning experience so that we would know how to do things like evaluate online instruction, which felt to many people like apples and oranges compared to face-to-face seated classroom learning.

Derek Bruff (06:20):
And this was 2019?

Lindsay Masland (06:21):
Yeah, 2019. So before the pandemic and kind of early in 2019 I think. So that task force was convened. I wasn't a part of it. I wasn't, interestingly, I hadn't ever taught online, even though I expressed interest in doing it, because there was that kind of bias of why would we do that unless we had to. It's going to be a less good experience,

(06:44):
Even though I said, I volunteer and tribute, let me try it. And they're like, no, no. I was like, okay. Obviously a couple years later, our hand was forced on that. So this task force is happening. I wasn't even a part of it, but there were definitely some faculty developer types who are on it. But it also had representation from many of our different colleges on campus, like faculty folks at different levels of roles, chairs, all of that. So they worked together and created some recommendations that they then presented to faculty Senate. And one of the recommendations was that this conversation needs to happen for all of teaching, not just online teaching, because how can we come up with a list of required quality components and one modality yet we've never done that in the other modality. We're just making assumptions. So that was really exciting.

Derek Bruff (07:42):
That was

Lindsay Masland (07:43):
A recommendation,

Derek Bruff (07:45):
Not a guarantee that they would come to that conclusion.

Lindsay Masland (07:48):
No, and I mean there were CTL type people on the committee that helped push that along. And it is true that I was hearing about what was going on. And in fact, when I heard about the committee, my knee-jerk reaction was, why don't we have this for all of teaching? So people definitely were having those reactions, myself included, about, so I don't know if that stoked the fire a little bit for them to get that reaction to move in the direction of that recommendation, or if it would've happened anyways. I don't know. But it did happen. They said, we need to do this for all of teaching. So then another task force was created kind of maybe towards the end of 2019, and this one was slightly bigger and definitely had representation from every college. So the deans were asked to provide names of people to should be on this task force, and then also the CTL folks were involved.

(08:49):
Now, I was at this point in my career where I was still more faculty, but I was doing some contract type work for our CTL. So I kind of had one foot in both, but then even the people who had both feet fully in faculty development were on the committee and who had both feet fully in faculty on the committee. And so yeah, we just started, or task force is probably the right name. So we just started meeting. And since I've always had an interest in, of course, teaching effectiveness and evaluation of teaching effectiveness because I knew this is where this is, conversation's going to go, even though that wasn't the initial ask, it could be used for that. And so I knew that many schools had already done this work. And so one way that our process might be different than some other folks, when they say, just go to the literature, I was so many people before us have already gone to the literature. So why don't we actually go look at what other

(09:50):
People

(09:50):
Have come up with in terms of their frameworks?

(09:54):
And so we look closely at, so Boulder's framework is really overlapped strongly with arts, that was probably the one that we were inspired by the most, but just lots of other institutions that were around our size, this kind of state school, comprehensive master's, comprehensive level university, we have 21,000 students, 1400 instructors. So just trying to find people who are around that and looking at other things that had been just published that weren't institution specific. So we started there and realized that most of the frameworks have really similar, if not structures, like big buckets to put stuff in. And so we ended up deciding, okay, what we're going to do once we spend a lot of time reading, what we're going to do is come up with a teaching quality statement, which just essentially defines the major areas that we want to talk about when we talk about quality teaching, which I think is an important but subtle point that our framework doesn't say this is quality teaching and this isn't.

(11:00):
It's more framing the conversation to be had and what are the pieces of teaching and learning that need to be discussed. And if evaluation comes into it, then that as well. So we just came up with a statement that's in all its words, it's several paragraphs long that has three areas of quality teaching, which are not surprisingly course design, the learning environment, and then a proactive and kind of reactive as well, a reflective approach to your teaching. I know other people have four things, or we just went with three because some of the things that end up being the third component in a teaching quality framework, we thought were a part of either design the learning environment, because ours takes the stance that anything you're doing is evidence informed anyways. And so evidence informed would be things that are student centered or ethical and inclusive, those kinds of teaching.

Derek Bruff (12:09):
Yeah. So how is the framework being used now at the institution?

Lindsay Masland (12:20):
So we decided not to get a vote from faculty Senate on it. And I know that is different than what a lot of other people did, but we just knew because what ended up, the document that came out of this task force is pretty comprehensive and not only had a teaching quality statement of defining teaching quality, we also created this thing called a growth guide.

Derek Bruff (12:47):
I am very interested in that. I don't know that other institutions have something quite like that. I can't recall seeing something like that.

Lindsay Masland (12:57):
Well, so they do, but they call it a rubric. And so we had a lot of discussions about is that actually what we want the product of this committee to be, that we came together and made decisions about what is and isn't good enough in teaching, and would that actually help us in being change agents and being able to continue using this in helpful ways. And so in our task force, we went back and forth on that and decided, we don't want the word rubric anywhere

(13:27):
Because

(13:27):
People are going to be less likely to buy into it. Then you're priming evaluation. So we talked for a long time and came up with growth guide because we felt like we needed something to operationalize some of the constructs in our definitions, because if you're not in the disciplines of teaching and learning, you might not know what counts as a certain type of evidence-based teaching decision.

(13:57):
And so it was really like we need a way to give a bunch of sample behaviors and to think about, some of these are really complex and we wouldn't recommend a brand new first year teacher to try to do some of this stuff. So how can we share that information? So we realized we can keep the same structure of a rubric, make it really clear, not supposed to be rating people, but you could just see how you could grow from novice to other levels. And we debated the labels of novice or whatever. Should it be amateur? Should it be expert? And we still don't love them, but we were just trying to make it clear that it's growth and that you're not expected to be in the right most column when you

Derek Bruff (14:42):
Start. And this is formatted as a grid. There's kind of different categories of elements of teaching, and then within each category, there's a kind of scaffold of sorts in the columns. Exactly. Yeah. Okay.

Lindsay Masland (14:54):
Yeah. So we had that tool and we were just envisioning faculty senate receiving that and interpreting it understandably as a rubric and then immediately rejecting it. And I'm not saying that Antifa Senate, I mean I was faculty only for 10 years. So I completely understand and value those perspectives. I have more time as a faculty member than as a faculty developer. But it's just a reality of how those things go, that the more complex something is, the less likely it is to have an entire body of people check off on it. So instead, what we decided to do is to just present the product and thank them for that and say, we have this and we have these new tools that we've created that people might want to use. That might be helpful. So that,

Derek Bruff (15:44):
Just real quick for listeners, I'm going to put a link in the show notes because the product, those documents are all available online.

Lindsay Masland (15:52):
That's right.

Derek Bruff (15:52):
Yeah,

Lindsay Masland (15:53):
Exactly. They're

Derek Bruff (15:53):
Out there for people to read if they're curious.

Lindsay Masland (15:56):
Around the time of that task force being completely done with their work and presenting things were presented kind of at the end of a spring semester, and then there was a summer, which is honestly good timing given everything I just said. Yeah. The other thing that happened, I think that was that summer, I think I have my timeline. Our Center for Teaching and Learning was reorganized. We got actually a bunch more resources, both people resources and fiscal resources. Part of that reorganization too was creating a full-time staff position that I moved into, not the position I have now, but a director of transformative teaching and learning. And so the structure was kind of being built, so I was like, oh, things are coming together and it's really about taking advantage of changes that may seem disruptive, but that give you opportunities. So we started that new center or Reconceived center, we've been around since the seventies, but we started that new center with this idea that we're going to try to align all of our programming to the teaching quality framework. One because, but two, because it's something the faculty Senate asked for in the first place.

(17:22):
And so the senior vice provost that we were reporting to who did this reorganization really liked that idea. It was structured. It was something to point to and say, this is what they do, we do. So a lot of things kind of happen that we could take advantage of. The other thing that's probably much more instrumental is we did have more financial resources. And so what I decided to do in my corner of the center was to create something called a Teaching quality framework grant. The idea was that we will give groups of people around four or five people $3,000 grants to work on something that they say is related to the teaching quality framework. And the only requirements is that it has to be very clearly explicitly linked to the teaching quality framework. So I don't want to have to go hunting for how is this related? It has to be explicit and it has to produce a product that other departments or programs might find useful.

Derek Bruff (18:30):
Alright.

Lindsay Masland (18:31):
Other than that, people can do whatever they want, and I could give out about eight of those a year based on the budget. So that was a program I created, and since we had just been redesigned as a center, we were also having to be presented to groups of people to the chairs and the jeans. Sure,

Derek Bruff (18:54):
You're going on the road. Yeah,

Lindsay Masland (18:56):
That's right. And say, these are the new people and these are their jobs, and this is what they can do for you. I knew that some stuff had just come down from the university system level because we are a University of North Carolina School and about needing to rewrite foundational documents in departments, things like rewriting promotion and tenure criteria or processes, rewriting annual review processes. And so I was like, I knew that I was staying up on my reading. And so when I went and talked to these people, I sold these teaching quality framework grants as a way to compensate your faculty to do the service labor you're going to have to tell them to do and they're not going to want to do. So that was a real strategic thing of your people are going to be mad when you have to tell them to rewrite all these foundational departmental documents. What about you get some money and CETL support if you need it? Maybe you don't. Maybe you just need the money.

Derek Bruff (19:57):
Either

Lindsay Masland (19:57):
Way, no rules other than these two things. Teaching quality framework make a product. So we've done two years of that now. Now that we're to 2024, and I was counting up the products we got. Now, some of them are really niche and okay, and they're great, by the way. They're so helpful for the program or department that created them. It doesn't necessarily move the institution forward on teaching quality framework, which is not required, but some of them really do. So for example, we've had three departments rewrite their peer review processes to align to the teaching quality framework. So that's huge. And that is a bottom up policy change, not a top down policy change,

Derek Bruff (20:42):
Meaning that it was the faculty in those departments who were putting together those new guidelines.

Lindsay Masland (20:48):
Right? So that's another reason why I'm glad we didn't try to get any kind of faculty senate approval and then go to the provost and say, let's make it a policy that could end up happening anyways. But with the buy-in, because departments are doing this themselves and they're realizing, wait, if we want to have a better peer review process and we're supposed to be using teaching quality framework, we probably just align it to the three categories and the 10 subcategories. And we're like, yes, that is exactly what we want to have happen. And they're realizing that it works regardless of discipline, because we have. So yes, education departments have done it, which often are the first people to sign on, but computer science has done it, communication has done it. So all sorts of people, and it's just really neat to see the feedback from these little grant groups.

(21:42):
They'll say things like, here's our product. We're done. We hope it's okay. And they say, this was really interesting. We realized that in order to actually effectively evaluate teaching, we can't just look at a 50 minute snapshot. Yes, that is when you get the fist bump because it's like, ah, yes. Because they're realizing, oh, we need more sources of data. We're going to need student data, but we also need peer data. We need self-reflection data. We need not to just be looking at what might be happening in a lecture, but maybe we need to look at course pages. We need to look at syllabi. They are having those realizations themself instead of a policy or even the CTL coming in and saying, y'all need to do it this way. That's not happening. So I think that's really cool. So we've got peer review stuff happening. We've also had two departments change their promotion and tenure and annual review guidelines, like the processes and policies around that for what evidence you would need to be providing, and that you need to provide evidence in these different buckets instead of it just being loosey goosey. Where it often is, we've had two programs do curriculum mapping projects, but they were also pedagogy mapping projects. They realized it's not enough to just make sure that the intro course prepares somebody for the mid-level version of the course, but if the pedagogical choices are drastically different from that course to that course, students are not going to be ready to learn

(23:16):
Independent of the content. I know. And so they're having these realizations themselves, because remember I told you the two very low easy bars to jump over. And they're realizing, oh, shoot. We need to get everybody in a room to talk about not just curriculum, but pedagogy. We had an entire new program that is an all online program, develop a logic model for how their teaching would affect student success and all of the constructs in the middle. And then the assessment plan that would be needed in order to collect the data to prove to themselves that they were, I know. It's amazing. It's so exciting. And then what ends up happening with all these different projects or grant groups is sometimes they do need help from our CTL to do the thing they're trying to do because they realize they don't have some expertise. So with the curriculum and pedagogy mapping, it means I have come in some cases and done a whole course design institute for an entire department. So they're all having these conversations together instead of individual people opting in, or it means that they realize they don't have the skills to analyze data they're collecting now from a logic model.

(24:36):
So we get them plugged in with our research lab that we now have in our center and saying, oh, we have a solution for that. We have students who are learning how to analyze data. Do you want them to analyze your data for you? Yes. Okay, good. So I just think it's really cool what's happened so far with it. Yeah,

Derek Bruff (24:55):
Yeah. Well, and it's a lot of elements here we could kind of pull out, but

(25:02):
Part of it is that the teaching center was able to operate through these existing campuswide structures, the faculty senate task force and such, and kind of inject some ideas there and support good ideas as they were developing. And I think teaching centers, 20 years ago, if you had looked at most teaching centers, they would've done a lot of one-on-one work with instructors if they had the staff to do that. One instructor, their course, their pedagogy, their course design, and some workshops that were kind of open to the whole campus that 20 or 30 people from across the campus would come to. And often those are the folks who would come back for the consultation. But what I hear you saying is that because of these kind of strategic moves and these developments on campus, you're now operating at a department or program level, which is just incredibly robust, the change that can happen when an entire department goes through a course redesign institute. I have to think that's pretty intense.

Lindsay Masland (26:06):
And I mean, I think it's important to say, because I think you could hear this story and say, oh, well, that was just a lot of lucky things that happened that she took advantage of, and that's right.

(26:18):
Yes. And you just have to be thinking about whatever opportunities are happening on your campus. They're not going to be identical to mine. But I just remember many years ago when I first heard that they were doing that online task force, my brain immediately jumped to 15 years into the future where I was like, okay, this is the door in. This is the way that we actually help the entire campus to value teaching more, which is admittedly a giant leap thinking about, okay, if we need people to value teaching more, we have to do a better job of connecting effective teaching to students success. We also have to do a better job of rewarding, compensating, whatever teaching at the same level at which we reward and compensate scholarly success. And so I had all of those things in mind of, so we do need to change p and t policies. We do need to do all of this stuff just so we can get to a point where teaching is valued. And I saw this one little door opening of a random online teaching task force's like, this is it. This is the door, this is the door in. So I think that's the trick is figuring out, well, first being really clear on what your intentions are. If you are in an educational development type role, what are your pie in the sky

(27:47):
Things that could one day happen, and then use the tools. We know backwards plan of like, well, what are the intermediate steps that would have to happen? And then you just start looking for opportunities to grab 'em and say, oh, maybe this will work. And not all of them work. Some of 'em would pan out and something you think is going to work fizzles, okay, we need a new door. We need a new way in.

Derek Bruff (28:06):
Yeah. Yeah. Many of them don't work, actually.

Lindsay Masland (28:09):
Yeah, for sure.

Derek Bruff (28:10):
But also you had your ear to the ground in really useful ways. So what you said about the stuff that was coming down at the state level that was going to force departments to move in certain directions, knowing that was coming, allowed you to reframe that as an opportunity for departments as opposed to something that they were less happy about. And I think that's important too, is that we have to have that kind of, I don't know what the right metaphor is. I said ear to the ground, but now I'm thinking of those little prairie dogs that are

Lindsay Masland (28:40):
Oh, yeah. Like looking around.

Derek Bruff (28:41):
Yeah. Scanning the landscape to kind of know what's coming. I think that's really important too. That helps you see those open doors when they pop up.

Lindsay Masland (28:49):
Yeah, absolutely. And I mean, everybody that I have interacted within an educational faculty development space at our heart, I think we want to serve and support people. And so I think that what that used to look like, as you said a few minutes ago, looked smaller and that made sense because it was kind, I think, proportionate to resources and to level of respect afforded to the people who were in those centers. But as conversations are shifting to this current obsession with student success we have, which has been funny to me, like we were never, not about student success and faculty development, but if that's the language that we need to use now to market ourselves as problem solvers for this thing everybody's been tasked with, then that's what we do. It's the same exact kind of, I don't know, pull or calling that we have to help somebody fix something that's broken in a quiz on their course.

(29:53):
It's the same thing. It's just we're now, instead of doing it standing on the stage with them, we maybe need to go stand in the balcony a little bit and talk to some of the producers up there that have funded the thing down here, but it's still about, I'm trying to help the people on the stage do the thing. And so I think, yeah, we just have to be paying attention to that and always thinking about context when we support people with their courses, we talk a lot about things like situational factors and thinking about the context in which you're teaching. To me, this is just that, but it's on a bigger scale. So what's happening at a system level, that's a situational factor, what the faculty senate is asking for another one, it's the soup that we're working in, and we can really use that to our advantage.

Derek Bruff (30:40):
Yeah. Well, and I think from my experience doing a lot of those one-on-one consults, I would often find that those situational factors turned into roadblocks for faculty. I can't fix this problem. I can't make this change that I want to make because there's something off in the curriculum, and now we need to move up to the next level and rethink that idea of kind of a pedagogical mapping. I want to do active learning in my class, but the students come in not expecting that and not in having experience with that. And so I have this huge uphill battle all semester. If that was changed at the curricular level, maybe we get some more wins up and down the curriculum because of that, but that requires operating beyond the course level and thinking about these bigger systems that are in play.

Lindsay Masland (31:26):
Yeah, absolutely. And it requires a lot of resources because if you only have one or two people who have the label of educational developer on your campus, then that's your situational factor. And in my center, we have around 10 people for our 1400 instructors,

(31:49):
And we don't have, in this version of this intro, we don't have responsibility to the learning management system. We still have to help people with that because in my head, the LMS is a learning, or in my head, the LMS is a situational factor itself. But what it does mean is we do have some people who can step beyond just a one-on-one consultation role beyond a workshop role, and neither is more important, but some of us can be operating at that different strategic, who do I need to be talking to level, and who do I need to show up and say, Hey, I have a way to solve this problem you have. I think that's what it's all about. And then making good on actually solving the problem. Of course.

Derek Bruff (32:38):
In what ways do you think it was important that you, Lindsay, are a faculty member and had a decade of experience at your campus?

Lindsay Masland (32:50):
That's a good question. I mean, I think the decade of experience part is maybe more important than the faculty member part, possibly because it's true that I had to know who to go to present a solution to. I had to know who might have a problem. And so those things just materialize over having a lot of interaction with people on different committees or task force, or some of these people came to workshops I had led in the past or came to institutes, and now they themselves have moved into positions that have decision-making capabilities. So yeah, I think having that, it's now 13 years, but having all of that really helps a hundred percent. But I hope we're always playing the long game in what we're doing. So even if you're brand new in a position, treating that newness as a situational factor, and we're overusing that concept. But to me, context is so important, right? That's just an ED development term for context and treating that as a part of your context and thinking about, okay, what committees do I need to be on? How do I need to show up and deliver service to people just so that they start to know me and see me as somebody that they could turn to? So I think no matter where you are in terms of longevity or somewhere there is still hope about how you can be moving towards some eventual goal.

Derek Bruff (34:24):
Well, speaking of the long game, where do you see work around the framework going in the future now at Upstate?

Lindsay Masland (34:32):
Yeah, so I mean, I budget willing, which I think we will have, I'm going to continue with these Teaching quality framework grants. I think it'd be cool if every department had gotten one five years from now, and I think that will start happening because when we receive their products, we put them on the website to say, here are examples. Here's the department, here's the PDF If you're thinking about how you might be able to do this in your department. So I think that'll happen. But the other interesting thing that's been happening is when we created the framework and the associated tools with it, like the growth guide, and there's also a reflection tool. We did that really from a place of looking at existing resources and what is our brains going to create using those resources. We didn't do it from a place of let's try to use it and then refine it, try to use it and refine it, right? It was much more like a boardroom discussion type creation. So we've had two years of us in the center using it for different things and realizing that we need a version 2.0. Okay.

(35:42):
Yeah. It's not going to drastically change things. I think the buckets will stay the same, but some of the smaller pieces inside the buckets might tweak a little bit, and I can give some examples of how we've realized that because if we're aligning all our workshops and stuff to the teaching quality framework, we should probably also align some of our other services as well. For example, if a faculty member wants us to come in and observe them teaching and they want feedback, they might have some protocol from their department that they're asking us to use, but sometimes they just say, come observe me. I need help. Wouldn't it be good if we had some kind of consistent protocol for doing that at the center level that was TQF aligned? And so we started doing that and realizing there's places we might want to give feedback that don't perfectly fit into any existing spot.

(36:38):
So we're having that real experiential learning around the use of the tool and realizing, okay, we need to have some conversations about this, and I'll just throw out to anybody who hears this, if you need a co-conspirator or just a co thinker to think about your particular context and what your version of this might look like, I love those kinds of conversations. And the only way that we as an institution have gotten to the place that we have is because other people had those conversations with me. So I just want to put that out there that in the spirit of us being really intentional with our teaching and teaching support and also being change agents when it works, the only way you do that is through community and through mutual support. So if anybody wants to have those conversations, I love spending my time that way.

Derek Bruff (37:28):
That's great. That's great. Well, we'll leave it there. Thank you, Lindsay. Really appreciate you coming on the podcast and sharing. Thanks.

Lindsay Masland (37:34):
Thank you.

Derek Bruff (37:38):
That was Lindsay Masland, interim Executive director of the Center for Excellence in Teaching and Learning for Student Success. Yes, that is the entire name of their teaching center at Appalachian State University. Thanks to Lindsay for taking the time to talk with me and for pulling back the curtain on this important change initiative at App State. I really love how strategic Lindsay was in her work and how she continues to look for ways to leverage her faculty development work, and resources and service to the teaching mission of her institution. I'd love to hear your thoughts on my conversation with Lindsay. In the show notes, you'll find a link to send me a text message with your thoughts, and you can always email me at derek@derekbruff.org. And if you found my conversation with Lindsay interesting, you should listen to episode 27 of the podcast from earlier this year.

(38:20):
In that episode, I talked with Beate Brunow of Penn State University and Shawn Simonson at Boise State University about the development of similar teaching quality frameworks on their campuses. Intentional Teaching is sponsored by UPCEA, the Online and Professional Education Association. In the show notes, you'll find a link to the UPCAE website where you can find out about their research, networking opportunities and professional development offerings. This episode of Intentional Teaching was produced and edited by me, Derek Bruff. See the show notes for links to my website, the Intentional Teaching Newsletter, and my Patreon, where you can help support the show for just a few bucks a month. If you found this or any episode of Intentional Teaching useful, would you consider sharing it with a colleague? That would mean a lot. As always, thanks for listening.