Linking Faculty to Organization, Development and Change: Teaching4Learning@Unipd

Faculty development is intricately connected with organization development and change. Most of the research on faculty development focuses on faculty teaching effectiveness and faculty personal and professional development. The instructor remains the only unit of analysis, with little attention given to the actions and strategies to develop the organization in order to foster excellent teaching while building strong communities of learning. Further, research on faculty development overlooks how to create a culture of innovation, fails to identify the impact of faculty development programs on the organization, and neglects the organizational implications of promoting teaching innovation. The aim of this chapter is to demonstrate that faculty development, and in particular the program Teaching4Learning@Unipd, could not be realized without a strong institutional commitment to develop and change, and to invest money and energy in the innovation process. Faculty development in this sense can become a means and an opportunity to develop old and prestigious institutions like university of Padova, involving all different actors at different levels of the organization: personally, and in group, through the building of faculty learning community (FLC) (Adams & Mix, 2014; Cox, 2004, 2013; Stanley, 2011). The present chapter aims to address the following questions: What are the challenges of promoting faculty development at a big Italian university? How can faculty development impacts organization development and change? Which strategic actions and practices most effectively promote change? What are future opportunities to develop research and practices linked to faculty and organization development? Keywords: faculty development, organizational development, organizational change