L Milne's List: Educational Development Programs: Planning and Design

by L. Dee Fink, a summary of key points in his 2003 book, Creating Significant Learning Experiences.

One of the first tasks teachers face when designing a course is deciding what they want students to learn or get out of their course. Students will always learn something, but good teachers want their students to learn something important or significant, rather than something relatively insignificant.
This leads to a question that is key to the whole teaching enterprise: What are the ways in which learning can be significant? If we have or can develop a language and a conceptual framework for identifying the multiple ways in which learning can be significant, then teachers can decide which of various kinds of significant learning they want to support and promote in a given course or learning experience.

by L. Dee Fink, 2003
"What do I hope students will have learned, that will still be there and have value several years after the course is over?" Fink suggests that faculty start with that question and design backward (in Wiggins & McTighe's phrase) from outcomes, through evidence of them, to teaching strategies to achieve that result.

Great set of resources from May 2009 design institute.

Oldie but a goodie...if you can get 1975 Journal of Higher Education

The author suggests that workshops, evaluation procedures, and institutional policies regarding instructional development should differ according to whether an institution's prevailing attitudes are oriented to consciousness-raising (Stage 1), focal awareness (Stage 2), or subsidiary awareness (Stage 3). Suggestions are made as to which programs fit the different developmental stages.

Another oldie but goodie from 1975 Journal of Higher Education.

Faculty development must give serious attention to the impact of change on the faculty member himself and on his institution. Organizational and personal development thus become essential to faculty development.

This Feb, 2009 report was written by Linda Darling-Hammond and a team of researchers from the Stanford University School Redesign Network. It examines what research has revealed about professional learning that improves teachers’ practice and student learning.

Among its findings:
What Research Tells Us
Professional development that is short, episodic, and disconnected from practice has little impact.
Well-designed professional development can improve practice and increase student achievement.
A review of high-quality experimental studies found that among programs offering extended PD (49 hours on average over 6 to 12 months), student achievement increased by 21 percentile points. (Yoon et al., 2007)