Education
Director of Faculty Development
Last updated
A Director of Faculty Development leads the center, office, or program that supports faculty growth as teachers, scholars, and academic professionals. They design and deliver professional development programs, provide individual teaching consultation, build communities of practice among faculty, and support institutional priorities like online learning transitions, inclusive pedagogy, and evidence-based teaching practices.
Role at a glance
- Typical education
- Doctorate in education, instructional design, or a related disciplinary field
- Typical experience
- 5-8 years of college-level teaching experience
- Key certifications
- Quality Matters framework, Universal Design for Learning (UDL) principles
- Top employer types
- Universities, community colleges, online learning institutions, higher education consulting firms
- Growth outlook
- Steady demand driven by accreditation requirements and pedagogical shifts
- AI impact (through 2030)
- Strong tailwind — AI is creating urgent demand for directors to lead faculty through navigating pedagogical implications and policy development.
Duties and responsibilities
- Design and deliver professional development workshops, institutes, and programming on teaching, learning, and academic career skills
- Provide individual consultations for faculty on course design, assessment strategies, inclusive teaching, and instructional problem-solving
- Lead new faculty orientation programs and multi-semester faculty learning communities for cohorts at different career stages
- Support institutional transitions in pedagogy: active learning, online course design, AI tool policy, universal design for learning
- Build faculty engagement with evidence-based teaching research — connecting SoTL (Scholarship of Teaching and Learning) to institutional practice
- Manage a team of instructional developers, program coordinators, and graduate assistants who support teaching development activities
- Coordinate faculty teaching observation and peer review programs in partnership with academic departments
- Produce annual reports on faculty participation, program satisfaction, and teaching improvement indicators for academic affairs leadership
- Oversee teaching grant programs that fund faculty course innovation, curriculum development, and SoTL research projects
- Serve as an institutional resource on current research in learning science, cognitive load, retrieval practice, and classroom effectiveness
Overview
A Director of Faculty Development runs the programs and services that help faculty become better teachers. The job is counterintuitive: most faculty are hired for research expertise and disciplinary knowledge, but teaching — the primary service most of them provide — is rarely formally trained. Faculty development fills that gap by creating learning opportunities for faculty who want to improve, adapting to where faculty are in their careers and what they're actually trying to accomplish in their classrooms.
The programming portfolio typically includes workshops (active learning, exam design, syllabus construction, grading practices), learning communities (cohorts of faculty working on shared pedagogical challenges over a semester), and individual consultations. The consultation side often involves analyzing video of classroom sessions with a faculty member, reviewing student feedback data together, or helping a faculty member redesign an assignment that consistently produces disappointing student work. This work is confidential by design — trust is the prerequisite for faculty to engage honestly about their teaching struggles.
New faculty orientation is a signature program at most institutions. Helping recently hired faculty — many of whom have never taught full courses — develop course planning skills, understand student population characteristics, navigate institutional systems, and build community with peers is both important and time-intensive. The director designs and often facilitates this orientation alongside department-level induction.
The institutional liaison function matters too. Directors of Faculty Development advise provosts and deans on faculty training needs related to strategic initiatives — online learning expansion, new assessment requirements, inclusive excellence commitments, and AI policy development. Being invited into those conversations early, rather than asked to train faculty after decisions are made, requires building credibility as a strategic resource rather than a training department.
Qualifications
Education:
- Doctorate in education, instructional design, higher education, or a disciplinary field with strong teaching and learning focus
- Background in learning science, cognitive psychology, or educational psychology is particularly valued
Experience:
- 5–8 years of college-level teaching experience — faculty take development programming more seriously from someone who has actually taught
- Experience in faculty development, instructional design, or academic affairs program management
- Workshop design and facilitation at a professional level
- Staff supervision and program management
Knowledge areas:
- Evidence-based teaching practices: active learning, retrieval practice, interleaving, spaced practice — the research base behind effective pedagogy
- SoTL methodology: how to design and conduct classroom research, interpret findings, and support faculty inquiry
- Instructional design frameworks: backwards design (Wiggins and McTighe), Bloom's Taxonomy, competency-based design
- Universal Design for Learning (UDL) principles and implementation
- Online pedagogy: synchronous versus asynchronous design, Quality Matters framework, accessibility in digital content
- Assessment design: formative and summative assessment alignment, rubric construction, alternative assessment modalities
Tools and platforms:
- Learning management systems as an instructional tool, not just as administrators see them
- Classroom observation and feedback protocols
- Survey and feedback tools: course evaluation design, mid-semester feedback instruments
- AI educational tools: enough understanding of the landscape to advise faculty credibly
Career outlook
Faculty development as a formalized function has grown substantially over the past two decades, driven by increased attention to teaching quality, accreditor expectations for systematic faculty evaluation and support, and the pedagogical disruptions created by online learning and now AI.
Demand for directors is steady, though the function is sometimes vulnerable to budget pressure at institutions that view professional development as a support cost rather than a strategic investment. Directors who can document the connection between their programs and measurable teaching outcomes — student evaluation trends, course completion rates in sections where faculty participated in development, reduction in grade distributions with problematic patterns — are better positioned to defend their budgets than those who report only participation counts.
AI is creating a specific and urgent demand signal. The faculty development center is the natural institutional resource for helping faculty navigate AI's implications for their courses, assignments, and disciplinary epistemology — but only if directors have developed genuine fluency in AI tools and their pedagogical implications. Centers that are ahead of this are fielding more requests from faculty and more invitations from academic leadership than they can easily accommodate.
The online learning wave produced significant growth in faculty development staffing at many institutions as universities needed to train large populations of faculty for online teaching quickly. Some of that staffing has persisted as online programs have stabilized; at institutions that now see online as a core delivery channel, the development function has become permanent infrastructure.
Career advancement leads to Associate Provost for Academic Affairs, Vice Provost for Faculty Affairs, or senior roles in educational development networks (POD Network, AAC&U) and higher education consulting. Some directors return to faculty positions if academic appointments are available.
Sample cover letter
Dear Search Committee,
I'm applying for the Director of Faculty Development position at [Institution]. I am currently the Associate Director of the Center for Teaching Excellence at [Institution], where I design and deliver professional development programming, run our new faculty orientation program, and manage three instructional consultants who support individual faculty teaching improvement.
The initiative I'm most proud of developing is our mid-semester feedback program, in which I offer facilitated small group instructional diagnosis (SGID) sessions to any faculty member who requests them. I meet with the class while the faculty member is out, solicit specific feedback through a structured protocol, synthesize it, and debrief the faculty member with a focus on actionable changes. In the last two years, 87 faculty have participated — more than any voluntary teaching program we've ever offered. The most common feedback I hear afterward is that the debrief conversation was the first time someone had discussed their teaching with them as a professional, not as a compliance exercise.
On the AI front, I've been running a faculty learning community this semester on AI and course design — 16 faculty from nine departments meeting every three weeks to share what they're observing in their courses, experiment with AI tools as learners themselves, and prototype assignment redesigns. It's the most generative professional learning community I've run in seven years of this work, and we're presenting findings at the regional POD conference in the fall.
I hold a doctorate in higher education from [University] and have eleven years of teaching and development experience, including five years of full-time college teaching before joining the center.
I would welcome the opportunity to discuss this position with you.
[Your Name]
Frequently asked questions
- What is the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL)?
- SoTL refers to faculty research that investigates questions about teaching and student learning, using disciplinary research methods applied to the classroom. A biology professor studying whether active learning techniques improve conceptual understanding in introductory courses is doing SoTL. Directors of Faculty Development often support SoTL as both a faculty professional development opportunity and a mechanism for generating institutional knowledge about what teaching practices actually work.
- What background is required to lead faculty development?
- Most directors hold a doctorate in education, instructional design, a disciplinary field, or educational psychology — with demonstrated expertise in college teaching and learning research. Prior teaching experience at the higher education level is expected; credibility with faculty depends on it. Experience in a faculty development or instructional design role before moving to the director level is the standard path. Familiarity with adult learning theory, instructional design models, and evidence-based teaching research is essential.
- How do faculty development directors work with faculty who are resistant to professional development?
- The most effective strategy is making participation worthwhile on terms faculty actually care about. Voluntary programs that feel relevant to real teaching challenges, that respect faculty expertise, and that don't take a deficit approach to experienced instructors earn participation. Peer-to-peer learning formats — faculty teaching other faculty, learning community discussions among colleagues — are more credible than staff-led instruction. Mandated training generally produces compliance rather than genuine engagement; effective directors design for voluntary adoption.
- How is AI affecting the faculty development role?
- The rapid adoption of AI tools by students has created immediate demand for faculty development support around course redesign, academic integrity, and assessment validity. Faculty who were never trained to design learning experiences that remain meaningful when AI can complete conventional assignments need help rethinking their approach. Directors are developing AI literacy resources, facilitating faculty conversations about disciplinary implications, and helping instructors prototype assessment designs that evaluate thinking rather than output.
- What is universal design for learning and why is it a faculty development priority?
- Universal Design for Learning (UDL) is a framework for designing courses that are accessible to diverse learners from the outset, rather than retrofitting accommodations after the fact. Implementing UDL involves offering multiple means of representation, expression, and engagement — varied content formats, flexible assessment options, and proactive accessibility in course design. Faculty development centers increasingly offer UDL training as both an equity strategy and a way to reduce individual accommodation burden on disability services.
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