Strengthening Faculty Development Programs Through Evaluation

Research on faculty development suggests that a college can choose from an extensive range of activities in designing a faculty development program, but that an institution is limited to a development process that matches faculty expec tations-or it risks failure. William Nelsen (1979) reported in his study of twenty faculty development programs that "how a college carried out its faculty renewal program was equally important, perhaps more important, than what it proposed to do." Although Nelsen found considerable information on program activities, few institutions could describe with much clarity or consciousness their thinking about the process of faculty development. Consequently, when the College of Arts and Sciences at American University received a grant to support faculty development, our initial planning focused primarily on how to carry out a program that made sense in our own insti tutional context. At the same time, however, we sought an evaluation process to complement our particular program and to enable us to assess our activities and success after the first few years. It is the procedure and the results of that evaluation that we describe here.