Susan Johnston and James Cooper: Professional Development of Faculty Leads to Student Success

California State University, Dominguez Hills professors of education Susan Johnston and Jim Cooper had their article “Supporting Student Success Through Scaffolding” published in a recent issue of Tomorrow’s Professor. The newsletter, an online faculty development publication at Stanford University, has a circulation of approximately 25,000 faculty and administrators at more than 600 campuses.

Johnston says the five steps of procedural guidelines, partial solutions, think-alouds, anticipating student errors and comprehension checks, echoes the metaphor of construction workers using a scaffold to build a structure and is instrumental in engaging students in order to reinforce learning.

“When the learning is new and difficult, there are ways to support the low-confidence learner or the learner that is a novice,” she states. “Eventually, when they feel more confident and have mastered it, the scaffolding goes away.”

As faculty associates in the California State University, Dominguez Hills Center for Teaching and Learning (CTL), Johnston and Cooper facilitate mentorships for new professors and professional development for all faculty. Johnston, who began her academic career as a teacher instructor at UCLA’s laboratory school in the Graduate School of Education, says that one of CTL’s goals is to “provide support that many secondary teachers would get training in but many university teachers would not.”

Cooper bolsters her statement and underscores the importance of professors learning to be more than experts and instead also becoming effective teachers.

“In addition to valuing research in the various disciplines across campus, we also value the scholarship of teaching and learning in the rank and tenure process, something many campuses do not,” he says.

As the lead faculty associate at CTL, Cooper spearheads the Faculty Success Seminar. New professors are allowed to take a course off each semester to acclimate to the campus and learn about research-based teaching, syllabi, and tenure file development. In the last four years, 125 new faculty have gone through the program.

“Twenty percent of Ph.D.s get one course on how to teach,” Cooper says. “But in the last four years, this [seminar] has really taken off. One of the side benefits is that a number of those participants have joined the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning, a national movement [begun at Illinois State University] that has been around for the last 15 years.”

Cooper says that while programs like the Faculty Success Seminar contribute to greater retention and success in the classroom, the real rewards are the effect on students. He recounts the results of faculty who received his and Johnston’s lecture on scaffolding and the outcomes of their teaching the first-year freshman course, University 101.

“Of those students who were in the class, 78 percent reenrolled [in the university] for their sophomore year,” he says. “Only 53 percent of the students who didn’t take it reenrolled. The evidence is pretty clear that in getting students engaged, the methods are effective. It’s also good for enrollment.”

Johnston says her role as a faculty associate in CTL cements her own understanding of teaching, even as an established faculty member. At the beginning of her career, there was no program in place to provide professional development and mentoring.

“I have an increased awareness of what new faculty needs to be successful,” she says, “and of how many details there are in our jobs. It’s a way for me now to deconstruct the process. Based on that deconstruction, I can send a checklist to all the [faculty] mentors by categories and I ask them to give it to their mentees to fill out and to see what their needs are, so they could custom-tailor their assistance.”

- Joanie Harmon