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While much physics education research focuses on students’ learning, this thesis explores physics faculty members’ teaching practices. This focus is needed given the role faculty play as an essential link between students and physics content, culture, and practices. Commonly used change strategies in science education target faculty as change agents, yet these strategies have shown to be insufficient in supporting faculty in making long-lasting instructional change. This thesis explores a novel model of professional development for educational change— Faculty Online Learning Communities (FOLCs). A FOLC connects faculty from different institutions via facilitated videoconferences and an asynchronous communication platform as they collaboratively work toward a shared goal, such as improving their teaching practice. A FOLC leverages the affordances of a community of peers to advance the learning and development of faculty around their teaching practice. We focus on two implementations of the FOLC model: one serving a subset of new physics and astronomy faculty and a second serving a group of STEM faculty (more than half of whom are in physics) implementing a particular physical science curriculum for future teachers and non-STEM majors. In focusing on the FOLC model and the participating faculty members, this thesis examines both the mechanisms for supporting physics faculty members’ pedagogical development and the impacts of these mechanisms as perceived by faculty.
We start by introducing the FOLC model and describe how it is designed to supplement traditional change efforts, primarily through the affordances of a community. We then present one particular application of the FOLC model to support new physics and astronomy faculty in their teaching development (the New Faculty Workshop (NFW)-FOLC). We illustrate the design of the NFW-FOLC and its six learning objectives for participants. Through an interview study of NFW-FOLC participants, we next provide empirical support for the efficacy of the NFW-FOLC. We present their self-reports of the impact of participating in the FOLC and their motivations for joining the program. Their motivations indicate that NFW-FOLC participants believe they need more support to implement changes than is provided by a single, in-person workshop and they value and see a need for this support to be in the form of a community. The reported impacts of participating are consistent with the NFW-FOLC learning objectives, such as gaining more teaching knowledge and implementing research-based teaching strategies. The efficacy of the NFW-FOLC according to faculty participants’ perceptions provides support for the general FOLC model. We also provide preliminary evidence that participating in a FOLC can continue to impact teaching practice years after the FOLC experience has officially ended. We next consider the adaptability of the FOLC model to different contexts by exploring its application to support instructors implementing the Next Generation Physical Science and Everyday Thinking (NGPET) curriculum. The NFW-FOLC and NGPET-FOLC differ in their focus and community structure. Nonetheless, they each are achieving their respective learning objectives for participants, including the ones they share in common. Through this comparison, we identify essential components of a FOLC and those which can vary depending on the goal of the FOLC. This thesis additionally contributes a taxonomy that can be used by both researchers and practitioners to study the content and structure of FOLC meetings and similar professional development environments. We end with a discussion of the potential for the FOLC model to expand beyond the two implementations presented in this thesis. Not only can it support the teaching practices of new physics faculty and STEM faculty implementing a shared curriculum, but it also has the potential to support groups of faculty who are underrepresented in their disciplines and to even inform our construction of classroom communities. Through model building and testing, this thesis advances the physics education and broader STEM education communities’ understanding of a generative model for the professional development of their faculty.