Faculty Development Coordinator

A Faculty Development Coordinator's job is to help college instructors become more effective teachers — through workshops, individual consultations, curated resources, and structured reflection on their own practice. The work is genuinely instructional, except that the students are professors and the subject is teaching itself.

The programming side of the role involves designing and facilitating professional learning experiences that faculty actually find worth attending. That last part is the challenge. Faculty are busy, skeptical of generic professional development, and highly attuned to whether the person facilitating has anything real to offer. A workshop on active learning techniques that consists of slides summarizing research findings will have poor attendance and even poorer uptake. A workshop that starts with a live problem — a specific course design challenge, a student engagement problem from a real course — and works through it using evidence-based approaches in real time will be remembered and used.

Individual consultations are where the most consequential work often happens. A faculty member who agrees to a classroom observation and debrief is offering something vulnerable — permission to evaluate their most fundamental professional activity. The coordinator's job is to make that experience genuinely useful rather than evaluative. That means using a reflective framework that puts the faculty member's own questions at the center, offering specific observations rather than global judgments, and connecting what the instructor actually wants to improve to what the research suggests is effective.

The evaluation and reporting side of the role requires building the evidentiary case that faculty development programs contribute to student success. Connecting workshop participation to changes in teaching practice, and connecting those changes to student outcomes, is methodologically complex — but institutions that fund these programs increasingly want that story.

Education:

• Master's degree in instructional design, educational technology, higher education administration, curriculum and instruction, or educational psychology (common and preferred)
• PhD in education or a discipline is not required but increases credibility with faculty audiences and opens doors to senior roles
• Graduate coursework in adult learning theory, instructional design, assessment, and higher education policy provides the theoretical foundation

Experience:

• 2–4 years of experience in faculty development, instructional design, educational technology, or a closely related higher education role
• Workshop facilitation experience with adult professional audiences, ideally in higher education
• Course design experience — either formal instructional design work or personal teaching with documented course redesign

Core competencies:

• Facilitation skills for professional learning — asking questions that generate reflection rather than presenting information
• Instructional consultation techniques: classroom observation, syllabus review, structured debriefing
• Curriculum and assessment design: backward design (Understanding by Design), constructive alignment, course mapping
• Inclusive pedagogy and accessibility: UDL framework, accessibility standards for digital content, culturally responsive teaching

Technical skills:

• LMS administration (Canvas, Blackboard, or Moodle) at a mid-level: course design, quiz construction, gradebook, communication tools
• Instructional technology: screen recording, video editing for instructional content, virtual facilitation tools
• Program evaluation: survey design, quantitative and qualitative data analysis, report writing
• Website management for resource library maintenance

Professional community:

• POD Network membership and regional engagement
• EDUCAUSE membership for instructional technology professional development
• Familiarity with Teaching Commons and similar open resource platforms

Faculty development as a professional field in higher education has grown considerably over the past two decades, and the coordinator role is a well-established position at most four-year colleges and universities. The growth has been driven by accreditation standards requiring documented faculty development, expanding online education programs requiring structured quality assurance, and increasing evidence that deliberate teaching improvement programs improve student outcomes.

Institutional investment in teaching centers has been relatively stable even during budget pressures, in part because these units provide services that accreditors explicitly look for and that student success initiatives require. The pivot to emergency remote teaching during 2020 resulted in significant short-term expansion of faculty development capacity at many institutions; some of that capacity was retained permanently as hybrid and online education became routine.

The most significant career development opportunity within this field is toward instructional design or teaching center director roles. Senior instructional designers and associate director or director positions at teaching centers pay significantly more than coordinator roles ($70K–$100K or more at well-funded institutions) and require the combination of facilitation expertise, program management capability, and institutional credibility that coordinator experience builds.

AI and technology integration has become the fastest-growing program area in most teaching centers. Coordinators who develop deep expertise in AI's implications for assessment design, academic integrity, and pedagogy are being sought for workshops, conference presentations, and policy consultation. This expertise is in demand at a moment when faculty across disciplines have urgent questions and few places to turn for pedagogically sophisticated guidance.

For those considering the field, the work is genuinely meaningful — improving teaching in even small ways has compounding effects on the students those teachers reach over a career. The field rewards intellectual curiosity about learning and teaching, diplomatic skill in working with faculty colleagues, and the organizational discipline to run programs that work at institutional scale.

Dear Search Committee,

I am applying for the Faculty Development Coordinator position at [University's] [Center Name]. I hold a master's degree in Instructional Design and Technology from [University] and have spent the past three years as a faculty development specialist at [College], where I coordinate a workshop series, facilitate teaching consultations, and manage our new faculty teaching program.

The part of my current role I find most effective is the one-on-one consultation work. Our model uses a structured observation-debrief cycle: I observe a class session with a focus area we've agreed on together, compile specific observational data rather than evaluative impressions, and use a reflective framework in the debrief that starts with the instructor's own questions. Over the past two years I've completed 47 of these cycles with faculty across disciplines, from introductory writing to upper-division chemistry. The most consistent feedback is that what instructors value is having someone give them specific, useful information about what's actually happening in their classroom, which is different from what either students or administrators typically offer.

I've also developed curriculum in the past year around AI and academic integrity — two sessions that have run across departments with waitlists. The need is acute and the questions are genuinely interesting: how do you design a history essay prompt that asks something AI can't answer, not because AI is forbidden but because the intellectual task genuinely requires the student's specific knowledge and analytical development? I've been presenting on this at the regional POD chapter and at our state higher education conference.

I'm drawn to [University]'s center because of the scope of your research faculty population and your documented commitment to STEM teaching improvement, which aligns directly with what I want to develop next.

Thank you for your consideration.

[Your Name]