Wiser Together: Sustaining Teaching Excellence With a Self-Study/Critical Friend

This SSCF (Self Study Critical Friend) project was imagined and implemented to provide a sustained and experiential educational development collaboration for two senior faculty members who teach in the same academic department at a regional comprehensive public university in the southeastern United States.

The university has a CTL with only one full-time staff member/director. The university has, therefore, been experimenting with a distributed model of educational development with a goal to identify a “faculty development fellow” in each of its eight academic colleges/schools. These fellows work with faculty, department chairs, and deans to identify educational development needs of faculty and to plan and curate appropriate, responsive programming. Not only is the university working, as most are, to do more with less, but it is also attempting to situate educational development within the specific context of faculty members’ work. Tracy (one of the authors) was the first faculty member on campus to begin working as a faculty fellow. As the “pilot” and now veteran fellow, Tracy was given the freedom and support to explore possible and promising models of educational development that might be replicated in other colleges and units. The model described here is one such exploratory effort.