CIE faculty member Cristine Smith has co-edited a book on Faculty Development in Developing Countries: Improving Teaching Quality in Higher Education with Kate Hudson, lecturer in higher education and Director of Program Development at the College of Education, UMass Amherst.

“The book grew out of a faculty development project that Kate Hudson and I worked on in 2011-2012 in Palestine,” Cris explains. “We worked with education faculty in three universities in Gaza, and multiple universities in the West Bank, helping the faculty to learn about and plan to use more active learning techniques—discussions, role plays, debates, small group problem-solving activities—in their university classes.”

“What we learned from that experience encouraged us to co-edit this book about our own and other practitioners' lessons learned in offering faculty development for active learning…. There are many books about faculty developing in higher education, but this is the first (we think) to focus specifically on professional development about teaching for faculty in under-resourced contexts, in any domain (not just education).”

The book provides an overview of active learning and faculty development for improving teaching quality in developing countries and case studies of professional development programs that aim to help faculty members “shift from lecture-based to active learning teaching” in higher and teacher education institutions in Kenya, Tanzania, Afghanistan, China and Rwanda. It includes also recommendations for programs and how to understand and gauge “faculty change and evolution in teaching.”  

The co-editors contributed several chapters, notably Lessons Learned: Content, Technologies and Processes for Faculty Development of Teaching by Cristine Smith and Kate Hudson, and A Framework for Understanding and Gauging Faculty Change and Evolution in Teaching by Cristine Smith.

CIE director Joe Berger with graduate students Hassan Aslami, Rohina Amiri, Mujtaba Hedayet, and Hanni Thoma contributed the chapter on Faculty Development for Teacher Education in Afghanistan.