CONCLUSION
Our work provides a comprehensive, campus-wide view of
STEM teaching at a university. We found that faculty members:
1) demonstrate a range of teaching practices that impact
student experience, 2) are generally but not always influenced
by class size when selecting practices, and 3) have
an awareness of how often they use specific teaching practices
in their courses. This work has important implications
for faculty professional development. In part, it provides
further confirmation that providers of professional development
should explicitly speak to and build upon the fact
that most faculty members fall somewhere in the continuum
between pure lecturing and primarily active-engagement
instruction. Emphasis should be on programs that increase
awareness of teaching practices currently in use across campus
and on strategies that can help faculty members gradually
shift where they are on the continuum in order to better
meet the needs of their students. In addition, our findings
suggest that many faculty members have experiences that
could contribute substantively to faculty professional development
programs. Indeed, drawing upon the diverse levels
of faculty teaching expertise during professional development
also offers an opportunity to effectively model a valuable
instructional strategy: honoring the prior knowledge of
the learners. Perhaps most importantly, this strategy helps
learners “remember, reason, solve problems, and acquire
new knowledge” (National Research Council, 2000) and, by
extension, will also help maximize the impact of the professional
development experience on faculty.