AFTER “ BEING THROWN IN THE CLASSROOM ” : THE DEVELOPMENT OF PEDAGOGICAL SKILLS IN VETERAN ADJUNCT FACULTY TEACHING IN THE NATURAL SCIENCES

The postsecondary landscape has changed drastically in the past 40 years, with one of the most obvious changes being the increased reliance on adjunct or part-time faculty. Approximately 50% of the current faculty employed by postsecondary institutions are categorized as part-time faculty, up from approximately 25% in 1975 (American Association of University Professors, 2017; Snyder, de Bray, & Dillow, 2016). While there is literature surrounding the impacts of this phenomenon, the majority of studies are entrenched in a positivist framework, utilize quantitative methods, and many use large datasets to distill down whether students are more or less successful when taught by part-time faculty. Very few studies utilize the voices and examine the lived experiences of part-time faculty, especially in regards to how they develop their pedagogical skills as teachers. A retrospective case study methodology was utilized to fill this gap in the literature. Seven part-time faculty members who teach in the natural sciences from various four-year institutions located in Southern New England were interviewed regarding their teaching experiences throughout their career, as well as their experiences with professional development through this time. The Novice to Expert Skill Model (Dreyfus & Dreyfus, 1980) was used as a theoretical framework. During analysis of the interview data, several key findings emerged. Based on the experiences of the participants, part-time faculty teach fairly similarly to full-time faculty: They want to make science relevant to their students, teach using alternative teaching practices, and make personal connections with their students. It was also found that part-time faculty proceed along the Novice to Expert Skill Model as it is described, with the exception of their beginning stage – many of the participants identified as more developed than the Novice stage when they began teaching. Several of the female participants showed a reluctance to admit they selfidentified as Experts, while other participants were overly confident in their development. Participants identified peer interactions, self-drive, and funding as positive impacts to their pedagogical development. Participants identified “being thrown in the classroom” with no support, spotty observations by superiors, mechanical and forgettable workshops, and feeling like a “second-class citizen” as having a negative impact to the development of their pedagogical skills. Participant experiences point out a need for institutions and departments to recognize the motivations and needs of the adjunct faculty they have on staff currently, without making assumptions of adjunct faculty in general. Recommendations for institutional and departmental professional development policies are included.


INTRODUCTION My Background and Interest in the Topic
During the past 40 years, there have been major shifts in postsecondary education, with one of the most obvious being the increased reliance on adjunct faculty to teach at institutions of higher education. In 1975, 24% of all instructional staff were part-time employees (American Association of University Professors [AAUP], 2017). Adjunct faculty currently represent approximately 40% of all faculty in postsecondary education (AAUP, 2018). If we narrow it down further to look at a specific population, the number of part-time faculty that are currently teaching in the natural science at four-year institutions is approximately 25% (Snyder, de Bray, & Dillow, 2016). For the past 10 years, I have belonged to this very specific demographic -I have taught undergraduate introductory biology courses at two private four-year institutions as a part-time, adjunct faculty member.
I was a very young 24 years old when I entered my own classroom for the first time. I had previous experience as a graduate teaching assistant, but had never been responsible for my own class. I had grand notions of what it meant to be an effective teacher, yet I walked into that room and began lecturing, making sure that I covered the content. My student evaluations that term were dismal.
My department chair, however, saw something in me, first when she hired this very young graduate, just out of a master's program, to teach in her department, but also as I struggled through that first termit would have been easy for her to just say, "Maybe this isn't the job for you." She instead guided me to professional organizations like the National Association of Biology Teachers and the National Science Teachers Association, and encouraged me to read their journals. Because I was also hired as a staff member in her department, she managed to swing funding for me to attend teaching conferences, and within a few years I was presenting at those same conferences alongside her. She was an excellent mentor for a young professional. Eventually, I decided to head back to school to earn my doctorate in what I had become passionate aboutteaching science.
My story is unique. Seeing and reading about the experiences of other adjunct faculty made me realize that there are not many adjunct faculty who have had an experience similar to mine, that many adjunct faculty are not exposed so early in their careers to pedagogy or guided by others to find resources on different teaching approaches. This led me to wonder, how do adjunct faculty in the natural sciences develop pedagogical skills, despite the lack of resources and support structures provided to these faculty? The following research questions were used to begin to investigate this larger question: 1. How do veteran adjunct faculty, who teach in the natural sciences, describe their teaching? 2. How do veteran adjunct faculty, who teach in the natural sciences, describe their development of pedagogical skills along the Dreyfus and Dreyfus (1980) Novice to Expert Skill Model?
3. How do veteran adjunct faculty, who teach in the natural sciences, selfidentify their current stage of pedagogical skill along the Dreyfus and Dreyfus (1980) Novice to Expert skill model? 4. What do veteran adjunct faculty, who teach in the natural sciences, perceive as factors that provided positive results in their development of higher pedagogical skills? 5. What do veteran adjunct faculty, who teach in the natural sciences, perceive as factors that provided negative results in their development of higher pedagogical skills?
Originally in my proposal, research questions 2 and 3 were switched in order, but it felt more authentic during interviews, analysis, and the writing process to drive the discussion of development from when the adjuncts began teaching to where they are currently, rather than assessing where they self-identified currently and describing how they developed to get to their current stage.

Statement of the Problem
The primary focus of a part-time faculty member's work at an institution is teaching (U.S. Department of Education, 2012), and yet, the majority of part-time faculty are lacking in teaching experience, as many come from industry or are directly out of graduate school, looking for full-time employment (American Federation of Teachers [AFT], 2010). Similar to the majority of faculty at the postsecondary level, adjunct faculty have an excellent grasp of the content knowledge in their chosen field, but their pedagogical training can be lacking or even non-existent (Light, 1984).
Professional development for faculty in the area of teaching/pedagogy is a constantly growing and changing field, but opportunities for adjunct faculty remain limited based on an institution's characteristics and culture. For example, the majority of the literature surrounding adjunct faculty professional development comes out of two-year community colleges, where upwards of 70% of their faculty are part-time. Due to this high reliance, community colleges are more likely to recognize the need to support adjunct faculty, compared to four-year institutions where the percentages of adjunct faculty are smaller. As such, there is a major gap in understanding how adjunct faculty develop their pedagogical skills, especially in the natural sciences.
Producing college graduates in the fields of Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) has become a national priority (Fayer, Lacey, & Watson, 2017;National Academies, 2010; Presidential Council of Advisors on Science and Technology [PCAST], 2012). It has been projected that the United States will need to produce one million more STEM graduates than will be produced at the current rate over the next decade to remain a global competitor in science and technology (PCAST, 2012). However, less than 40% of students who enter college intending on pursuing a STEM major persist in STEM until graduation (American Association for the Advancement of Science [AAAS], 2011;PCAST, 2012). The rate of attrition is higher for women, racial and ethnic minorities, students with disabilities, and students that come from weaker academic backgrounds (Chen, 2013;Xu, 2017).
At the same time, non-STEM majors are typically required to take at least one science course as part of their core or general education requirements for graduation.
Students with degrees in a variety of fields are going to have an impact on scientific research and technological advances (National Research Council, 1999;AAAS, 2011AAAS, , 2015. For many of our nation's future policyand decision-makers, a low-level undergraduate science course is the last time they were required to think broadly about STEM applications, and yet science intersects with their lives on a scale that they have difficulty imagining without help. Science majors and non-majors alike are likely to be impacted by the overreliance on adjunct faculty. Adjunct faculty are typically used to teach science major introductory, gatekeeper courses (Eagan & Jaeger, 2008); those courses which students must succeed in before moving up to more complex and specific content courses (Tobias, 1990). Gatekeeper courses are a major focus of retention efforts, as they are typically the first major roadblock to many students, and if the roadblock is too difficult to pass, student will likely change their major and leave science altogether (Seymour, 2001). Adjunct faculty are also used to teach general education courses taken by non-major students, which are often the last science touchstone non-majors have within formal education. Understanding the development of pedagogical skills and the professional development that drives the development of those skills in adjunct faculty may help administrators to remediate low retention rates in gatekeeper courses and low student interest in general education courses.

Significance of the Study
The research is clear that no matter the discipline, incorporating active and collaborative learning approaches, as well as various teaching practices to encourage student engagement in the classroom, leads to better student learning outcomes (Chickering & Gamson, 1987;Kuh, 2007;Kuh, et al., 2005;Pascarllea & Terenzini, 2005). This has especially been true across STEM disciplines (Freeman et al., 2014) and within specific STEM disciplines (Prince, 2004;Ruiz-Primo, Briggs, Iverson, Talbot, & Shepard, 2011;Springer, Stanne, & Donovan, 1999). That being said, there is a continuous assumption that most teachers in all disciplines in higher education are woefully unprepared in regards to their role as a teacher, have unsophisticated conceptions of teaching (e.g. that they are there to transmit information), and have little knowledge of effective teaching practices (Boyd & Harris, 2010;Evers et al., 2009;Hendricson et al., 2007) when they enter the profession. Many STEM teachers in higher education are also unwilling to make commitments to evidence-based teaching approaches, despite understanding their effectiveness, because of the time commitment necessary to properly learn and execute active and collaborative teaching practices (Henderson & Dancy, 2007;Sunal et al., 2001;Sunal & Hodges, 1997).
While there is a large reform movement regarding changing the way science is taught at the undergraduate level, much of that focus is geared toward full-time, tenure-track faculty. Part-time faculty face additional hurdles to adopting and implementing various instructional practices. At the same time, much of the research on adjunct faculty is limited to how effective they are compared to their full-time, tenure-track counterparts, and this research is firmly ensconced in the positivist framework, resulting in a multitude of quantitative studies that all have contradictory findings on that effectiveness in regards to retention rates (Chen, 2012;Deutsch, 2015;Eagan & Jaeger, 2008;Ehrenberg & Zhang, 2005;Harrington & Schibik, 2001;Ronco & Cahill, 2004), graduation rates (Deutsch, 2015;Ehrenberg & Zhang, 2005;Jacoby, 2006;Jaeger & Eagan, 2009), student GPA (Harrington & Schibik, 2001;Johnson, 2011;Ronco & Cahill, 2004;Rossol-Allison & Alleman Beyers, 2011), and individual course success (Bolge, 1995;Burgess & Samuels, 1999;Davis, Belcher, & McKitterick, 1985;Fedler, 1989;Landrum, 2009;MacArthur, 1999;Muller, instructional practices of adjunct faculty (Baldwin & Wawrzynski, 2011;Eagan, 2007;Leslie & Gappa, 2002;Schuetz, 2002;Umbach, 2007) are also large-scale and quantitative. While quantitative studies allow researchers to gain an important understanding of the large-scale picture of using part-time faculty and its impacts, some of the nuances regarding motivation for being an adjunct and what exactly their teaching looks like are overlooked. The studies often lump all full-and part-time faculty into one large category, without accounting for any differences in experience.
There are very few research studies that employ a qualitative methodology and utilize the voices of adjunct faculty to describe their experiences at all, let alone as teachers, especially throughout their careers. Therefore, this study will use the stories and experiences of veteran adjunct faculty members who teach in the natural sciences to explore how those individuals developed their pedagogical skills throughout their careers. The results of this study will serve to create recommendations which inform departmental and institutional policies for professional development for adjunct faculty.

REVIEW OF LITERATURE
The reliance on adjunct faculty has been a concern in the literature for decades every study on adjunct instructors since the 1990s begins with a statement on the increased reliance of adjunct faculty and reviews the perceived benefits and drawbacks to their increasing presence in undergraduate classrooms. Much research focuses on the demographics of adjunct faculty and what their motivations are for becoming adjuncts in the first place (Bell, 2000;Callan, 1997;Donoughue, 2008;Gappa & Leslie, 1993;Jolley, Cross, & Bryant, 2014;Kezar & Maxey, 2014). Others highlight the benefits to bringing in adjunct faculty with industry or business experience (Bettinger & Long, 2010;McGuire, 1993;Wallin, 2004;Wickun & Stanley, 2011).
In the following sections, I will introduce demographics and the motivations of adjunct faculty members, and explore the research surrounding the use of part-time faculty and its impacts on student outcomes. I will then summarize the literature surrounding the instructional differences of part-time versus full-time faculty and introduce the Dreyfus and Dreyfus (1980) model of skill development, which has been modified by Berliner (2004) for a focus on teaching skills. This model will serve as the theoretical framework for this research. The following two sections will focus on professional development for teaching, both in general, and to enhance the teaching skills of adjunct faculty at four-year institutions.

Understanding Adjunct Faculty
An adjunct faculty member is defined as one who identifies as contingent faculty, postdocs, teaching assistants, non-tenure-track faculty, part-timers, lecturers, instructors, or non-senate faculty (AAUP, 2003;2006). For the purpose of this research, I use the terms adjunct faculty and part-time faculty interchangeably to refer to part-time instructors, paid on a per-course or hourly basis for their work.
In the past four decades, the postsecondary landscape has seen a dramatic shift in the composition of instructors and the positions they hold (AAUP, 2017;Snyder, et al., 2016). The AAUP estimates that the number of tenure and tenure-track faculty appointments has dropped from 45% of the total instructors to only 30%, while contingent appointments (including non-tenure-track, adjunct, and graduate students) has soared to 70% of total appointments. Part-time appointments made up 40% of the instructors in higher education in , up from 24% in 1975(AAUP, 2017. Other sources of data have placed this number as high as 50% (Snyder, et al., 2016).
The shift is mostly due to the cost savings institutions gain by using contingent workers. AAUP (2017) reported that the average tenured professor nationwide earned $102,402 annually in the 2016-2017 academic year. In comparison, the average salary paid to adjunct faculty working at one institution was $20,508. Some individuals even reported being paid less than $1,000 a course as recently as 2013 in the Boston area (Adjunct Action, 2015). At the same time, only five percent of institutions offer all part-time faculty benefits, like health insurance, while 33 percent offer some of their part-time faculty benefits. In both cases, benefits are prorated based on less than fulltime worked and any salary-based benefits, like retirement contributions, are lower because of the lower salary (AAUP, 2018). This is not to say that institutions are floundering financiallymany of the largest increases in part-time employment occurred during times of relative economic stability. What is happening, though, is that institutions have been shifting their spending priorities from instruction to noninstruction expenditures, such as research funding, student academic services, and student services such as facilities and sports (Jacob, McCall, & Stange, 2018;Webber & Ehrenberg, 2010).
As a result, there are now two "classes" of faculty, the tenured "haves" and the temporary, part-time "have-nots," and this has been the case for nearly three decades (Bowen & Shuster, 1986). Because adjunct faculty are cheaper and help offset undergraduate teaching loads, hiring them allows institutions to protect the researchheavy, more specialized tenure positions. Tenured faculty benefit from this situation, and as such have no vested interested in seeing it change (Gappa & Leslie, 1993). As a result, they do not always seek to incorporate adjunct faculty into the department culture, nor do they always support adjunct faculty when they seek to change the system or advocate for themselves, e.g. through collective bargaining.
Due to their part-time status, many adjunct instructors are disconnected from the campus community (Center for Community College Student Engagement [CCCSE] 2009). Forty percent of part-time faculty indicate they spend zero hours advising students (formally or informally), 47% indicate that they spend zero hours outside of class interacting with students, and nearly 80% spend zero hours participating in campus committees or task forces (CCCSE, 2009). The few studies that specifically address adjunct engagement identify similar feelings of being invisible on campus, very little connection with other members of the faculty and department heads (Bell, 2000), very little guidance in course and curriculum development, and lacking a "voice" within a department or on campus (Callan, 1997;Donoughue, 2008;Gappa & Leslie, 1993;Jolley, et al., 2014;Kezar & Maxey, 2014).
Adjuncts are also limited on time, as many spend their time working for more than one institution to accumulate a reasonable salary, but then must spend additional time commuting back and forth between said institutions (Ethan & Seidel, 2013;Mueller, Mandernach, & Sanderson, 2013). Additionally, the only measure of adjuncts' teaching occurs during the student evaluation process, as many adjuncts report never having been evaluated by an outside observer (Jolley, et al., 2014;Kezar & Maxey, 2014). This is potentially problematic given that the validity of student evaluations of teaching tend to be biased against women (Boring, 2017;MacNell, Driscoll, & Hunt, 2017, Sprague & Massoni, 2005 and people of color (Reid, 2010) and are not particularly effective at measuring a teacher's effectiveness (Boring, Ottoboni, & Stark, 2016;Uttl, White, & Gonzalez, 2017).

Who are adjunct faculty?
Adjunct faculty in the popular press are typically painted with a broad brush that completely conceals the diversity of people who work part-time and what their motivations are for doing so. Countless articles posted by magazines and newspapers, describe the conditions under which some adjuncts livesome requiring food stamps to eat, others turning to sex work to supplement their meager incomes, and some even living out of their cars (Gee, 2017). Others describe the "frequent flyers," those adjuncts who work for multiple institutions and spend a good majority of their time commuting between campuses (Hall, 2015). Yes, these examples highlight the exploitation of adjunct faculty, but they do not present a representative view of all adjuncts and their motivations for working part-time. Nor do they represent why parttime faculty were utilized in the first place: The utopian view of adjunct professors is one of having highly educated, highly qualified, mentor-quality leaders who are also practicing professionals instructing the individual specialty in each college-level course. That is, they teach their subject matter of expertise in a highly specialized or focused class... These stellar part-timers bring the benefit of years of experience to the classroom thereby giving each student the best of both worlds. Additionally, it can be argued that adjuncts bring fresh faces and new ideas into the classrooms. In the end, it is the student who benefits the most. (Dedman & Pearch, 2004, p. 27).
Unfortunately, the utopian view is not how reality presents itself. Adjunct instructors typically fall into one of four main categories, as defined by the foundational work of Gappa and Leslie (1993): the career-enders; the specialists, experts or professionals; the freelancers; and the aspiring academics.
The first group of adjunct instructors are referred to as the career-enders.
These individuals have typically held either a full-time appointment in higher education or in some industry outside of higher education, and have chosen teaching as an important part of their retired life. While traditionally they have made up a small percentage of the adjunct faculty workforce, their numbers are steadily increasing because of retiring baby boomers (Lyons, 2007). The second group of adjuncts are the specialists, experts, or professionals, faculty who maintain a full-time job and teach either discipline-specific or general education courses as a second job, mostly due to their love of teaching. It can include medical professionals and business people, and accounts for nearly 50% of the adjunct faculty workforce nationwide (Lyons, 2007).
The third group are referred to as the freelancers, and include faculty for whom one of their many part-time roles is teaching in higher education. This group includes faculty who teach by choice and faculty who teach part-time due to other roles they play, such as parenting or caregiving. The freelancers make up the smallest percentage of the adjunct faculty workforce (Lyons, 2007).
The final group of adjunct instructors are the aspiring academics, faculty with terminal degrees or ABD doctoral students who are gaining experience teaching as they maneuver the job market to land a full-time faculty appointment. Monks (2009) reports that in 2004, 35%t of adjunct faculty appointments were held by those in this group, up from around 17%t in the early 1990s (Gappa & Leslie, 1993). However, this number may have increased in the past decade and a half given the consistent increases in doctoral degrees conferred and the unequal increases in full-time positions available for those newly minted doctorate degree holders (Snyder et al., 2016). It is this group of adjunct faculty who gains the most media attention (Lyons, 2007). They are also the most likely to participate in political activism in pursuit of better working conditions (Lyons, 2007).
While most adjunct faculty do have other occupations or obligations that prevent them from immersing themselves fully in the institutional culture (Lyons, 2007), it has been shown that approximately 30% of community college adjunct faculty report having worked for their current institutions for over 10 years (Leslie & Gappa, 2002), indicating a level of institutional loyalty that is sometimes overlooked by the institutions themselves. Meixner, Kruck and Madden (2010) also reported approximately 30% of adjuncts at a mid-size public university had worked there for more than 10 years. Institutions accept the narrative that adjunct faculty wish to remain weakly connected to their institutions, and because of logistical and economic difficulties barely attempt to institute programs that will help develop adjunct faculty teaching skills (Roeche, Roueche, & Milliron, 1995).

Impacts of Part-time Faculty on Student Outcomes
There has been a substantial amount of research in the learning and retention outcomes of students who are taught by predominately adjunct faculty versus those taught by full-time faculty (Bettinger & Long, 2010;Bolge, 1995;Burgess & Samuels, 1999;Chen, 2012;David, et al., 1985;Deutsch, 2015;Eagan & Jaeger, 2008;Ehrenberg & Zhang, 2005;Fedler, 1989;Harrington & Schibik, 2001;Jacoby, 2006;Jaeger & Eagan, 2009;Johnson, 2011;Landrum, 2009;MacArthur, 1999;McGuire, 1993;Muller, et al., 2013;Ronco & Cahill, 2004;Rossol-Allison, 2011;Sonner, 2000;Wallin, 2004;Wickun & Stanley, 2011). Despite an abundance of research, the impacts of using adjunct faculty remain unclear, as some studies report negative impacts in GPA, second-year retention, and graduation rates, while other studies show no impact compared to students taught by full-time faculty in some of these metrics, and some even report positive findings. This section of the literature review will summarize the reported advantages and disadvantages to utilizing adjunct faculty.
The one very clear benefit most reported in the literature is that adjuncts can bring professional experience into the classroom (Bettinger & Long, 2010;McGuire, 1993;Wallin, 2004;Wickun & Stanley, 2011). This is especially true in cases where the adjuncts are current professionals in the field or are career-enders who spent their previous careers in industry. In their research, Bettinger and Long (2010) found at a public, four-year college, students who take courses with older adjunct faculty (over the age of 40), are more likely to take subsequent courses in the major, especially in majors that are directly tied to a profession, such as education, engineering, and the sciences. They attributed this to the fact that many older adjunct faculty have prior or concurrent industry experience that can be shared in their teaching. They also found younger adjunct faculty (under the age of 40), have a positive impact on students taking more courses in academic subjects, mainly attributed to their ability to focus on their teaching, rather than research. McGuire (1993) and Wallin (2004) both state that using professional adjunct faculty maintains ties with the local professional and business communities in the area of the institution. Wallin (2004) also suggests that practicing professionals bring a "real-world" component to their teaching, something that full-time faculty may be lacking from either many years out of industry or having never been in industry to begin their careers.
Where the literature begins to get a little unclear is when researchers focus on student outcomes, which was the focus of much of the research on adjunct faculty in the 1990s and 2000s. The following section will summarize the literature surrounding student retention, graduation/completion rates, individual course success, and student GPA.
Part-time faculty and student retention. Harrington and Schibik (2001) focused their research on first-year freshman at a mid-size comprehensive university. They analyzed the fall to spring retention of four cohorts of students spanning four years. They reported that 47% of the overall cohort, on average, took at least half their coursework with adjunct faculty and almost 57% of those students were not retained to the spring semester. They found a significant relationship between a higher exposure to part-time faculty in the first semester of college and a lower retention rate in the second semester. Ronco and Cahill (2004) reported that, while high school GPA and entering college having declared a major are more important indicators of retention at a public, research-intensive university, there was a significant effect in student retention when students took less than a quarter of their freshman year credits with full-time faculty. They showed an almost 14 percentage point drop in second-year retention for those students who took the vast majority of their freshman courses with part-time faculty or graduate student assistants. Ehrenberg and Zhang (2005), using nationwide data collected by the College Board, reported that an increase in exposure to part-time faculty by 10 percentage points results in a 0.5 percentage point reduction in first-year completion at public institutions. However, they reported that an increase in exposure to part-time faculty had no measurable impact on second-year retention at public institutions. Eagan and Jaeger (2008) studied the impact of instructor type in gatekeeper courses, those first-or second-semester courses required for either a major or general education, at four public universities. They reported for every percentage point increase in exposure to part-time faculty in gatekeeper courses, students became up to 37% less likely to be retained into the second year, even after controlling for key variables such as students' prior academic achievement and academic major. Because their study focused on gatekeeper courses, which typically have large enrollments and thus tend to suffer from poor pedagogical practices such as lecturing or failing to engage a large percentage of students (Seymour & Hewitt, 1997), Eagan and Jaeger postulate that the reduced retention in the second year is a result of part-time faculty being less accessible and less available to students outside of the classroom.
More recent research by Chen (2012) and Deutsch (2015) appears to show that part-time faculty have very little impact on retention rates. Chen (2012) analyzed national community college data from the National Center for Education Statistics' Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS) and Beginning Postsecondary Students (BPS). Through the IPEDS system, institutions are required to report on a number of variables, including ratio of part-time instructors and graduation rates. BPS follows a cohort of students that began postsecondary education in the 1995-6 academic year and followed them through 2001. Both sets of data allow for longitudinal tracking of students. Chen (2012) was most interested in what institutional-level characteristics of four-year institutions resulted in higher student dropout rates. He found no significant effect of the percentage of part-time faculty on student dropout rates. Deutsch (2015) also ran statistical analyses on first-year retention rates using IPEDS data from the fall 2004 to fall 2012 cohorts from more than 1,100 institutions. His results revealed no significant relationship between retention rates and the percentage of part-time faculty at an institution, even after separating the data into public versus private institutions.
As one can see, the quantitative research has been unclear as to whether retention rates are impacted by a student's exposure part-time faculty. When looked at from an institutional perspective, it appears exposure to part-time faculty does have an impact, but when looked at using higher level data, like nationwide surveys, there isn't as much of an impact.

Part-time faculty and graduation/completion rates.
Another typical measure of student success is graduation rates. Ehrenberg and Zhang (2005) utilized data from the College Board to analyze the impact of part-time faculty on graduation rates at four-year institutions. Their econometric analyses revealed that as the percentage of part-time faculty or more faculty on non-tenure track lines increased, there was a reduction in graduation rates. This was most prevalent at public institutions, compared to private institutions. They found that a 10 percentage point increase in part-time faculty resulted in a 2.65 percentage point reduction in graduation rate. They also found that the magnitude of the effects are largest at master's level institutions, where a 10 percentage point increase in part-time faculty results in a three percentage point reduction in undergraduate graduation rates. Ehrenberg and Zhang (2004) also reported that the College Board data did include some research on two-year institutions, but their analyses showed no impact of increasing part-time faculty on the graduation rates at two-year institutions. Jacoby (2006) developed a model using IPEDS data and found that the ratio of part-time faculty had a significant and negative impact on three separate measures of graduation rates of community college students nationwide, in direct contrast to the findings of Ehrenberg and Zhang (2004). Both of these studies used institutional data that may have simplified the relationship between other variables, such as student motivation and academic performance, which may also impact graduation rates. Jaeger and Eagan (2009) combined institutional-and student-level data to report on associate's degree completion rates in the California community college system. Their statistical analysis showed that with every 10 percentage point increase in exposure to part-time faculty, there was a one percentage point reduction in degree completion. While this may seem to be a small impact, the average student in their sample took 50% of their credit load with part-time faculty, resulting in a five percent decrease in degree completion rates. Of their total sample, 4.4% took their entire credit load with part-time faculty, which ultimately resulted in those students being 10% less likely to complete their degree. In contrast, Deutsch (2015) found that six-year graduation rates were not significantly impacted by the percentage of part-time faculty at an institution. He used IPEDS data from the freshman cohorts of 2001-2006 that represented more than 1,100 institutions.

Part-time faculty and individual course success.
There is limited research on individual course success, mostly because of the possible disparity between how part-time and full-time faculty grade, and that individual success is more likely determined by other variables, such as high-school GPA or standardized test scores. Fedler, Counts, and Stoner (1989) was one of the first studies to address this question and found that part-time journalism faculty at two universities in Florida and one university in Ohio were more likely to give higher grades than full-time faculty. MacArthur (1999) found that part-time community college humanities faculty were more likely to give higher grades than their full-time compatriots in their courses. Part-time faculty gave 42% of their students As, compared to 22% of the students enrolled in courses with full-time faculty over the course of three spring semesters. Sonner (2000) also reported that at a small public university, where 70% of the business courses were taught by part-time faculty, there was a significant difference between the grades given by part-time versus full-time faculty, even after controlling for course size, discipline, and instructor degree. The most commonly held belief in the literature for this phenomenon is that part-time faculty members' jobs are reliant mostly on student evaluations, and as Greenwald and Gilmore (1997) report, low grades conversely impact positive student evaluations. Jacoby (2006) hypothesized that because part-time faculty are more likely to have lower course expectations and give higher grades, it explains why students who take introductory courses with part-time faculty are less likely to be successful in subsequent courses in a series taught by full-time faculty (Burgess & Samuels, 1999). This is in direct opposition to work by Mueller et al. (2013) on the success of students in an online course taught by both adjunct and full-time faculty. Both adjunct and fulltime faculty were required to complete the same training before teaching online. They report that there is a significant difference in the final course grades, completion rate, and course satisfaction level between sections taught by adjunct and full-time faculty, where students were less likely to succeed and be satisfied in sections run by adjunct instructors. To make matters even more confusing, no effect on individual course success has been reported in the literature as well. Davis, Belcher, and McKitterick (1986) showed that student success in subsequent English courses was not impacted by the status of the professor in the prior course. Bolge (1995) also reported no significant differences in how much students studying introductory mathematics learned from part-time versus full-time faculty, based on pre-and post-test scores on a standardized state skills test. Landrum (2009) also found no significant differences between the grade distributions of part-time versus full-time faculty in undergraduate courses in the social sciences.
It appears that individual course success is also too variable to draw any meaningful conclusions about the impacts of using part-time faculty.

Part-time faculty and GPA.
There have been a few studies that have shown that a higher exposure to parttime faculty can impact the first-year GPA of students. Harrington and Schibik (2001) found that students at a mid-sized comprehensive university who took a higher percentage of their courses with part-time faculty were more than likely to be male, have lower SAT or ACT scores, and have lower first-year GPAs following the completion of the fall semester. Ronco and Cahill (2004) also found that students at a public, research-intensive university who took 50% or more of their credit hours with adjuncts had a slightly lower first-year GPA. Johnson (2011) presents a unique argument that the majority of studies that measure the impact of part-time faculty on student outcomes report statistical artifacts that result from aggregating data, typically into quartiles representing the percentage of classes taken with part-time faculty.
Using a different statistical approach, Johnson reports that part-times faculty at a midsize research university have no impact on second-year retention and also found that contingent faculty give higher grades than tenure/tenure-track faculty. While many studies had previously shown a negative impact on GPA, once Johnson accounted for high school GPA and ACT scores, there was no significant impact of contingent faculty on GPA. This takes into account research by Bettinger and Long (2005) which shows that students with high ACT scores and higher high school GPAs take more classes with tenure-track faculty, mostly because they are more likely to register for classes sooner and select course times that are more likely to be taught by tenure-track faculty. Rossol-Allison and Alleman Beyers (2011) also reported a miniscule difference in enrollee success, which they attributed to higher-achieving students purposely taking courses with full-time faculty. The work of Bettinger and Long (2005) and Rossol-Allison and Alleman Beyers (2011) may help to contextualize the results of Harrington and Schibik (2001) and Ronco and Cahill (2004), both of which also showed a correlation between standardized test scores and first-year GPA.
As one can see, the actual impact of adjunct faculty on student outcomes is unclear given the contradictory results of these quantitative studies, but there is the potential for concern given some of the reported negative impacts on retention and graduation rates. However, these studies do not tell the whole story, as they do not reveal why the reliance on part-time faculty would cause a drop in retention or graduation rates, or have an impact on student GPA. From the numbers alone, we cannot tease out if it is the result of instructional differences between full-and parttime faculty, or if it is the result of more situational characteristics between full-and part-time faculty, where part-time faculty have less out-of-class meetings with students, less time available to students, and less peer connections. It also combines all full-and part-time faculty together, without accounting for differences in experience and training. The above studies set an important foundation, in that there may be differences in the outcomes of students if we continue to rely on part-time faculty for a high percentage of instruction, to open the door for more quantitative and qualitative research seeking to understand why that may be the case. This research seeks to examine the experiences of part-time faculty teaching and of their professional development to begin to understand the nuances that may be lost using strictly quantitative data on student outcomes.

Instructional Practices of Part-time Faculty
Recent literature on adjunct faculty has focused more on the teaching practices of adjunct faculty compared to their full-time counterparts. There is less of a focus on individual student outcomes and more on whether the teaching practices used by faculty are effective in terms of student learning. The emphasis has shifted from focusing on their status as part-time faculty to the types of teaching approaches they use in the classroom, and if those approaches have been shown to be effective in the literature. The following section summarizes the research on the differences between the pedagogical approaches that full-and part-time faculty use in their classrooms. Schuetz (2002) analyzed data on instructional practices of community college faculty nationwide using the 2000 Center for the Study of Community Colleges survey. She found no significant differences between the group means of part-time and full-time faculty, which suggested that overall, the two groups have a very similar use of class time -45% of class time for lectures, 15% for class discussions, and 11% for quizzes and exams, with the rest of the time split between computer/internet usage, student presentations, media presentations, and field trips. The only significant difference in group means was in how often laboratory activities were used. That being said, they did find significant differences when they looked deeper into what faculty never do in the classroom. Part-timers are significantly more likely to never use guest lecturers (75% of part-timers answered never, compared to 69% of fulltimers), films or taped media (49% part-time versus 40% full-time), laboratory experiments (80% versus 69%), and computer/internet usage in class (61% versus 49%). She also reported that full-time faculty were three times more likely to use collaborative techniques, group activities, and teamwork assignments than part-time faculty. In terms of instructional activities outside of class, part-timers were less likely to have revised their syllabus in the past three years, less likely to have developed extracurricular activities for their students, and more likely to have spent no time planning for instruction on their most recent working day. Leslie and Gappa (2002) corroborated this data using the same dataset, as well as the National Survey of Postsecondary Faculty conducted in 1992-93 by the National Center for Education Statistics. They found similar results in both datasets. According to their analysis, although both full-and part-time faculty spent approximately the same amount of time in class lecturing, part-time faculty were less likely to use more "creative" teaching approaches in their classrooms. Umbach (2007) utilized data from the Faculty Survey of Student Engagement, which was administered to 132 institutions in spring of 2004 to determine differences between the instructional practices of part-time and full-time faculty. He found that part-time faculty were significantly less likely to use active and collaborative strategies in the classroom, presented less of an academic challenge, and spent less time preparing for classes than their full-time counterparts. He did, however, find that part-time faculty in the social disciplines, like nursing, psychology, and education, were more likely to use active and collaborative teaching practices (Chickering & Gamson, 1987) in their classrooms. Baldwin and Wawrzynski (2011) analyzed the 2004 National Survey of Postsecondary Faculty. With over 9000 faculty at four-year institutions, they found that part-time faculty were more likely to use subject-centered activities, such as multiple choice exams, and were less likely to use learner-centered activities such as essay exams, group projects, written assignments with multiple drafts, and peer evaluation techniques. Eagan (2007) corroborated these results using the same data, and also found that part-time faculty were less likely to use technology in the classroom, including having a course website.
As part of developing a community of practice for the University of British Columbia's dentistry adjunct faculty, faculty (both fulland part-time) and graduate students were interviewed on their assessment and evaluation techniques (Webb, Wong, & Hubball, 2013). They found that the knowledge of evidence-based approaches for best educational practices to be low among not only adjunct faculty, but also full-time tenure-track faculty and graduate students.
As one can see, the research on how adjunct faculty teach in comparison to full-time faculty is limited, mostly to large-scale, nationwide surveys of teaching practices. At first glance, it appears that full-and part-time faculty teach in very similar ways, especially in regards to the time spent lecturing, having discussions and giving exams. However, the studies above do make mention that part-time faculty are less likely to engage in "more creative" (Leslie & Gappa, 2002) teaching practices, such as active and collaborative practices. There are also findings that suggest that part-time faculty spend less time preparing and challenge their students lessall of which could lead to differences in student outcomes outlines above. But again, there is very little accounting for the differences in teaching experience and training among all of the part-time faculty being surveyed. This study seeks to allow part-time faculty to describe their teaching practices, specifically in the sciences, using their own words and describing their own goals for their courses and how they attempt to achieve those goals.

Theoretical Framework: Novice to Expert Model of Skill Development
Teaching is a skill that must be developed over time. Much like participating in sport or chess playing, developing the skills necessary to be an expert teacher requires years of practice and study (Berliner, 2004). Dreyfus and Dreyfus (1980) developed a model of skill development that extends from novice to expert and illustrates growth over the course of one's experience in a particular domain. There are five stages of development in the Dreyfus and Dreyfus (1980) model: Novice, Advanced Beginner, Competent, Proficient, and Expert. The Novice-to-Expert skill model has been used to explain the acquisition of knowledge and skills in a variety of contexts, including clinical medical education (Batalden, Leach, Swing, Dreyfus & Dreyfus, 2002;Carraccio, Benson, Nixon & Derstine, 2008;Green et al., 2009;Swing et al., 2013) and nursing (Benner, 2004). Adapted and expanded upon for teaching by Berliner (2004), the characteristics of the five stages can be seen in summary in Appendix X.
In the novice stage, the task environment is typically decomposed into contextfree features that can be recognized without the desired skill, and then very specific rules are followed when those features are encountered (Dreyfus, 2004). For example, a novice manual transmission driver will be taught to shift up to second gear when the speedometer reaches 10. While this works most of the time, it will not work when the context changes, such as driving up a hill. In a teaching context, a novice teacher is typically bounded by rules that are context-free, such as "give praise for correct answers" or "wait at least three seconds after asking a higher order question" (Berliner, 2004, pg. 206). Novice teachers are fairly inflexible because of those rules, only seeing things in black and white when making decisions. In a K-12 context, student teachers and first-year teachers are often novices (Berliner, 2004).
As learners move into the advanced beginner stage, they start to have some expanded context and experience that helps them see that rules have exceptions, but are still challenged when faced with novel difficult situations. The manual transmission driver will use engine sounds as well as the established rules to determine when to shift gears (Dreyfus, 2004). In education, this is where the verbal knowledge taught in education programs melds with the situational knowledge gained through experience. Most second-and third-year teachers fall into this category of skill development. While they begin to feel more comfortable, when novel situations arise, like the first time a student challenges authority or tries to monopolize the teacher's attention, they are unsure how to proceed until they have experienced it a few times.
Case knowledge, or the learning that happens in those kinds of situations, is practical knowledge developed mainly during this stageit is ultimately the knowledge experts rely upon later in their careers (Berliner, 2004). There is some evidence that some teachers never develop past the advanced beginner stage (Borko et al. 1992;. As learners gain more case knowledge and experience, they become overwhelmed and begin to wonder how they will ever master the skill. They begin to develop their own set of rules for situations they have experienced, most of which are tempered by the context in which they are learning, and thus are inappropriate for novice and advanced beginners. Because they can regulate part of their context, competence is experienced by practitioners who recognize when to attend to a situation and when to ignore another based on their contextual experience. The competent driver leaves the highway and regulates their actions based on speed, but the situational characteristics, like surface conditions, severity of the curve, etc., require them to quickly analyze the best course of actioneither to hit the brakes or continue accelerating (Dreyfus, 2004). Competent teachers make conscious decisions about what they are going to do by making their own plans and setting realistic goals.
Becoming competent can be frightening to the learner, because prior to this stage, they can write off unsuccessful situations as not having adequate training and experience, or not having learned enough of the rules. Because competence is characterized in people that have chosen their own set of rules, they feel ultimately responsible when a situation goes awry and they still struggle when faced with unfamiliar situations. As such, they are not very fast, fluid, or flexible in their decision making. If teachers reach competence, it typically occurs within the third to fifth year of teaching (Berliner, 2004). It is also at this stage where emotional attachment may play a very important role in further skill development. Benner (1984) found that with nurses, the more emotionally invested they were, both in the joy of a job well done and the remorse felt when a situation went awry, the more likely they were to progress to later stages of skill development. The nurses who remained within the safety of their own rules were less likely to progress forward and more likely to burn out trying to figure out all of the possible rules and maxims presented by a career in medicine. This may help to explain the retention issues of new teachers in the K-12 context-many do not last more than five years (Ingersoll, 2003;Sutcher, Darling-Hammond, & Carver-Thomas, 2016).
As one becomes more emotionally attached to their career, it becomes more and more difficult to resort back to the inflexible rules that they themselves have developed. Using both positive and negative emotional experiences and allowing for the anxiety of choice, proficient practitioners can set forth plans that are the obvious outcome, rather than the result of a complex set of deliberations. The proficient driver approaches the curve just as the competent one, but is more likely to react faster and will be more likely to navigate the curve successfully (Dreyfus, 2004). Teachers are considered proficient when they respond with situational intuition that has been built upon years of case knowledge and experiences, being able to predict when a classroom situation may go awry. Proficient teachers, however, still take time to deliberate when making decisions. Proficiency is typically not seen before the fifth year of teaching (Berliner, 2004).
Expertise is achieved when all of the situational experiences encountered by that person coalesce into a reference that they can intuitively pull from. Decisions are immediatethe car driver approaching the curve quickly pulls their foot from the accelerator and applies the correct pressure to the brake with zero thought (Dreyfus, 2004). Another example of expertise can be seen in expert chess masters, who typically play games at five to-10 seconds a turn, navigating more than 100,000 possible scenarios with very little deliberation (Dreyfus, 2004). Expert teachers function as effortlessly as possible, using their intuition and knowledge from thousands of hours of teaching to deal with situations as they appear. Expert teachers are still deliberate when something doesn't work out in the classroom, but very rarely reflect when things go smoothly. They operate from a deep understanding of the total situation. It is generally regarded that it takes approximately 10 years or 10,000 hours of practicing a skill in a particular domain to reach expert level (Berliner, 2004).
Developing expertise in teaching, however, requires more than just reflection and experience. Bereiter and Scardamalia (1993) suggest that teachers must continuously engage in self-regulating their learning about teaching in order to develop expertise. Experts, they claim, continuously seek out opportunities to further their understanding of problems, and as a result develop even more effective ways of problem-solving, as opposed to non-experts who resort to routine based on experience. Kreber (2002) describes the difference between an excellent teacher and an expert teacher as where their knowledge of teaching is derived from. An excellent teacher will develop and modify their skills based on experience onlywhat works and doesn't work in their particular context. An expert teacher develops their expertise not only through experience, but draws in knowledge from outside resources on teaching specificallyusing the educational literature and pedagogical models developed by others to inform their practice.
One of the main focuses of this research study is to determine if the novice-to expert skill model can be used to describe the skill development, not of traditional K-12 teachers, but of adjunct faculty members, many of whom have entered into the teaching profession through a wholly untraditional way. Many of the participants in this study may be considered experts in their own careers, and as such, one wonders if prior expertise or even prior development of other skills can impact teaching skill development.

Teaching Professional Development
For the purposes of this research, teaching professional development (TPD) is defined as "programs and activities meant to foster faculty member engagement in any individual or social activity, reflection, or learning about teaching or learning with the goal to improve one's own or other's teaching knowledge or practice" (Bouwma-Gearhart, 2008, pg. 5). This is to distinguish TPD from faculty development and professional development, in that the two latter terms often include a focus on the whole professional life of faculty, including research, content, and service professional development. TPD narrows the focus to those activities that focus solely on teaching.
Faculty development has gone through many changes in focus throughout history. The first recognized instance of faculty development was sabbatical leave, which was first instituted at Harvard University in 1810 (Lewis, 1996). From that point until the 1960s, the major focus of faculty development was on scholarly work and research expertise (Ouellett, 2010). Sorcinelli and colleagues (2006) then identified five major stages in the history of postsecondary faculty development, with the first being in the 1950s and -60s as the Age of the Scholar. During this time, very few institutions had any resources for faculty interested in improving their teaching (Ouellett, 2010), as the overarching perception at the time was that teaching skills improved as one's scholarship increased (Heiss, 1970). The second stage spanned the mid-1960s through the 1970s and is considered the Age of the Teacher. During this time period, faculty began to become dissatisfied with the lack of resources in regards to teaching (Ouellett, 2010). During this time, teaching improvement programs included "one-shot" workshops, sometimes called expert centers, where veteran faculty could advise colleagues in return for release time and financial incentive programs. Faculty received small grants or sabbaticals to engage in teaching improvement projects. The 1980s brought in the Age of the Developer, which was a time where institutions began to formally create faculty development positions and centers on campus (Sorcinelli et al., 2006). The 1990s were the Age of the Learner, where the focus shifted more to how students learn, rather than how teachers teach, which led to innovations in student-centered, active, and collaborative learning (Sorcinell et al., 2006). During this time, faculty development programs evolved quickly to become comprehensive, institution-wide programs that served the large diversity of faculty (Ouellett, 2010). It has been proposed by Sorcinelli and colleagues (2006) that we are now in the Age of the Networker, where faculty development centers are being called upon by institutions to work with faculty, staff and administrators to solve institutional problems.
TPD can take many different forms. Weimer and Lenze (1994) identified five categories of postsecondary TPD. They have been ranked in importance by full-time STEM faculty in a study by Bouwma-Gearhart (2008) as: workshops, seminars, or courses; consultation of teaching resource material, either paper or electronic; colleague-to-colleague mentoring; consultations with individuals at education centers or education "experts"; and grants/sabbaticals for working on teaching curriculum/instruction. Despite a large amount of research into the effectiveness of workshops, seminars, courses, and colleague-to-colleague mentoring (in the form of mentoring partnerships and learning communities), there is less research on the importance of the other types of TPD, even though consultation of teaching resource material may be the most common form of TPD practiced (Sunal et al., 2001). It is also important to note that, while this list has been created and ranked by full-time faculty, part-time adjunct instructors may not have access to these same types of TPD.
Four major reviews of the higher education TPD literature have been conducted. Levinson-Rose and Menges (1981) reviewed 71 studies from the 1960s to the 1980s and found that, while the majority of respondents had participated in workshops and seminars, typically "one-shot" meetings, those opportunities of TPD were the least likely to produce changes in faculty approaches to teaching. Steinert and colleagues (2006) reviewed TPD specifically in the medical sciences and found that it was difficult to "tease out" what makes teaching development effective. Preliminary findings suggest the importance of peers and feedback, as well as the importance of multiple methods of instruction. Stes and colleagues (2010) reviewed 36 studies between 1977 and 2007 and found weak evidence that development activities of longer duration resulted in positive learning outcomes at the faculty level. They also found that course-length interventions had more positive learning outcomes for students. Amundsen and Wilson (2012) reviewed the development literature using a slightly different lens, ultimately clustering together TPD that was more similar to allow for more accurate reporting of effectiveness. They also found that despite there being a consistent body of literature cited in TPD studies, it did not appear that many studies were built upon the results of previous work.

TPD for Adjunct Faculty
Research on adjunct TPD is lacking, especially within the STEM disciplines and at four-year institutions. Much of the research focuses on professional development at two-year public community colleges, as they employ some of the largest percentages of part-time faculty, upwards of 70% (Snyder et al., 2016). Fouryear institutions, especially research institutions, are more likely to focus their professional development attention on other cohorts of faculty, such as new and junior faculty, graduate teaching assistants, and even midcareer and senior faculty (Lambert & Cox, 2007).

It has been recommended by the Center for Community College Student
Engagement (2009) that part-time faculty be offered professional development, not only to enhance their teaching strategies, but to learn about the institution structure and mission (Easton, 2009), which will ultimately facilitate student success. Baron-Nixon (2007) lists key opportunities for professional development that may help to make part-time faculty feel more a part of their teaching communities. These characteristics include: scheduling development workshops at various times during the day, not just during the daytime hours, to allow part-time faculty the opportunity to attend; providing information about grants and fellowships that may not be wellpublicized; participation in scholarly forums where faculty can share scholarly activities and accomplishments; access to institutional funding for teaching improvements; access to professional development to increase technology usage; invitations to submit original scholarly work in institutional publications; access to funding to attend conferences and pedagogical seminars; and tuition discounts for educational programs pursued at the institution. Jaeger and Eagan (2011) have shown a positive correlation between the percentage of non-tenure-track faculty (of which adjuncts were included) and student retention, when all faculty at an institution are provided support and training. That being said, there are very few opportunities for adjunct faculty to interact, share their experiences, and be exposed to and embrace current pedagogical advances within their program or institution (Lydon & King, 2009). Schuetz (2002) reported on the instructional practices of community college instructors nationwide and, as a part of the survey used, asked questions regarding professional development. Among full-time faculty, 85% responded that they intended to pursue professional development in the next year, compared to 76% of part-time faculty. Full-time faculty were more likely to engage in behaviors that indicated they would follow through in pursuing professional development, such as joining membership organizations and attending meetings or conferences related to those organizations. It is also important to note that not all institutions allow adjuncts to participate in workshops or seminars, colleague-to-colleague mentoring can vary on a wide range of implementation (Boyle & Boice, 1998;Zellers, Howard & Barcic, 2008), and sabbaticals are typically unavailable to part-time faculty. Another consideration is timemost adjunct faculty have at least two jobs and must balance any development between a typical workload and commuting (Ethan & Seidel, 2013;Mueller et al., 2013).
There have been a few studies that have focused on the success of specific programs implemented by four-year institutions to increase TPD opportunities for adjunct faculty. The following section summarize those studies, organized by the type of program: online workshops, orientation programs, and long-term teaching programs or communities of practice.
Quite possibly the easiest approach to TPD for adjunct instructors is instituting online opportunities for TPD. One of the largest obstacles to implementing any type of professional development for adjunct faculty is the accessibility to the faculty, as many are only on campus for the short periods they teach each week. Using asynchronous online workshops can allow adjunct faculty to use resources they may not be able to access on campus. Yee (2007) describes such a course developed for adjunct and other teaching faculty at the University of Central Florida that can serve as a touchpoint for adjunct instructors to review as necessary. The course was designed with several stand-alone modules on pedagogy that can be started and stopped at any time, but included many hyperlinks and resources that provided several layers of additional information. Instructors were given access to the course indefinitely, so they could refer back as necessary.
Another common approach to TPD for adjunct faculty is to offer orientation or onboarding workshops at the beginning of the year. Key features of orientation workshops for part-time faculty include: ample opportunities for the adjunct to become familiar with the mission and values of the institution; acquainting the adjunct with the policies and procedures they must follow; assisting adjunct faculty members in developing departmental relationships; providing opportunities for mentorship; establishing reliable means of communication; and providing the basic instructional tools the adjunct will need in the classroom (Smith & Wright, 2000). While most of these orientations focus on the myriad of operational concerns of a new faculty member, such as how to utilize email, learning management systems, and an overview of academic support departments, some have begun to include talks and workshops on teaching. Yee (2007) describes one such orientation for adjunct faculty members at the University of Central Florida that takes place in the form of an eight-hour retreat on a Saturday. One-third of the day is spent on administrative matters; the other two-thirds focus on pedagogical topics. Part-time faculty are awarded a stipend for attending the day's events. Renninger, Holliday and Carter (2007) describe an orientation developed at Shepherd University to support incoming adjunct faculty members after retention and graduation rates declined following a change in the institution's mission statement and classification (college to university). They offered the one-day session on several days to allow adjuncts the ability to attend at least one. They also polled the adjunct faculty to determine what information would be useful to include in a new faculty guidebook designed to take care of some of the operational information without using up people's time. Schwartz (2007) describes his personal experiences with an Instructor Effectiveness Training provided by one of the institutions he worked for when he began teaching. He took a face-to-face course over the course of four Sunday mornings, where he connected with other adjunct faculty and had the opportunity to reflect quickly on his experience in education and how to reach students with all sorts of learning styles and approaches.
There have also been examples of intensive term-or year-long programs that have been successful. The University of Connecticut recognized the need to centralize their TPD for adjunct instructors teaching at their regional campuses (Barker & Mercier, 2007). Adjunct instructors were nominated by campus heads to participate in the program, resulting in a group of adjuncts committed to learning to be better teachers. As such, they have had great success in the program. The program involves adjunct faculty being committed to traveling to the main UCONN campus, meeting with instructional designers on making pedagogical changes to their courses, implementing projects that enhance their own pedagogical practices and incorporate more technological applications to their courses, and a comprehensive evaluation of the course design at the end of the program. Adjunct instructors who complete the program then return to their regional home campus and serve as a teaching resource associate to the other adjunct faculty on campus. One such adjunct made note that having the teaching resource associates offer workshops has strengthened the social structure of the adjunct community on campus.
Miami University, known in the TPD literature for their use of Faculty Learning Communities (FLC), opened up a "FLC-lite" program to part-time faculty (Lambert & Cox, 2007). The program did not demand the intense commitment the full-time FLCs required, but did provide several workshops mandatory for participation, as well as a $200 stipend to spend on pedagogical materials. After the first year, when only five participants completed the program, the researchers began to gather information on what part-time faculty were looking for in terms of TPD, which included a stronger community tie and a strong focus on teaching in higher education.
The University decided to open up some of its typical FLC offerings to part-time faculty if they were interested and revamped the FLC-lite to focus even more on teaching. Webb, Wong, and Hubball (2013) also reported on the success of communities of practice for professional practitioners hired as adjunct faculty members to teach for the University of British Columbia programs of dentistry and education. Both programs offered flexible communities of practice that focused intensively on evidence-based instructional practices and assessment techniques.
While the researchers found it was difficult to ensure participation, and most of the adjunct faculty continued to relate to their chosen professions more than they did as instructors, the researchers also found that instructional practices changed to more student-centered teaching techniques and there were better learner outcomes based on assessment portfolios produced as part of the program.
TPD opportunities specifically for part-time faculty at four-year institutions are few and far between, so it appears that, in many cases, adjuncts are responsible for their own professional development, as described by Maria Durso (2011), which also appears to be the case for full-time faculty as well (Sherer, Shea and Kristensen, 2003;Sunal et al., 2001). Durso (2011), an Adjunct Instructor of English at Park University, reflects on her experience developing skills in the scholarship of teaching and learning as she began her part-time career. She was encouraged to read books and articles describing best practices and the accomplishments of her colleagues by the administration. By the end of her reflection, it is clear that the majority of Durso's development was of her own doingher ability to self-reflect allowed her to change her practices and convert her classroom to a learner-centered space. However, she states in her reflection, that simply being exposed to materials is not enough; there needs to be encouragement to develop teaching skills. Durso's (2011) reflections regarding part-time faculty and professional development also highlight one point that is very clear in the literature: Part-time faculty members are motivated to work primarily for their desire to teach, and many are motivated to become better teachers.
Further, 57% of part-time faculty in the profession teach not for the money, but simply because they enjoy teaching (AFT, 2010). Meixner et al. (2010) noted that, despite very clear concerns about difficulties keeping students engaged, maximizing learning experiences, and dealing with underprepared students, the overarching emotions regarding these concerns involved "love, passion, and appreciation for teaching and engaging with university students" (p. 145).

Post-positivism and Qualitative Research
This research was influenced by the post-positivist paradigm. Post-positivism upholds the belief of an absolute truth, but that the absolute truth is unattainable due to flawed human intellectual mechanisms (Lincoln & Guba, 1994). The evidence presented by research is always "imperfect and fallible," (Creswell, 2009, pg. 7). Postpositivists abandon the dualism of the positivists, but still maintain a sense of objectivity in which the researcher remains separate from the analysis (Lincoln & Guba, 1994). Post-positivist research focuses on how well current findings fit with the existing knowledge of a topic (Lincoln & Guba, 1994), while also reflecting the needs to assess causes that influence outcomes (Creswell, 2009). Post-positivism usually applies an etic, or outsider, approach. When an etic method is employed, a key feature is that observations are made across different settings in a parallel manner (Morris, Leung, Ames, & Lickle, 1999). At the same time, emic viewpoints may be solicited to "assist in determining the meaning and purposes that people ascribe to their actions," (Lincoln & Guba, 1994).
Post-positivism usually employs a quantitative approach, but when appropriate, a qualitative approach can also be utilized. Qualitative researchers are interested in understanding how people make sense of their world and their experiences in the world (Merriam, 2001). Qualitative post-positivism can be used to overlay a participants experience over an existing theory to determine if that theory can be used to explain the participant's experiences. The constant-comparative method (Glaser & Strauss, 1967) of data analysis is a commonly used approach within the paradigm of post-positivism (Lincoln & Guba, 1994).
A large portion of qualitative research is directed at problems within professional practice. Findings can be generalizable to other settings and therefore are informative for decision-makers in those other settings (Stevenson, 2004). As revealed in Chapters 1 and 2, policies surrounding the use of adjunct instructors and their institutional support systems are typically employed in a very superficial, quantitative manner, utilizing a positivist, dualist frameworknot accounting for the complexities of the experiences of all adjunct instructors. However, one distinctive problem of the post-positivist paradigm being utilized in qualitative research is that "findings do not translate into unambiguous prescriptions or blueprints for action to be followed mechanically by" decision-makers (Stevenson, 20040, pg. 46). The need to include a "rich, thick description" (Geertz, 1973) in a qualitative study is then imperative to allow decision-makers as much information as possible to interpret the findings in light of the circumstances by which they are found, "providing readers good raw material for their own generalizing" (Stake, 1995, p. 102).
This study employed a retrospective qualitative multiple case study methodology to answer the following research questions: 1. How do veteran adjunct faculty (five or more years of teaching), who teach in the natural sciences, describe their teaching? 2. How do veteran adjunct faculty, who teach in the natural sciences, describe their development of pedagogical skills along the Dreyfus and Dreyfus (1980) Novice to Expert Skill Model? 3. How do veteran adjunct faculty, who teach in the natural sciences, selfidentify their current stage of pedagogical skill along the Dreyfus and Dreyfus (1980) Novice to Expert skill model? 4. What do veteran adjunct faculty, who teach in the natural sciences, perceive as factors that provided positive results in their development of higher pedagogical skills? 5. What do veteran adjunct faculty, who teach in the natural sciences, perceive as factors that provided negative results in their development of higher pedagogical skills?
For the purposes of this research the term "pedagogical skills" is defined by the skills listed in the Novice-to-Expert Skill model (Berliner, 2004), including teaching approaches and strategies, and teaching using more equitable or inclusive pedagogy (Adams & Love, 2009). Participant experiences were analyzed through the lens of the Novice-to-Expert Skill model by Dreyfus and Dreyfus (1980) and how their experiences "caused" positive and/or negative growth along the model, utilizing a predominantly etic perspective. The exception to this was in Research Question #1, where participants' responses about how they describe their teaching were analyzed more from the emic perspective, or the insider perspective, utilizing their own words to describe their teaching.
The study followed all University of Rhode Island IRB Guidelines. There was a minimal risk to the participants, as the subjects were not part of a population traditionally at risk. Every effort was made to ensure the confidentiality of participant identities, with each participant being given a unique numeric code on all documentation. Participant consent forms were stored and organized in a separate, locked private file, so a connection cannot be made between participant identities and transcripts. Pseudonyms have been used in reporting the results.

Case-Study Methodology
Case study methodology was chosen based on the following considerations as described by Yin (2014): (a) the focus of the study is on "how" or "why" questions; (b) the researcher cannot manipulate the behavior of the participants in the study; (c) the researcher wants to cover the contextual conditions because it is felt they are relevant to the study of the case; and (d) the boundaries are not clear between the phenomenon and the context. Yin (2014) defines the scope of a case study as "an empirical inquiry that investigates a contemporary phenomenon in depth and within its real-world context" (p. 16). Stake (2013) uses the term quintain to describe this phenomenon; it is the object or condition to be studied. The quintain contains the individual cases that share a common characteristic or condition and are somehow categorically bound together.
In this research, the quintain is adjunct pedagogical development and is comprised of individual adjunct instructor experiences as the cases. In a multiple-case study, the individual cases are studied for their similarities and differences in order to understand the quintain. Yin's (2014) holistic multiple case study selection process embodies the post-positivistic paradigm, as cases are selected based on whether similar or contradictory results are expected for predicted reasons.
Each adjunct faculty member's experience is different, but they all inform the target of the studyadjunct pedagogical development. The boundaries between the quintain, adjunct professional development, and the contexts in which the individual faculty experience the quintain are difficult to parse out. For example, each individual adjunct faculty member is offered different experiences in terms of professional development because of institutional or departmental culture, and these experiences shape the development of their pedagogical skills.
One of the major pitfalls of case study methodology is asking questions that are too broad or have too many objectives (Baxter & Jack, 2008). Both Yin (2014) and Stake (1995) suggest placing boundaries to determine what is not part of the case. The boundaries set in this research are in regards to the types of institutions adjunct faculty have taught at and characteristics of the adjuncts themselves. The first boundary identified was that the adjunct faculty members interviewed should have at least five years of experience teaching, as the purpose of this study was to investigate the development of pedagogical skills, and time would certainly need to be a consideration. The second boundary identified was in regard to prior education. As the study focus was designed to look at the development of pedagogical skills in adjunct instructors as a result of their experiences as adjunct instructors, I did not want to cloud the results with the experiences of adjunct instructors with prior formal education in pedagogy. As such, adjunct faculty with conferred degrees in education (at the bachelor, master, or doctoral level), as well as those with K-12 certification, to account for alternative pathways of certification, were excluded from the intended sample. The third boundary imposed on the sample was that I wanted to focus on the experiences of adjunct faculty who have taught the majority of their courses at fouryear institutions. The bulk of the literature on adjunct faculty is focused on community colleges (Meixner et al., 2010), mostly because of their reliance on part-time faculty.
As adjunct faculty make up a lesser percentage of the total faculty at four-year institutions, institutions may have a different approach to supporting their professional development than two-year institutions. However, I did not exclude adjunct faculty who currently or previously have taught for two-year institutions. The final boundary imposed was that I did not include current graduate students who we classified as adjunct faculty for the institutions they were attending for their studies, as there is typically a different culture surrounding graduate student pedagogical support.

Sample
The participants for this study were selected using a purposive sampling method (Creswell, 2012). A snowball approach was attempted, but due to the constraints of the intended sample, none of the participants were identified because of their relationship to another participant. The participants in this study are part-time faculty members, who predominantly teach natural science courses (biology, chemistry, physics, environmental science, nutrition or general science) at four-year institutions.
Once I received IRB approval, emails (see Appendix B) were sent out to department chairs at four-year institutions throughout southern New England (Rhode Island, Massachusetts, and Connecticut). Various social media outlets (see Appendix C) with a higher-education focus were also identified as potential recruitment avenues.
Potential participants were directed to complete a short survey (see Appendix D) that was included in the initial communications to vet interested participants and ensure they fit within the boundaries of the quintain. The survey was completed through a Google Forms survey that was password protected and no names were collected through the survey. Once a participant was identified, I contacted them via email to schedule an in-person interview. Each potential participant was evaluated following the three main criteria for selecting cases as outlined by Stake (2013) year institutions, no K-12 certification, no formal education degree, and not a graduate student at the institution(s) where they teach). Of the nine, seven responded to further communication and were interviewed in person. All of the participants in the study had responded to the survey through the recruitment emails sent to department chairs, and as such, were all geographically located in southern New England. A summary of their demographic information can be seen in Table 1.
Of the seven participants interviewed, five identified as female and two as male. All of the participants identified as white, and one identified explicitly as Jewish.

Data Collection
The primary source of data was semi-structured interviews with the participants. Interviews were chosen to allow for the adjunct faculty voices to be utilized in the analysis, as well as to highlight nuances between individuals.
"Interviews are necessary when we cannot observe behavior, feelings, or how people interpret the world around them. It is also necessary to interview when we are interested in past events that are impossible to replicate" (Merriam, 2001, p.72). Using a semi-structured format for the interview assumes that each individual defines the world in their own unique way (Merriam, 2001). While there was a highly structured portion of the interview designed to obtain very specific information, the majority of the interview questions were not as strictly worded and did not occur in a specific order. This allowed for "the research to respond to the situation at hand, to the emerging worldview of the respondent, and to new ideas on the topic" (Merriam, 2001, p. 74). The first part of the interview focused on each faculty member's background, including questions about discipline, education, teaching experience, and identity, followed by questions about the courses they teach, what teaching approaches they utilized when they started teaching, and how their pedagogical skills have developed over their career as an adjunct, including what resources were available to them. Faculty were also provided with the Novice to Expert skill model (Dreyfus & Dreyfus, 1980) and were asked to identify which stage they identified with when they began teaching and where they feel their stage of teaching development resides currently. The semi-structured interview protocol used for this study can be reviewed in Appendix E.
Case studies typically examine complex phenomena where multiple variables impact the outcome of a single or small number of data points. As a result, multiple sources of evidence are used to triangulate the data (Yin, 2014). Additional sources of data that were used for triangulation included classroom documents, such as course syllabi, when they were made available by the participant. These documents served as a permanent record of the evolution of an instructor's teaching approach, and were helpful in triangulating the data collected in interviews. I also reviewed the mission statements and strategic plans of each institution identified by my participants in order to determine the underlying approach to professional development at each institution.

Data Analysis
Data analysis in qualitative research begins while collecting data. There is an iterative process of collecting data and immediately analyzing the data that serves to focus the remaining data collected (Merriam, 2001). For example, questions asked in the first interview may be modified to ensure that subsequent interviews result in the correct data. After each interview was transcribed, I began to construct categories or themes that emerged from the data using the constant-comparative method of data analysis developed by Glaser and Straus (1967). While developed for grounded theory research, it is commonly used in case study research as it "is compatible with the inductive, concept-building orientation of all qualitative research" (Merriam, 2001, p. 159 After working through the first interview transcript in the above manner, I began to group notes and comments that were similar or might fit together in the same theme. After this stage of analysis, I created a memo that included all of my initial themes and groupings. Keeping this category list in mind, I annotated the second interview as described above, and then compared those notes to the constructed list of categories and merged the themes together. This process continued until all of the data was analyzed and a complete master list of themes was created. Using this master list (see Appendix F), all of the data was re-analyzed to organize units of data that fit within each category (Merriam, 2001). As the analysis process is iterative, even after re-coding, the final findings required some additional reorganization from the master list of themes during the writing processas such, the master list is not the final organization of the themes in this dissertation.
The end product of case study research "is an intensive, holistic description and analysis of a single instance, phenomenon, or social unit" (Merriam, 1988, p. 21).
A rich, thick, descriptive narrative of each of the cases was developed from the data collected. As is essential in multiple-case analysis, similarities and differences were then identified across cases, in a cross-case analysis. It was important that the crosscase analysis not only focused on the commonalities among cases, but highlighted any case that has unusual features that caused it to stand out amongst the cases, typically due in part to context (Stake 2013).

Trustworthiness
To ensure the trustworthiness of my research, I considered the four criteria described by Guba (1981): credibility, transferability, dependability, and confirmability. A brief checklist accounting for all of these criteria can be found in Appendix G. To ensure credibility of the data and analysis, I used triangulation by collecting multiple sources of data, peer scrutiny using critical friends who are familiar with my background and with my research focus, and member checking with subjects during and after analysis to ensure their experiences had not been manipulated in any way. Participants were emailed a shortened version of the master list of themes that omitted some findings that may have been distressing or caused harm or anxiety to my participants. For example, I omitted the sub-theme in Research Question #3 that suggest that some participants identified as expert, but my analysis indicated that some may not have been experts. The findings summary that was sent out to participants can be seen in Appendix H. Three of the seven participants responded indicating that they were content with my findings and even added their commentary on a few items.
While most findings in qualitative research are relevant to only a small number of individuals or environments, each group is a member of a broader group, and as such, transferability between individuals should be accounted for. To account for transferability, a thick description of the phenomenon has been included in the analysis. Also, purposive sampling was employed to choose unique cases that may be similar to other contexts (other institutions). Dependability of a qualitative study is closely tied with credibility, but ensures that the study could be repeated by another researcher. An in-depth methodological description is key to allowing other researchers insight into how the study was conducted, as well as the keeping of reflective journals and extensive documentation throughout the data collection and data analysis portions of the research. The final criteria to ensure trustworthiness in a qualitative study is confirmability, or the assurance that the findings are the result of the experiences and ideas of the informants, not of the researcher. The best way to ensure confirmability is to be upfront about my personal experiences and biases in regards to my research focus, including a detailed admission of my own personal experiences, beliefs, and assumptions (Shenton 2004).

Personal reflection
The nature of qualitative research requires the use of researcher-as-instrument, and as such, can result in personal biases introduced in the analysis. I am an adjunct faculty member in the natural sciences who has had my own set of experiences developing my pedagogical skills, so I bring my own perspectives to the research. It is these experiences and perspectives that have shaped my research question and interview protocols. However, because each individual's reality is constructed by their own experiences, I must attempt to set aside my experiences while questioning participants and analyzing the data. The following reflection will utilize the lens of the Novice-to-Expert Skill Model by Dreyfus and Dreyfus (1980)  In retrospect, I would identify as an advanced beginner in the very first course where I was the instructor of record. I had a couple of years of experience in teaching as a graduate student, and even more years of experience as an undergraduate tutor before that. The most defining characteristic that makes me identify as an advanced beginner was being "Unable to see the entirety of a new situation (may miss some critical details)" (see Appendix A for the Novice to Expert Skill Model (Dreyfus & Dreyfus, 1980) including their education and career history, as well as a classification into one of the four categories of adjunct faculty as described by Leslie and Gappa (1993). The remainder of the chapter will be organized by research questions, with evidence that supports each question.

Participants
Natasha. Natasha is a white, female, part-time faculty member currently working for a small liberal arts university in New England, where she teaches primarily biology and general science courses. She has a master's degree in cell and molecular biology, and worked in research and development and sales for pharmaceutical companies before teaching. Natasha has worked for three different institutions in the 12 years that she has been an adjunct. She began working at an allwomen's university, where a friend of a friend told her about the position. She taught introductory biology and wellness courses there. She has also taught at a local community college, where she taught introductory biology. At both her current institution and the community college, she had union representation. I have decided to classify her as a freelancer, mostly because of her motivation in becoming an adjunct had to do more with flexibility to spend time with her family, which consists of a husband and two children. She could also be classified as an aspiring academic, although her lack of terminal degree has pigeonholed her into part-time positions, as many full-time positions now require terminal degree status for consideration.
However, she has no inclination to join the tenure track, as she has no desire to conduct original research.
Sofia. Sofia is a white, female, part-time faculty member who currently teaches environmental biology at a small, private, Catholic institution in New England. She has a master's degree in environmental engineering and a PhD in oceanography. She spent the majority of her career working as a soft money (grantfunded) research faculty member at a top oceanographic institute in New England, where she was an ecosystem ecologist. During that time, she advised a handful of graduate students as the major professor or a member of master's and doctoral committees. She also worked closely with a STEM outreach program that paired actual research scientists with K-8 teachers to advance elementary and middle school STEM education. She attributes many of her teaching skills to this work, as she had close relationships with education faculty and picked up tips and techniques from the workshops that she has modified for her teaching. She did not start teaching until about 12 years ago, when she began co-teaching a continuing education course at a comprehensive state university. She did spend a few years working as a full-time lab instructor for her current institution, but quit full-time because it was more time than she was willing to work. The institution later called her to teach environmental biology, which she has been teaching for six years. Sofia is classified as a careerender, as she did not begin teaching until her first career as a research scientist ended.

Rachel.
Rachel is a white, female, part-time faculty member who currently teaches biology courses at a small, private Catholic institution in New England. She has a PhD in molecular virology, but opted to stay home with her small children until they started school, as her lack of income was of no consequence to her family. She has been teaching as an adjunct for 15 years, also holding a part-time position at a small, liberal arts university early on in her teaching career. Her PhD has served her well as an adjunct, as she has developed a virology course at the institution where she works. She teaches both majors and non-majors. Majors normally take her virology course, whereas she teaches human biology and a microbiology course for non-majors.
She has, for one or two terms, held a non-tenure track full-time position, but only because there was a need for her to teach more than a part-time teaching load. She is classified as a freelancer, as many times in her interview she emphasized her family as her number-one priority over her teachingfor example, she mentioned taking a term off because her family was moving and that she couldn't teach afternoon labs because her kids would be home.

Malcolm.
Malcolm is a white, male, part-time faculty member who teaches earth science and chemistry at a small, private religious institution in New England.
He has a master's degree and worked as a microbiologist and chemist in industry and for public health initiatives in New England. He stumbled upon an ad for teaching at his current institution when he was helping his youngest child find a job after she finished college. He has been teaching both online and in the classroom for 13 years, teaching mostly non-major science electives like chemistry in society and earth science. Malcolm is classified as a career-ender, as teaching has been a secondary career now that he has retired from industry.
Philip. Philip is a white, male, part-time faculty member who teaches chemistry at two institutions, a community college and a comprehensive state university, both in New England. He has his master's degree in chemistry, and is ABD for his doctorate degree in chemistry. While he was a graduate student, he taught a lot of lab sections, as well as a lab recitation, as he was one of the few people with English as a first language teaching the labs. When he opted out of his doctoral program, he began working in industry as a chemist, where he was involved in safety and machine instruction. He worked a few times as a sabbatical replacement at a few local institutions, but it wasn't until about five years ago, when he was laid off from his job, that he began teaching regularly. He actually works "full-time" by working for the two institutions, both of which offer union representation. He teaches several different levels of chemistry, including general chemistry, organic chemistry and analytical chemistry. Philip would be classified as a career-ender, using teaching to fill in the gap between a long-term career and retirement.
Wanda. Wanda is a white, Jewish, female, part-time member who currently works for two different business schools in New England. She has a master's degree in nutrition science and is a registered dietitian. She taught a little straight out of graduate school, but also worked as a dietitian for WIC and for some hospitals. She has taught at numerous college and universities in New England for the past 17 years. She currently teaches nutrition and a course called Health and Disease to non-major students as electives. Wanda is classified as a freelancer because her husband has a full-time job with benefits, and she made mention of raising her family during her career.
Melinda. Melinda is a white, female, part-time faculty member who teaches physical science courses for a small, liberal arts college in New England. She has a master's degree in mechanical engineering. She spent the first part of her career in industry, where she worked long hours and traveled overseas often. When she decided to start a family, she quit the corporate world and decided to start teaching as a flexible job. She was offered a job teaching high school, but the schedule did not work for her family, which was her ultimate priority. She began working at her current institution six years ago, teaching algebra and merchandising math for fashion majors. She switched from the math department to the science department the next year, where she began teaching physics, a modern science and technology course designed for nonmajors, and a science for educators course designed for elementary education students.
Melinda is classified as a freelancer as she prioritizes her family over her job and is currently seeking out ways to make more money that fits with her schedule.

Findings
The following sections present evidence to support each of the research questions individually. Each participant's interview was analyzed to develop themes around how they described themselves as teachers, how they described their development along the Novice to Expert Skill Model (Dreyfus & Dreyfus, 1980), how they described their current stage of development along the skill model, and the positive and negative factors they perceived during their development.

Research question #1
Research question #1: How do veteran adjunct faculty, who teach in the natural sciences, describe their teaching? This question was designed to act as a baselineif I was going to ask questions regarding the development of pedagogical skills in veteran, adjunct, science faculty, I needed to have a good idea of how they saw themselves as teachers, both when they began and throughout their careers.
Participants were asked to describe their first and current teaching experiences in detail, using interview questions that guided their responses, many along the lines of asking them to tell stories and experiences. Participants were also asked several times about what an effective teacher looks like, or what an ineffective teacher looked like.
From their responses, three major themes presented themselves that describe how the participants teach: 1) science should be relevant to the students in the classroom; 2) science should be engaging, and they teaching using a variety of teaching practices; and 3) they develop personal connections with their students. During the interviews, participants were asked questions reflecting on their past and current teaching, as well as what they think effective and ineffective instructors look like. Overwhelmingly, the participants responded that teaching in the sciences should be relevant and engaging, while also prioritizing developing personal connections with their students.

Making science relevant
All of the participants have been responsible for teaching non-majors science courses at some point in their careers, and as a result, recognize the need for science to be accessible to all students in all of their classes, non-majors and majors alike. Those experiences made it very clear to them that part of being an effective teacher is to make sure that students can access science at a level that is appropriate. This is a common concern of students themselves, and in many cases, science being irrelevant to their lives is a reason they decided not to pursue further science education in their postsecondary careers. Pike and Dunne (2011)

interviewed students in the United
Kingdom who had chosen not to pursue science after compulsory education. An example of a student response: "…it was just so irrelevant to what…to my whole life and to what I would be doing. None of it was going to help me pay the bills and things like that. I just…didn't see the relevance of it really I just went off it…" (pg. 494).
Similarly, all of the participants in this study made mention of making their particular brand of science relevant for their college-aged students.
Relevance was referred to in several ways, from using small real-world analogies to explain difficult concepts, to using current events and situations relevant to the students' lives to illustrate concepts in action, to focusing the main goal of their courses in a way to enhance critical thinking skills to develop scientifically literate and consumer-conscious students when they exit the class.

Simple real-world analogies
Rachel, Philip, and Malcolm all described simple examples of analogies that they use to teach difficult concepts. An analogy can be defined as, "a comparison of two otherwise unlike things based on resemblance of a particular aspect," (Merriam-Webster, 2018). Analogies have been consistently used in many disciplines, including science, as a way to facilitate the construction of knowledge. The constructivist view of education (von Glaserfeld, 1983;Whittrock, 1985) has remained one of the leading theoretical perspectives on how learning in science occurs, and is based on two tenets: 1) learning is actively constructed and 2) learning is only possible if based on previously constructed knowledge. As a result, learning occurs when students examine the similarities between the new and what they already knowhence the extensive use of analogies by teachers who employ constructivist practices, especially in nonmajors courses (Dult, 1991;Coll, 2015;Glynn, 2015;Seiler, & Huggins, 2018).

Rachel described a good example of an analogy that included popular culture:
I teach about prion disease so I think that prions are like the Transformer toys really transform this thing you don't take any pieces away you don't add any pieces but you go from a bird to robot so you just change the way it's folded.
As a result, she says, "I get a real kick out of reading their papers and seeing my words come back….Transformers are in every answer and I just think that it's so interesting watching that connection." Malcolm also gave an example of using an analogy in his earth science class that students could refer back to, and its success: One such example he described using in a job interview teaching demonstration: "I did one on limiting reactants and I used the example of loaves of bread and slices of meat and pieces of cheese and how many sandwiches [someone could make]." Years later, he ran into someone who had seen that teaching demo and they related to him that "You were a really good teacher. I remember that lecture you gave me on the sandwiches." All of these examples take sometimes extremely complex science concepts and make them a little more approachable to the students by focusing on the similarities to concepts they already know and can access in their knowledge base.

Current events and students' lives
The majority of responses that referenced making their classes relevant to students referred to using current events and topics that would eventually impact the students' lives. Natasha details this when she described how she approaches teaching in her general science course for non-majors: Sofia, when asked in what context she felt most satisfied teaching, responded saying that she loves teaching her environmental biology course "because it's the topic that I feel is so little known by the general public, I teach non-science majors now but I feel it's so important that they understand ecology and the effects of humans, huge populations on ecology." An example of an assignment she gives in class that ties into the lives of students is detailed below: For instance, we did an exercise on food waste and they had to keep a diary on food waste and then we related that to the fact that, the scientific fact that, food Well what it does is yeah, it raises the temperature half a degree Fahrenheit.
Tablespoon of water will raise a gallon of water half a degree Fahrenheit, which is not enough to make a difference but what it does is it makes the pasta taste better. And examples like that. If you can get to an example that they are familiar with then you can make them remember it. At least a little better.
Rachel also describes a simple example that she uses in her human biology course, stating, "You know, I do the skin, I tell them where they put the ink for tattoos. I try to find the things that are relevant to their lives." All of the examples above provide connections to what students already know and have experienced to help to build scaffolds for new knowledge to be created, much like the analogies describe above, but focusing on much larger-scaled concepts.

Critical thinking skills
Taking real-world applications to the next level, some of the participants described how their goal was not just to use relevant examples in class, but make sure the skills students learn, like critical thinking skills, could be applied outside the classroom. Critical thinking skills are defined as the capability to think reflexively and to judge information thoughtfully, so as to decide if said information is reliable and to determine what action one should take based on said information (Ennis, 2002;Gut, 2011). Improving critical thinking skills is a common learning outcome in most science courses, but only some instructors make that their main focus, as evidenced in this study.
Melinda defines her classes by this process, stating, "I think that's what the science classes are supposed to be. It's more about applying the reasoning process and teaching you how to reason with it." As a way to teach students how to use the reasoning process, she makes sure she illustrates and scaffolds those skills in her classrooms: They sign up for current events and we start off every class with something that they've found. It can be something that sounds ridiculous, but they bring it in and we assess it for, was this a study? Is this a product that you would buy?
Is this a reputable source? Where was it published? How long was the study done? Was it double-blind, placebo-controlled? Are we talking absolutely risk, relative risk? Is somebody just trying to sell you something? And they're amazing. They go to Science News or Daily, or whatever, and bring in those kinds of things. But sometimes somebody'll bring in some outlandish advertisement, which is perfectly fine because this is what they see as consumers. If they're going to be healthcare consumers, they need to know how to ask.
Rachel also uses advertisements of products that are "clinically proven" to help students see how science can be used outside the classroom, having her students ...go find an ad for anything that says clinically proven. Or laboratory tested.
Does it meet this criteria? So just letting them become a more savvy consumer.
So all those things I think are valuable traits and maybe even to like science or like some aspect of it. In all of these examples, the instructor's focus was less on the contentlike with Rachel, she could describe the necessary vaccine someone need when they visit somewhere like Southeast Asia and why they are needed because of the specific diseases that are endemic to that regioninstead, the instructors focus more on how and where to find the information the students need to answer their own questions, and how to accurately judge the quality of the material at hand, giving them skills that they can turn around and use in their own lives.
A few of the participants described instances of how they knew they were being effective or ineffective based on the use of relevant example in science. Rachel, when asked for an example of a time she felt like an effective teacher, described: I had a student say to me, we had done reproduction and he said that a woman who was pregnant got pregnant again and I had just told them how you stop ovulating and it's so you can't get pregnant and hormone levels and turns back and he said, "And they had it on the news! Cause it was weird." And that, that to me is really exciting when they say they make the connection to something in the news or outside of class and they bring it in for me, to share or something like that. I really like that.
Wanda also described a situation where her students engaged in the material outside of

Engaging students: Utilizing a variety of teaching practices
All of the participants described an evolution in the teaching approaches that moved from fairly traditional teaching practices, like lecturing and writing on blackboards and transparencies, to incorporating a variety of other teaching practices, all in an effort to engage their students in the material in their courses.

Using traditional teaching practices as early teachers
Almost all of the participants described their first teaching experience as using When asked if the class was primarily lecture driven, Philip responded, "Yeah." Malcolm described not being as connected to his students when he first started teaching because of the space that he was in, stating: Early on, it was PowerPoints. Because the system was hardly ever up, it was a struggle, but early on I did PowerPoints. I wasn't that actively involved with [the students], but the room I was in was literally an amphitheater, so, I wasn't able to walk around the room.
Both Rachel and Melinda mentioned that they always opened their lectures up to questions from their students, but both indicated that their first teaching experiences were less than satisfactory to them as a result of mostly using lecture to present the material. Rachel, when asked to describe how she approached teaching her first class, stated, "Probably PowerPoints….I always thought it was kind of boring after a while to just talk at them. I always encouraged them to ask questions, or you know, comment. I think it started more with mostly me lecturing." Melinda actually reflected back on her first teaching experience, knowing that she would approach it differently: It was a lot more textbook and whiteboard, a lot of writing, opening up to questions. I would've done that, if I had to do that course a little bit different. I would've done it differently the first time.
Natasha and Sofia both indicated that while the majority of their approach consisted of lecturing, they both also incorporated alternative activities in their first classes. "So I used the whiteboards a lot and then I would do worksheets with diagrams from the book and you know, like, guided things for them to do in class," stated Natasha, describing how she taught her first introductory biology courses. Sofia taught a general education night course that was three hours long, so she incorporated activities to break up the time, and assigned a hands-on activity at home. She described some when asked how she approached teaching her first class: Probably PowerPoint lecture. Some PowerPoint lecture. I did have these, I tried to bring lab into it and case studies so I know I did a case study of Narragansett Bay. Some real stuff that was going on. And the hands-on activity which was for them to grow their own ecosystems.
Sofia then went on to describe a terrarium experiment that she sent home with her students where they modeled watershed and pollution. Using this experiment in her first class really solidified her use of hands-on activities because, as she reported, "They loved it….The feedback that I got was that they wrote pages and pages about….It was like, wow. You required some five-page lab report and I got 10 [pages]." Adding alternative teaching practices through the years Each of the participants described how they began to incorporate a variety of teaching practices in their classrooms to increase student engagement in the material.
The participants actually described what appeared to be a spectrum of adoption of alternative teaching practices, where Malcolm existed on the more traditional end of the spectrum using mostly lecture as his practice. Others existed in the middle, using various alternative teaching practices, and Melinda and Sophia existing at the other end of the spectrum using alternative practices on a daily basis.
Malcolm was the least experienced in using techniques other than lecturing, but was particularly proud that he had begun to incorporate crosswords into his classroom to allow student to work together to understand vocabulary. Malcolm described his current teaching approach as follows: Class is usually an hour. It's supposed to be an hour and 15, so I lecture usually half an hour. Then I will have them work on a crossword that is related….Then we will review it. Then if there's time, I might lecture some more. Philip did also note that one of the benefits of being a retired part-time faculty member is that he has more time than full-time faculty to grade assignments and exams, and as such, he uses more open-ended questions on exams so that they are less objective and students can earn partial credit: That's one thing that I have to some of the full-timers. I have ... I can allow myself to take the time and I will always have a couple of partial credit multiple choice questions which the scantron isn't gonna mark but I will go back and take now, I can take the Excel file. Put it into my computer and say okay, these are the ones that get partial credit.
Philip does also incorporate videos and other resources, but not so much during class time, stating: I was using videos but it's so great and I…was putting stuff, the tutorials, the As mentioned in the previous section, Natasha really feels the need to make sure she incorporates discussion and alternative teaching approaches, like case studies, in to her anatomy classes because that's where her students connect to the material. Rachel described using popular culture movies to help solidify topic in her microbiology course and the response from her students: We watched a movie, Contagion, which was with [Kate Winslet and] Matt Damon. So it was a regular movie but it was actually really well done because it talked about the CDC and so they loved that all these science terms they had learned the whole semester were now in the movie and so the science I asked them, "What was wrong with that movie? Where did it not follow the signs?" They were so excited to hear these terms and to know what they meant.
This example also ties back to making science relevantutilizing a popular culture references like movies and television shows help to give students a scaffold upon Rachel also describes other activities that contextualize the content she teaches. To show how an epidemic begins, she described, "I did like, synthetic epidemic and so I put glow-in-the-dark powder on their glove and they shake hands and it spreads around the room and they love it. They love it." To teach how exercising can change the pH of the body, she describes using a respiratory exercise: ...they had a basic solution with some PH and decanter and they blew into it and changed the PH and then I had them exercise and then did the same thing and then they timed how long it took the PH to change, the color to change. So they associated the increase in CO2 with the change in PH and they saw that they had more CO2 because they exercised.
All of the examples above highlight how Rachel's hand-on teaching practices allow the student to experience or investigate a phenomenon, rather than being told in a lecture format.
For Sofia and Melinda, alternative teaching practices were a daily part of their classroom activities. Melinda began incorporating more hands-on practices in her classes because her curriculum changed and she had more time, stating: I had the entire science curriculum that was to be covered in this class and that was a lot. So it was physical science, life science, or space science, earth science….So that was a lot to do in one semester. So I had to move from one topic to the next topic so I didn't have time for labs and stuff, and sometimes I have to go through this. But then they changed it….A year later. And they're like okay, we'll just have one semester focused on physical science and one semester focused on life science and space science. And when they did that it just changed….It was like, I could do a lot more labs. In fact, almost every class we did something. So it changed the game.
Melinda typically starts out her physics classes with a hands-on activity, as she describes below: Usually I start up always with an icebreaker build. They usually build something…So I usually start them doing that. Maybe a structure build, and then they usually build something really tall, or whatever. And then I ask them what concepts did you use? So they talk about that.
Melinda also does hands-on activities so much that she requires students to bring certain materials to her science methods classes that are taken by elementary education students. "They're thrilled. They're like, they get to color. I actually do, I did for my syllabus. Like now it's like bring colored pencils and scissors and glue sticks. It's on the syllabus." Melinda's activities are designed so that her students can take them and use them in their own future classrooms. She also gets good feedback from her students when using alternative teaching practices, even in her early classes, impacting the way she feels about teaching: Yeah, I think when it was not the presentation slides and it was like when I did the lab or so on, I could see the enthusiasm in the kids so I was like, you know, I wish I could do more of this, I feel good about it.
Sofia was the strongest proponent regarding alternative teaching approaches in the classroom, having spent a good portion of her career working with K-12 teachers on inquiry-based techniques in their classrooms. She defined inquiry-based to me, comparing it to the way labs were originally taught, stating: ...the difference in the old labs when you did labs was that it was all laid out, what you did, and you kind of knew what the answer was supposed to be at the end and so it wasn't terribly gripping or interesting although it could be fun, whereas inquiry-based science is the entire lesson from beginning to end isn't separate lab/lecture, it really is, the students are thinking about the topic and exploring ideas about it and coming with their own hypothesis.
Sofia was very deliberate about building her course around inquiry-based, hands-on activities. One of her projects she describes below: Another activity Sofia includes in her classes not only is hands-on, but ties very much in to relevant skills students can use outside the classroom, like composting, and even turns it into a mini-competition: I have contests in which there's teams of students making compost and they know that they have to learn for their homework how to make compost, they bring in their materials, they make compost….Then we have a contest. They measure the temperature in it -whose compost reached the highest temperature, and then we plant seeds in them and whose seeds grew the best, they get extra credit added on. So it's like this really big deal, they take that very seriously.
From the examples above, it is clear that while some adjunct faculty, like Malcolm, subscribe to more traditional banking education approach to teaching, the majority of adjunct faculty value alternative teaching practices that include discussions, using technology, hands-on and inquiry-based approaches and use them frequently in the classes.
Quite possibly the most important takeaway from the findings here was that all of the participants in this study at least attempted to incorporate some type of alternative teaching practice in their classrooms, and that may contradict the evidence in the existing literature that adjunct instructors teach using fewer creative, studentcentered or collaborative activities (Baldwin and Wawrzynski, 2011;Eagan, 2007; Leslie and Gappa, 2002;Schuetz, 2002;Umbach, 2007). It is well known in the literature that preparing and employing alternative teaching practices takes more time and effort, therefore serving as a barrier for some faculty to adopt (Henderson & Dancy, 2007;Sunal et al., 2001;Sunal and Hodges, 1997). Some of the participants in this study nullify the continuing assumption that because adjunct faculty have less time and connection to their institutions, they are more likely to choose teaching approaches that are easier to employ, like preparing and giving a lecture. For some of the participants, like Sofia and Melinda, every class period has some alternative teaching practice built into the plan, to ensure student engagement every day.

Making personal connections with students
The last important theme that was described by most of the participants when they described their teaching was that they made a point to develop relationships with their students. Another common assumption about adjunct faculty is that due to their transient nature and not being required to advise or spend time with students outside of class, they don't develop relationships with their students. According to a study conducted by the Center for Community College Student Engagement, 40% of parttime faculty in community colleges indicate that they spend zero hours advising students (formally or informally) and 47% indicate that they spend zero hours outside of class interacting with students (CCCSE, 2009). While these numbers come from community college faculty, it is likely adjunct faculty at 4-year institutions have similar responses. Considering that part-time instructors are often responsible for teaching introductory courses for first-year students, the connection gap between students and faculty in these courses is concerning, especially for retention rates in first-year students (Chen, 2012;Deutsch, 2015;Eagan & Jaeger, 2008;Ehrenberg & Zhang, 2005;Harrington & Schibik, 2001;Ronco & Cahill, 2004). However, in contrast to the literature, six of the seven participants in this study explicitly mentioned the relationships they develop with their students, many tying it directly to their effectiveness as a teacher.
Natasha described what she didn't want to be as a teacher, reflecting back on professors she had in school, stating, "I don't want to be talked at. Like a talking head.
You didn't know anything about themthere wasn't any personal connection." When asked what satisfied her as a teacher, she referred back to the relationships between students and teachers and the impact they have on her own learning: I think probably my most satisfying time when working is when I'm probably being challenged, right, like, as far, so probably when -I think it's a balanceyou have that moment where you know you're resonating with the students and you see the light bulbs going off and you know they're getting it and the same time it's challenging enough when a group of individuals -like your own knowledge is being tested. So you're not complacent. You're seeing that they're learning, in turn you're learning despite the fact that you're the teacher.
That's probably when I'm most satisfied. I don't know how to quantify that since satisfaction is uh --yeah. But when I walk away from a day and I think they got something and they the questions they asked or an interaction that made me think about it differently, then I'm pretty satisfied.
Sofia's reflection on personal connections was simple: "But then I love the students.
I've fallen in love with each class of students, it just sounds so strange." Rachel described becoming a role one might not expect of their professors: Not that anybody really needs another mother but sometimes I feel like some of my attribute has to do with being a mother of people of this age. Malcolm's interview took place just before his afternoon class started and he pointed out in the hallway when I asked how his class was run, and said "Well, I don't know if you saw….Only several of them show up early…and they show up early because we socialize. I talk to them. We socialize." Several of his students were in the classroom 20 to 30 minutes before class was scheduled to begin.
One reason the participants in this study may contradict the prevailing narrative that adjunct faculty don't have time or opportunities to make connections with students may be tied to their motivations for pursing adjunct positions. Since all of the participants were classified as either freelancers or career enders, they all held fairly reasonable teaching loads, even if they taught for more than one institution (five participants currently taught for only one institution, two participants currently taught at two institutions). By reasonable teaching loads, none of them taught more than four courses at the time of their interviews, four courses being a typical teaching load at a primarily teaching institution. Philip may have taught more than four at times, because he did mention the ability to teach three courses at each of the institutions for which he worked based on collective bargaining agreements. It was also only Philip that taught large class sizes, being responsible for teaching chemistry lectures at a state university.
As a result, it isn't a stretch to understand that it is possible for the majority of the participants in this study to develop relationships with their students beyond knowing their names.

Novice stage
The novice stage of teaching development is characterized by a very black and white, concrete view of teaching. Novice teachers follow the rules that they have been given for how a classroom is supposed to run, and don't stray from those rules (Berliner, 2004;Dreyfus & Dreyfus, 1980). But because they are given context-free rules, when the context changes, they have difficulty adapting to a situation.
One of the most interesting findings of this research is that when they began teaching as adjunct instructors, all of the participants in this study self-identified as not When she was asked how effective she was, she said, "It probably was not effective because I didn't know what I was doing. I was just doing it." Natasha also almost pined for being a Novice at one point, despite probably being an Advanced Beginner.
When Natasha examined the model to determine her starting level of skill, she remarked on teaching not being as simple as she had hoped, stating, "I think I knew everything wasn't sort of like black and white, right, but I kind of knew there was some -I kind of almost was hoping it was black and white and it wasn't." The novice stage of teaching development, as described by Berliner (2004), was developed to describe the experiences of K-12 teachers coming out of a teacher education programnovice teachers are typically student teachers or first-year teachers. Obviously, this type of description isn't useful to describe the experiences of adjunct instructors, or even full-time faculty, as neither typically get a formal education in how to teach before they are given teaching responsibilities, even as graduate students. So instead of falling back on "the rules" they have been taught, they must utilize knowledge they have from other parts of the life experiences to determine what kind of a teacher they are. The main response was that their experience with bad instructors when they were in school helped them identify the type of instructor that they didn't want to be. Natasha described her experiences as a student when asked how she knew the classroom wasn't as black and white as she wished it would be, before even stepping into a classroom of her own:

I think just previous teachers and grad school and previous educators and what
probably subconsciously was effective to me and my peers that we all talked about. Like why we liked somebody's course better than others and met some of those criteria. It was the ones that could have changed things up when they realized we were all staring at them without the answer. So I think it was probably just the years of education…being a student myself.
Melinda also mentioned when asked where some of her early skills developed that, "the fact that I went to many years of school, and I feel like at least with the material I felt pretty good." Both Wanda and Philip describe specific teachers they had in school that turned them off to a particular type of teaching that wasn't as advanced, mostly because that wasn't the focus of that instructor's career. Wanda elaborated, "I had professor in grad school who read from the textbook. That's horrible. He couldn't teach, but he was tenure track, so he did his research." Philip also described a teacher he had in graduate school stating: I had a couple of really bad teachers. And I had one really awful teacher when I was in grad school. She was research first, and the way she would teach was, she would take one of the desks, put it up to the front, look at her notes and read. And did not understand why her evaluations were so bad.
Malcolm identified both his own previous teachers and those of his children as helping him decide what kind of a teacher he wanted to be, saying, "What appealed to me is probably locking horns with the teachers that my children had, and the teachers that I had. Really none of them knew how to teach." The participants reflected that these early interactions with other instructors gave them a little bit more grounding in what it meant to be a good teacher. These responses are supported in the literature by Oleson and Hora (2014) in their research as to where faculty develop their knowledge of teaching. In their study, 22 of 56 respondents identified experiences they had as a student contributing to the way they approached their teaching. As we will see later on, participants valued peer observations to help develop their skillsbut these observations of their own instructors were still valuable to their development.
Of the seven participants, Natasha, Rachel, Philip, and Wanda taught as part of their graduate programs. While most of them found support lacking while they were teaching assistants, as we will revisit later, but having the experience to teach in labs or recitations as graduate students allowed some of the participants to experience the novice stage of teaching before they were responsible for their own courses. Philip mentioned his experience teaching chemistry labs, where he was well sought after by professors and students alike, and got a lot of teaching experience in the process: For a while, I was the only native English speaker teaching organic lab, so I would not only be teaching mine, but the lab next door would come over and listen to me. Eventually we wound up having to have a Friday afternoon lab lecture for the coming week. Either my boss or I would teach them.
Wanda was the only participant who was offered a class as a graduate student on teaching, stating, "When I was in graduate school, I took a class on how to teach. They offered that in graduate school. And I took it, and then we got to teach a one-credit course, which met once a week." Considering that the novice stage typically lasts through the first year of teaching, the participants that had several years of experience as teaching assistants would have experienced the novice stage before entering their own classrooms as adjunct professors.
Surprisingly, several of the participants attributed their "jump" over the novice stage to the fact that they were parents. This too is supported in the literature, as Oleson and Hora (2014) reported that 10 of their 53 respondents recognized their experiences as parents as contributing to their teaching approaches. Rachel, when asked how comfortable she felt in her first class as an instructor, reflected on her time prior to teaching as a stay at home mother: Yeah, no I think I did probably feel a little more comfortable, I think 'cause… So my youngest was probably seven. And my oldest was 14 so, you know I was an in involved mother. I was very aware of the teaching process and what kids respond to. Maybe not college age….I think parenting is, I don't want to say motherhood, but parenting maybe provides you with some skills that can be applied here.
Sofia also referred to her experience with her children prior to teaching when asked about how she developed some of her skills she used in education, stating, "Having children. I mean children, watch them go to school, when they -and I enjoyed working with my children and teaching them when they would come to my science lab….And then science fairs and that was fun." Melinda, who was also a stay at home mother for some time, attributed some of her development to being a parent and a Girl Scout leader: Maybe because I have kids….
[I] knew that you can't be so rigid….And actually before I even started teaching I was a Girl Scout leader, and I had a co-leader who was a teacher, is a teacher, elementary school. So I learned so much from her, like how to run these sessions. And I kind of applied that a little bit already into the classroom. So I probably started off with a little more teaching background than I actually thought I did.
Malcolm also referred to his children and how he uses them as an example to his students, stating, "I've taught all my children also and I've got four of them. I mean all I ever hear is they're unbelievably hard workers, they do more than I ask. That's the way it ought to be." Teaching, along with other "caring" professions, like social work and counseling is a job in which parenting provides an emotional infrastructure for the job (Shaw, 1995). Similar autobiographical accounts of teachers utilizing their parenting skills in teaching can be found in the literature. Madeline Grumet (1988) celebrates how teaching offers an opportunity to "mother" outside of her home and incorporated it deeply into her pedagogy. Sophie Freud Lowenstein (1980) wrote about how she could use her mothering skills while teaching and achieve close to "perfect" statussomething of which she could not, nor can anyone, as a mother. Because of the tight relationship between teaching and parenting, it is not surprising that the parents in this study could utilize some of those skills to skip the novice stage when they begin teaching later in life, mostly in regards to the characteristic that novices work by the book and that everything is black and white, as many parents experience living in the grey with regards to making parenting decisions.

Advanced beginner stage
The advanced beginner stage is defined by teachers having some expanded context and experience that helps them see that rules have exceptions, still being challenged when faced with novel difficult situations (Berliner, 2004). The participants in this study, when asked to describe their first teaching experiences, exhibited a good number of advanced beginner characteristics, such as being marginally effective, missing critical details, and having trouble navigating challenging situations with students. They also described a lot of fear and uncertainty in this stage, which would be considered normal for a new teacher.
As stated above, several of the participants identified as being advanced beginners when they started teaching their own classes. This was particularly clear when they were asked how effective they thought they were in their early classesresponding in a way that indicated they could, at that time, demonstrate marginally acceptable performance. Natasha, when asked if she ever had an early class of hers where she felt spot-on as a teacher, said: So despite engaging at least one of her students to the point of changing majors, Rachel still felt her teaching wasn't effective enough and began modifying it. For the most part, the participants accepted that they were probably effective, but not to the degree to which they really wanted to bethey recognized the need for improvement.
Rachel and Wanda both used experiences from their first teaching experiences to highlight how they were not novices at that point. Rachel took over a lab course in the middle of the term, stating: She had already been teaching most of the semester, I was doing kind of the backend. And so everything was sort of set and I was just coming and doing it.
And um, she graded their lab notebooks twice a year. It was a lot of notebooks.
She said "Oh, I don't need read them"….And I said, yeah that doesn't seem fair, they spent all this time working on it. So I took a piece of paper from a pad and I went through all the labs I was supposed to and told them, "You're missing this, you're missing this," and I remember the professor for the class said, students hadn't never seen anything like that. So uh, I know for sure I didn't do everything by the book.
Here, we see that if Rachel was a novice, she would have taught the class as the original professor had intended without deviating from that plan. Melinda may have felt the same way. She also indicated that situations like the above were still difficult for her to encounter because of her status as a part-time faculty member, and that she was afraid to push too hard against students because, as she said, "I'm not locked in….No job security." Sofia also reflected back on a situation where students went above her head to make a complaint about her teaching in her first course, describing: I told you that the students rose up against me and told me I was giving too much homework, which really threw me and I don't recall the details of that. I just know the administration backed me up and said I wasn't giving too much homework….That was really scary….The administration looked at what I was doing and said no, they didn't understand and they backed me up. I probably gave less after that.
The feelings of fear and uncertainty when challenging situations arise is very much indicative of the advanced beginner stage.
Overall, some of the participants had difficulties recalling specifics of their first courses on their own, considering that for them those first classes were decades ago. However, it was very clear based on the examples above that several of the participants did in fact begin their professional teaching careers as advanced beginners.

Competent stage
A competent teacher is characterized by someone who becomes emotionally connected to their teaching, and as such feels the weight of their choices when things go wrong. So at this stage, teachers are better able to determine what strategies and techniques work with their students and which ones fall short of engaging or enhancing the learning of their students. Large pedagogical shifts are common in competent teachers, as they begin to figure out what works and what doesn't work with their students, using the trial and error from their previous courses to inform pedagogical decisions. They also begin to impose rigid rules so that they can keep control of their class, giving them the illusion of managing their emotional connection if they keep control of the class, they won't fail their students as a teacher (Berliner, 2004 Being able to accept their own roles and expending emotional energy in whether students engaged in and retained the course content was a big step towards entering the competent stage. Competent teachers being to impose rigid rules so as to maintain a sense of control because they recognize that they are now personally responsible for what happens in their classrooms. Because competence takes three to five years to develop, they can't fall back on not having the experience of novice and advanced beginners (Berliner, 2004). Wanda described a situation where she felt she had lost control of her classroom, and as a result, imposed a very rigid process: That was 125 students and just me, and there was a situation where I remember giving an exam and I had a student come up to me and say, "Don't look, but those two students are exchanging exams." I had no control of the classroom.
So for the final, I brought in three other people, especially when I found out that a student was trying to bribe one of the secretaries for a copy of the final. I brought in my husband and two friends. I had the class divided into four rooms, I made them bring picture ID, they had to go to the bathroom before the exam, they could not get up and leave. And the grades dropped tremendously.
So there was a lot of cheating going on in my class. Malcolm also started his early classes trying to grasp a sense of control. He described a situation on his first day in an actual classroom (he had taught online previously), stating: When I initially walked in, students, a few of them were like horsing around, and I said, "Hold it. You and you, out." And they went, "Huh?" I said, "Yes.
Out. And after I talk to you next week, I'll make a decision as to whether I will allow you in here anymore." Imposing rigid, inflexible rules as described above help teachers maintain a sense of control, especially as they begin to realize that some of their chosen strategies don't work as effectively as they had once thought. Natasha also reflected that it took a few classes to really gain this insight, stating when asked when she started to feel more confident: Probably like the second-go-around. I think I was like, "Okay, this is way more comfortable for me. That, I know that didn't work, I'm not going to do that again, or I know that worked and was effective. So that was a good design there or a good exercise." So I would say after the first go-through, so probably my third semester, I was like, "Okay, I can do this." This is not so uncomfortable.
Natasha describes how her experience comes into play above. In this quote, she was speaking generalities, that by the second and third semesters she taught a class, she could identify which teaching practices, that she did not define here, were working for her and which were not. Philip has made these types of modifications a part of his course planning process, stating, "I'd pull out last semester's, go through them. Sofia also gave an excellent example of this happening in her classroom recently, where an activity she had planned didn't quite work out the way she intended: I tried a new activity to teach the greenhouse gas effect and I think I know how I would modify it to do the next time but it ended up, students didn't get a complete understanding from me even though we had a lecture after it. We went outside and the students became molecules of carbon dioxide and sun rays or whatever -they each had a role. The space we did it in was too small so they were all jumbled up together. They were happy to be outside and they got something from it. It could really be a much more effective activity.
Sofia saw the value in the activity, even if it didn't quite have the outcome she expected, and she knew that she could modify it in some way to make it better the next time around.
Both Philip and Malcolm have used student feedback in the past to really focus on the changes they've needed to make, now having the experience of several years of students to be able to read body language and facial features. Malcolm uses students he's identified as maybe not so invested in the course to help him figure out if he's being engaging: I'll choose an individual whom I view as difficult to interest, and individuals who aren't, and I will look for a reaction to judge. Early on, I really wasn't able, Philip also highlighted the fact that teachers at the competent stage are able to see their actions in terms of long-term plans. One of Philip's main fears as an instructor is to get caught by the students for not knowing the answer to a question. He now tries to build that into his courses, stating: You go ahead and you make sure that [you] anticipate what kinds of questions there's going to be. I learned then to put the work into getting ready for it, because a lot of people don't put the work into it.
The competent stage is where teachers begin to feel ownership over their classrooms and begin to personalize them, both to ensure they don't lose control and that the course is serving the needs of the students. In the competent stage, teachers utilize their experience to make pedagogical changes to better serve their students. The evidence above shows that all of the participants in this study could be considered competent teachers, with the reminder that reaching the competent stage is not guaranteed.

Proficient stage
Proficient teachers are tempered by experience. They begin to pull back on their rigid, inflexible rules, they begin to organize content in a way that really makes sure the students are grasping the information, and they also begin to think on the fly.
Proficient teachers start to make larger pedagogical shifts, really seeing the role that they play in the course (Berliner, 2004). They also perceive situations in terms of "wholes" instead of "parts"having a much better grasp of their courses as a whole, and of the role their courses have in the larger picture of the institution.
Replacing rigid rules with situational intuition was indicated by several of the Requiring attendance and beginning to take it reflects someone in the competent stage -Rachel realized she was losing some control over her students, they were falling behind, so she imposed a rule. However, the inclusion of three absences regardless of whether it is excused shows a flexibility that recognizes that students are humans with lives outside of her classroom. Philip actually admits to relaxing his rules a bit too far, mentioning: [I] will not be rigid, can be understanding. In some cases I'm a little too, I bend over a little too far backwards sometimes, and I regret it later….But compassion for the students, understand students, get a feel for what they are in for.
Malcolm indicated that he never had rigid, inflexible rules in the first place, stating, "I am not an inflexible individual. I do not like people who are." This may have been a result of his many years in industry prior to teaching. This flexibility is less mechanical than that found in the advanced beginner stage, where teachers can flexibility react to situations, like a projector breaking. Here we see flexibility more in terms of how they treat their students, also tying back to developing relationships with their students. We can see the development of deeper relationships in the proficient stage, which ultimately culminates in the expert stage where teachers are wholly aware of the needs of the students they serve, which one cannot know without developing those relationships with students.
Another indication that teachers have moved into the proficient stage is the ability to see the larger picture and really hone in on what pedagogical decisions best serve their students. Natasha really highlighted this when she was discussing how she approaches teaching in her anatomy classes, stating: Gross anatomy is just that -it's memorizing. But I think the challenge for me with that and the flip side of that and probably why I'm more on the proficient level of it when I first started is that that's not acceptable, right? Like just memorizing stuff. So I take it as a challenge of like, how do I make that necessary evil applicable to you where you're not just sitting down and making flash cards?
Instead of feeling like a teacher in that class, Natasha describes herself as "an organizer of content…more about how I do I make this material manageable for [the students] in an organized way." Being able to recognize that there was a better way to approach a dry course like anatomy, and realizing she was more a facilitator to help them learn study skills shows her development to the proficient level. Rachel showed a similar development, except that she makes sure to include input from her students. Being willing to take into account student opinions on classroom activities and course content allows Rachel to really put her class in perspective of the student's entire education, which is one of the characteristics of a proficient teacherperceiving situations in terms of "wholes" instead of "parts." It also serves as a springboard to becoming an expert teacher, especially in the sense of being aware of the context and the needs of who they serve.
Another characteristic of being a proficient teacher is starting to become more flexible mechanically in the classroom, but still needing time to deliberate on their choices. Proficiency shows a higher level of planning, to account for situations where one needs to be flexible, and also to see the "whole" of their course, rather than the individual "parts." The flexibility gets planned into their course. Natasha revealed that the time she needs to plan ahead has changed significantly since she started as a Rachel, when describing more about her student surveys, noted that she is still trying to figure out the best ways to assess her classes, and as stated above, incorporates her students' opinions into her deliberation: This semester I gave two tests and a final and four homeworks and a few quizzes and I'm going to ask themthat's different from last yearthat's constantly evolving. One year I gave them a quiz every week... because there was too much information and they were falling behind and after that semester they felt that even that was too much information for a little quiz. And if I gave them a little quiz, because I didn't want to spend a whole day giving them a grade -testing -and only teaching two days. I make a little quiz and they spent all this time studying these three or four questions….And then this semester I gave them a study guide for the first test and I knew some of the grades weren't great and I said to them, you let me know what you think would help all of you. I came up with an idea and my idea is that I'm going to give you the study guide after each chapter instead of before the test and that way as we go through it you can just start to fill this in and create your study guide so by the end --they all liked that. It's been more positive.
As you can see, Rachel still takes a bit of time to deliberate on the best way to test her students on material, but has been very flexible in those choices based on the feedback she hears from her studentsespecially when it comes to spending too much time studying for small quizzes. Rachel also does the same regarding content. She plans ahead the "whole puzzle" and decides how many days to spend on a topic, but to make sure her class is relevant she makes sure that she includes current events, stating: Especially when I teach microbiology if there's an outbreak, I always incorporate that, whether it's in the news or whether there was a Nobel prize winner that is somehow is related to something I'm teaching, I try to make it accessible and relevant so any things in the news that somehow ties in, I get it, I use that. Philip made time outside of class to make sure that students understood a basic tenet of chemistrywhich if not understood would make it difficult to move on to highlevel topics in the course.
As you can see from the evidence above, the majority of the participants did describe instances in their teaching experience that suggest that they had moved at some point into the proficient level, where they become more flexible both in terms mechanical classroom planning and in terms of being more flexible towards students because of the deeper relationships they develop. They also relax their rigid rules that they may have made earlier in their careers to keep control of the class. Their stories suggest that they are more relaxed, but at some points, still required a little bit of deliberation when they were making decisions, making sure to plan flexibility into their courses.

Expert stage
An expert teacher is defined as someone who reacts quickly and with a lot of flexibility that's based on one's experience, and is someone who is aware of the context and the needs of the students they serve. I also believe that experts are very aware of their own shortcomings and as a result have modified their approaches to account for those shortcomings.
Being flexible on the spot is indicative of an expert teacher. Rachel describes this perfectly when she was describing a class that she had the morning of our interview: I have homework assignments I collected today and I had given it to them last week and I said to them, "On Wednesday, they were due Monday and they're genetic problems…. Look at it before Sunday night and come back to class on Friday and we'll talk about it. But you've got to look at it before." So they came into class and we started talking about it and I could tell that everybody had problems with one thing. And so as we were talking about it I just said, "Okay! Let's just do the problem together." 'Cause the point is for you to understand it, okay.
Rachel had a plan for the day, but instead ended up focusing on homework problems because she knew that her students weren't understanding the material. This flexibility is different from the proficient level because it happened immediately on the spotit did not require deliberation on her part to reteach the materialshe just did it because that was what her students needed in that moment. As we can see above, being aware of the needs of the students both inside and outside the classroom is a very important characteristic of being an expert. It comes as a result of developing personal connections to students, which all of the participants identified as part of their teaching, but may be limiting to adjuncts who have difficulties developing relationships with student because of time commitments. But knowing the needs of the studentsincluding their needs as majors versus non-majors, their needs to succeed when they make a mistake, and their mental health needsrequires adjunct faculty to be a little more flexible in the planning and execution of teaching.
It is at the expert stage of development when seeing "the big picture," as Natasha put it, is really a helpful step in developing teaching skills. Natasha spent a few years working on the curriculum committee for one of the courses she taught, and as a result, had a level of interaction at the institutional level that many adjunct faculty and saying, 'I was wrong.'" The way that some of the participants illustrated this characteristic was by describing places where they have added activities, or even removed whole content areas, to make sure that the content that is necessary is covered effectively. Rachel removed an entire topic on the renal system in human and had the discussion with their team based on this article and it was great and it was like, how this discussion went between two people, and I pulled this chart up and they read it back and then they had their own discussion. And I asked them, does it make this any easier to talk about and they said yes….And so I felt good that I found something that really worked, it didn't rely on me to do the discussion because I really struggle with that.
Sofia went out and found an activity that allowed her to still have a discussion in her class, while not relying on her lack of ability in leading that discussion.
Rachel, Wanda, and Philip all outsource some of their topics to people or videos that better described the things they wanted to cover. Philip did so as a backup to his own lectures, describing his use of videos online: One of the things I do with Blackboard and Moodle is I put up tutorials and I explain to them it's because sometimes I'm not going to get it across to you and this person might and the other thing is, you can play it again and again.
Rachel also incorporates videos into her classroom, but uses them when she isn't completely confident coving the information: I showed them a Charlie Rose video, he did on a series on the brain and one was dedicated to gender….And you know I find it difficult to lecture on that. I don't feel wise enough to -I fumble on the pronouns and so this was very good. It was very good. I thought it was thought-provoking, you know, and the idea that it's such an evolving science.
Wanda brings in guest lecturers, or has people from her rather large network of colleagues and friends, to go over materials that aren't in her content area of expertise, describing: I farm out my topics. When I cover psychological health, I have a friend who teaches abnormal psych, I ask her to go over my stuff. When I cover genetics, I have a friend who works at Dana-Farber, she went over my stuff.
Knowing their own limits and figuring out ways to overcome those limits is really indicative of being an expert teacher, and as seen above, there are several participants who would fit into that category.

Research question #3
Research question #3: How do veteran adjunct faculty, who teach in the natural sciences, self-identify their current level of pedagogical skill along the Dreyfus and Dreyfus (1980) Novice to Expert skill model? Only one participant, Sofia, currently identified as being a proficient teacher. Three participants, Natasha, Wanda, and Melinda, identified as experts, but rather reluctantly. The other three, Rachel, Philip, and Malcolm, all identified readily with being an expert teacher. Two interesting patterns were revealed in the course of the interviews, the first being that several of the women participants underestimated themselves. Some that described ways in which they were experts were reluctant to place that title on themselves, and Sofia, who did show some expert characteristics, readily identified as proficient. The second finding of interest was that two of the participants, Malcolm and Melinda, identified as experts -Melinda somewhat reluctantly -but in their descriptions of their teaching, didn't really describe expert characteristics based on the Novice-to-Expert Skill Development Model (Berliner, 2004;Dreyfus & Dreyfus, 1980).

Imposter syndrome in women adjuncts.
All of the women, save for Rachel, appeared to have underestimated their skills as teachers. Rachel was the only one who succinctly replied when asked where she felt she was currently on the model, "Oh, I'm expert," and proceeded to highlight many of the ways that she was an expert. The others were much more reluctant to say that they were an expert. Melinda replied, when asked where she fell on the model, "I Sofia responded when asked where she felt she was currently on the model, "Well it was definitely not expert," despite describing several ways in which she could potentially consider herself an expert, but firmly planted her feet on identifying as proficient.
Based on the definition that an expert has been learning a topic for 10 years and over 10,000 hours (Dreyfus & Dreyfus, 1980), all of the women except Melinda have been teaching for more than 10 years and have probably put more than 10,000 hours into their teaching. Wanda has been teaching for approximately 30 years; Natasha and Rachel have taught several classes at a time for 12 to 15 years; Sofia has taught fewer classes at a time for more than 10 years, which may influence her perception of where she exists in the model; and Melinda has only taught for six years.
This underestimation of their teaching abilities may be indicative of imposter syndrome, or the imposter phenomenon. First described by Clance and Imes (1978), the imposter phenomenon is an individual experience of self-perceived intellectual phoniness or fraud, and is fairly common among high-achieving women. The phenomenon is far more common and intense in women, as opposed to men, although men can also be afflicted by the phenomenon. Impostorism is intricately linked to an individual's inability to self-assess their performance (Kets de Vries, 2005;Want & Kleitman, 2006), but also to a lack of self-confidence and/or self-efficacy (Dahvlig, 2013). Impostors continuously overestimate the abilities of others they deem better than them, as well as underestimate the work that others put into their successes (Parkman, 2016). Natasha did this when she compared her teaching skills to the teaching skills of K-12 educator friends she has, thinking that their formal education in teaching puts them far ahead of her in terms of skills development, despite the differences in their teaching contexts. Early research into the imposter phenomenon indicated that self-deprecating humor was also indicative of impostorism (Kolligian & Sternberg, 1991), newer research shows that some people use impostorism as a selfpresentation strategy, acting rather than feeling like an impostor (Ferrari & Thompson, 2006;McElwee and Yurak, 2007). Wanda was a good example of this, as she described employing a lot of self-deprecating humor into her classroom.
Impostorism is common among people who work in highly-competitive and stressful jobs (Hutchins, 2015). The imposter phenomenon has been described in academia for decades, mostly due to the stressful "publish or perish" environment that exists in many institutions of higher education. While adjuncts are not necessarily subjected to the "publish or perish" mentality, they do work under stressful conditions, beginning courses at a moment's notice at times, never knowing whether they have a position from term to term, fear of being terminated if a problem arises and the administration doesn't side with them, and teaching without adequate supports in place. As also shown in this study, some adjuncts even are made to feel like "secondclass citizens" which may add to their impostor mentality.
Brems, Baldwin, Davis and Namyniuk (1994) researched how impostorism impacted faculty behaviors in higher education and found that impostorism can influence the way faculty run their classrooms, including increasing the amount of lecturing done in class to avoid interacting with students who could reveal their lack of knowledge or leaving class early to avoid questions by students. For the participants in this study, where the apparent impostorism was focused mainly on their skills as a teacher, not on their content knowledge, it may explain the positive focus on selfdrive, their own individual research into how to teach certain topics, rather than going outside to experts in teaching to guide them further. Natasha was very articulate about this, not wanting to attend a teaching conference because she felt like she had no idea what she should attend because she had very little knowledge of pedagogy as a discipline. It is possible that once she reached out and attended a conference, she might see how developed her teaching skills actually are, but without that outside influence, she feels like an impostor to those with formal teacher training.

Dunning-Kruger Effect in adjunct faculty.
Two of the participants identified as experts, but didn't really highlight examples of ways in which they were experts. Malcolm, who has been teaching for fourteen years, and does have a feel for being flexible and knowing his students, An expert always knows that there is room for improvement or change in a course.
Melinda also described how she doesn't really acknowledge that there are secondary education students in her science for educators class, noting: There are some students that are going to be high school teachers or something not even….I usually get a review, sometimes at the end. And the ones that frustrate me are the ones that say, "Oh, well this was elementary science." I'm like, "Well that's what the course was." And I always tell them at the beginning of the class, I just want you guys to know, this is an elementary science class.
So you will be learning information that you learned in elementary school.
I couldn't tell if this was an enrollment problem or if Melinda was actively ignoring an important group of students that were required to take her course, as secondary education majors. Either way, an expert teacher would encourage the secondary education students to take a different course or modify the course so that there was interest across the levels, as she would have a stronger relationship with her students and have a better idea of the needs of the student she serves. As stated above, Melinda was well under the 10-year threshold for being an expert teacher, and despite skipping over the novice stage because of her industry experience and raising her children, it hasn't been enough to push her forward into the expert stage.

Malcolm and Melinda may be exhibiting the Dunning-Kruger Effect. The
Dunning-Kruger Effect is defined as "cognitive bias in which individuals, who are unskilled at a particular task, believe themselves to possess above-average ability in performing the task," (Psychology Concepts, 2018, n.p.). Basically, everyone has ignorance in certain areas of their lives, but this ignorance is invisible to the person (Dunning, 2011). This is because the skills needed to remedy the ignorance of a domain, are the same skills needed to evaluate competence in that domain (Kruger & Dunning, 1999). As a result of this invisibility, people tend to believe that they are performing perfectly fine in the domain, perhaps even overstating their abilities.
Neither Malcolm nor Melinda had very much training at all in teaching, nor did they have any other feedback on their teaching other than from students, both having entered the profession after spending years in industry and not teaching as graduate students. As a result, they do have some ignorance as to how learning occurs, and to overcompensate for that ignorance, they overstate their abilities.
The important thing to note here, is that without some sort of intervention, both

Developing relationships with peers
Developing relationships with peer instructors was one of the most common responses when asked about professional development. In this section, I consider peers to mean all instructors, not dependent on whether they are part-or full-time faculty members. Responses from the participants described a number of ways that they developed and took advantage of relationships with their peers, including sharing materials and expertise, striking up informal conversations, and participating in peer observations. Natasha really explained this well when she was talking about her lack of faith in student evaluations in determining her effectiveness as an instructor, stating: . Relationships with peer instructors, both full-and part-time, provide excellent resources and space to receive informal feedback on their own teaching approaches.

Sharing materials and expertise
Melinda and Rachel both described, early in their careers, reaching out to faculty members who had previously taught the class to see if they would share their course materials with them. Melinda taught a merchandising math course prior to teaching her science courses and compared having help with not having it: I actually did have notes from a professor who was also teaching a section of that, so that helped so I kind of went through….Did what they did, which is very rare, because the science courses that I taught, I had absolutely nothing.
Rachel also described getting help in her first courses, but not being overly thrilled with the approaches, even back then: I think I probably had spoken with other faculty members who had taught it before. I know I did. Some of the older people who aren't in the department anymore. And they were, you know, very helpful, very willing to help. But kind of rigid in their outlook on this this this this. You lecture at them and that's it.
In Rachel's case, she got some help, but certainly saw room to improve the way the course was taught.
Sharing materials with peers continued throughout the participants' careers.
Philip spoke about making adjustments to a chemistry lab manual with his course coordination, stating: Sofia described hearing about a teaching resource through another faculty member and having it help her modify a teaching approach she used in her classroom: I had heard…from a faculty member that teaches here in the oceanography department that they had been given this book by someone here and they really liked it, so I bought it and read it. So for instance there's something called the "jigsaw" and I had been doing it wrong. So I read this book and I think, "Oh, that's why this doesn't work!" Using a resource she would have not known about if not for a peer, Sofia was able to troubleshoot a practice she had been attempting for a while but couldn't get to work for her.
Wanda actually participated in sharing materials the other way, being a sharer of clicker technology. She described being introduced to clickers when she came back to one of her institutions after a period of absence. "It was when I came back here, the science department used them…. Yeah, they showed me how to use it, I talked to tech support in the classroom, I was like, 'This is great. It's a new toy.'" Wanda then turned around and shared clickers with the other institution she worked for, becoming known as "the tech genius," when in fact it was just a technique her peers hadn't been exposed to. Rachel also developed relationships with the other members of her department in order to supplement her class with hands-on activities, stating "Everybody is very good about [it], the micro guy gives me plates and I use the space from the [general bio] labs...I'll come around and say, 'Do you have any glassware I can borrow?' I feel pretty comfortable with everybody in the department." Rachel also turns it around and helps others in her department, describing: I'm more than happy to be a team player as well. I was teaching human bio one year with a regular faculty, we were both doing it and we decided to start doing the blood typing and I'm a little anxious with kids poking themselves and bleeding so we had been talking about and I said, "Oh I'll come to your class to help you, you know, when you do it. So you have an extra set of hands," and I know he was really appreciative of that.
Sofia also developed relationships with peers outside of her department so that her students would benefit from her teaching, reaching out to some business faculty members: I wanted to get to know some of the business professors, so I could find out what they were learning in business about environmental stuff. And so I wrote to the department chair of the business school and she gave me a couple of names and so I initiated meetings with those people and one of them turned out to be really useful and he's mentoring some of my business students now in their project. He offered to help them out.
As seen above, sharing course materials, teaching materials, and even actual classroom materials like glassware, within and across departments is seen very much a positive by several of the participants.

Informal conversations
Having informal conversations with peers is also viewed positively by all of the participants, particularly regarding sharing stories about students or ideas in the classroom. Natasha spelled out how these informal conversations begin really nicely: It's the kind of stereotypical water-cooler coffee conversation. I do think, like, when I have those classes...that could have gone differently, I proactively seek out people who I respect their opinion and have been doing this a lot longer and I ask them questions, "Hey when this happens -what do you do with that?" and sometimes it's helpful and they're like, well I don't care. And other times it's like, "Yeah, yeah, that happens" So yeah...I would say that there are some times that are very calculated and premeditated that I'm looking for a resource and then other times it's like, you just happen to run into somebody and, "How's it going, haven't seen you, how's your semester? You should try this, right?" Sofia identified "rubbing shoulders with other people who were trying to do the same thing" as one of the most influential types of professional development she has had.
Philip described some of the conversations he's had with fellow faculty, stating, "We spend a lot of time talking in the evenings about where we want the course to go, and ways of teaching." Similarly, Rachel described talking with a peer with a unique background: She was on a committee looking at science education for the state. So, lower, not college but -and so every once and a while she and I have conversations about technique and ways of engaging students, things like that.
Melinda has taken a lot of advice from a fellow adjunct faculty member, describing: There's another adjunct faculty that I enjoy talking to, and he actually does have a certification, so he's adjunct but he's taught at a high school previously, so he's kind of retired. I enjoy discussing [things] with him because he also has so much to bring to the table, more than I do. And I think he's got cool tricks up his sleeves, so I enjoy talking with him….And then we always just compare about students and so on, "So what would you do in this situation or that situation?" Malcolm has befriended a full-time faculty member that he believes has been very helpful in times that he's needed it: There's one professor in particular who has been so helpful. I mean she, I was having trouble with the exam reader. She actually walked up here. Her office is at the opposite end on the first floor. Walked up here, helped me, anything I've ever asked her, anything.
Wanda has developed a friendly rapport with her department head, stating, "I'll go and sit in his office and chat with him, and try not to talk politics, but sometimes it happens….We talk about attendance policies, and how students just want As." Wanda even extends her informal conversations to email, discussing her "problem students" with another faculty member. Going just a bit further, Rachel has developed relationships outside of her department, stating, "I have a friend here who's in the English department and I'm obviously biology department but I ask them how they deal with things. I seek out other people's opinions." Informal conversations, either between members of the same level (adjunct to adjunct), different levels (adjunct to full-time), different departments, or even through email, can lead to the sharing of ideas and serve as a gripe session that can lead to troubleshooting problems in the classroom.

Peer observations
Natasha, Sofia, and Rachel each made it a point to mention that something that was really helpful for them in terms of developing peer relationships was observing their peers teaching. Sofia did this as part of her first teaching experience, because she was co-teaching a class: I went to all the classes that the other [taught]-we alternated -it was very strange. He'd teach a physics class then I would teach biology, it was very strange but I went to all his classes...because I wanted to learn and see what he was doing and see how his class was run.
Rachel also used peer observations early on in her career, being surprised that others didn't take advantage, stating: I used to run the freshman bio lab and one semester I took a section of it -I was teaching a section of it and I always went the day before my lab to hers to sit through it and I remember her saying to me that I was the only one who did this. So I would show up….I came ahead of time to run through it. And that could be my own insecurity.
Natasha used peer observations early in her career to not only figure how she wanted to teach, but also how she didn't want to teach, describing: I didn't have children, I was just recently married and I had some flexibility so I went and watched other faculty members, you know, to see how they were doing it or you know, that helped a little bit, then it was also like, more I would say, it helps recognize what you didn't want to do….Every institution that I've gone to I've asked if I could shadow someone because not to necessarily see what good looks like, but just to contextualize the course that that school has.
Sofia also observed a peer outside her field when she was involved with the K-12 program that trained teachers throughout the state, stating, "I wanted to meet the teachers and see what it was that [K-12 teacher educator] was doing with the teachers in the classroom, so I sat in on one semester to watch her." To these participants, taking a further step and observing peers in their own classrooms was immensely useful in helping them hone their own teaching practices.
Both Rachel and Wanda emphasized the benefits of getting many peers together in one space. For Rachel, it was confirmation that she wasn't alone, that even full-time faculty have difficulties: One of the older professors, this was a while ago -he was being, he was pretty frustrated with teaching and said something like, "Anybody interested in having like, a bag lunch discussion on teaching methods and things?" and I went to that, even though I didn't have a lot of expertise...and I found that comforting, to see these full-time faculty having a lot of the same issues that I had, not that I thought that just because they were full-time that they had all the answers, it's just, it was good to hear.
Wanda laments the fact that these types of interactions don't happen for her, stating: Pulling together a group of peers can clearly have value to part-time faculty, although is less spoken about.
Developing peer relationships can serve many purposes to a part-time faculty member. Peers can share materials, expertise, be a sounding board for common teaching gripes, and serve as a positive (or maybe even a negative) example for how part-time faculty want to teach.

Self-drive: Individual professional development
Another common theme that presented itself was the concept of self-drive, an intrinsic motivation to go beyond what they had done before in the classroom.
Examples of this theme included researching teaching strategies and approaches off the internet, so as to not "reinvent the wheel," but also included some very unique resources that the participants used to help them develop as teachers in the classroom.

Researching teaching strategies on their own
Melinda identified her self-drive as the most important factor in her development, stating, "How I've changed as an instructor is I'm always teaching myself. I've always liked trying to learn and learn and learn, and then that has kind of changed the way [I teach]. All self-learning versus taking classes." Natasha described, even early on, having to create her own assignments because there really wasn't any other choice, noting: I would do worksheets with diagrams from the book and you know, like, guided things for them to do in class. But I had to create them from scratch because there was no support from the publishers. You didn't get anything.
Currently, in her anatomy classes, Natasha incorporates the use of case studies and said, "I use other people's. Like ones that come from the publisher, sometimes I make them up on my own." Sofia stated she used the internet as a resource to help her cover a topic she has difficulty with: "I'm always looking for ideas and a big topic right now is how do you teach climate change, so I'm always looking through all of that." Malcolm uses online resources to determine if someone has already figured out a way to teach a topic he has to cover, stating, "I always look for you know, like how has another person…What the heck's he throwing in there? How have others taught this?...If it's a thing that I know will be hard, all right, I want, you know, how have others taught it?" Rachel also uses the internet, stating, "I do use the internet, I have to say is that something I find, though, that I'll even be looking at high school level stuff on the internet and I'll adapt it for them," revealing that it is not just post-secondary resources adjuncts are using to find teaching tips. Wanda listed a handful of resources she uses online, and also how she interacts with the creators of those resources: McGill Office of Science and Society….He just sent out a weekly newsletter and he answered my question on how come melatonin is being sold over the counter even though it's a hormone. And that's because it's normally present in certain vegetables and fruits. So, that's how come they can sell it.
Not only does Wanda pose questions to some of her resources, she has worked with some online personalities to pilot apps with her students that a relevant to the course content, stating, "The Nutrition Diva….Yeah, she had something on apps she developed called The Nutrition GPA that I helped her pilot in my class one semester." Philip also spent a lot of time online researching how to best create questions for online homework assignments and quizzes in his chemistry classes, describing his situation: But, figuring out how to get Moodle to do something like, how do you have a student give you a Lewis structure in a system that does not let you do drawings?... Right, figuring out how to do all of that online.
All of the participants relied upon using outside, online resources to help further their teaching skills. Given the sometimes isolating nature of being an adjunct, which will be described in the next section, individually researching the information they need from online resources clearly has value to many adjunct instructors.

Using unusual resources for teaching
A surprising finding of this research was a list of some of the more unusual resources that the participants had used to develop their skills. Melinda was so excited about having learned about 3D printing and using it in her classroom, but where she learned it and used it was a little unusual, describing her favorite resources: I look at so many things and see which one that I feel is good. And like the 3D [printing] was like the [local public] library, because they were offering classes….So they had free courses to teach you how to do that, so I attended all the courses….And if you attend the courses you can do 3D printing for free, so yeah, so I did that.
Melinda used her local public library to first learn about 3D printing, but she also uses the resource to supplement a content area on 3D printing where the students design and get to make their models using the local library hardware. Sofia learned a great many teaching tips and techniques during her time working with the K-12 outreach program for science teachers. Many of her most popular activities were drawn straight from elementary or middle school curriculums and modified for college students. She described two activities, both from an elementary curriculum. The first she described from her first course: The terrarium connected to an aquarium so the aquarium drips down into the The second activity came from her current environmental biology course: We did a team contest on who could find the most different tree species by identifying or looking at the leaves and proving to each other and to other teams that these were different species of trees. So we learned what a species was and a genus and you know all that kind of stuff….They really enjoyed that. So we spent a lot of time outside collecting and looking at leaves. I have to admit that I got that activity also from, I think, the third grade activity that I participated in in one of my things and I modified it.
Melinda also admitted to modifying activities from an elementary curriculum for her science for educators class, except that her resource was her own kids' assignments, stating, "Some labs I knew my kids did. For instance we learned about Pangaea, so I actually had it broken up into puzzles and had them put it together." Philip also used a resource geared toward a slightly younger crowd: And looking for, even looking at more general, lower-level kind of science books. One of the things I've been taking a look at was, I found, on eBay, the chemistry set I used to have….But the manual is about that thick, and I remember some of the experiments. And flipping through that to see there's demonstrations, things like that, looking for demos.
Rachel also turned to her children for inspiration, but not as a resource to find a way to teach something, but more as a mental resource, stating: My youngest just graduated college, so I had someone in school for the last many, my youngest and that's three kids through college so I've always been asking them, "Is this fair?" [or] "What would you say if a professor said this?"…I found they're a good resource.
It is pretty clear that adjunct instructors will use any and all resources available to them, not just online, to push forward their own learning.
Regarding motivation to seek resources out on their own, Natasha and Wanda both had interesting perspectives on why they personally go out and find resources. Both Natasha and Wanda's self-drive is motivated differently, quite possibly tied to their motivations for being an adjunct in the first place, or a difference in their career trajectory, but nevertheless it is clear that adjuncts value resources that they can access themselves on their own timetable, and those resources do have a positive influence on the development of their teaching skills.
Independent professional development is a commonly cited form of professional development in the literature for full-time faculty as well. Bowma-Gearhart (2008) cited consultation of teaching resource material as the second most common form of professional development that full-time science faculty pursue.
Durso (2011) reflects on her independent growth as a teacher in her reflection described in more detail in Chapter 2. It has also been cited as an important aspect of professional development by Sherer and colleagues (2003) and Sunal and colleagues (2001). Wanda took the most advantage of her professional development money afforded to her through her union's collective bargaining agreement. First, she purchased software to make her life a bit easier when making exams, describing, "I forget who had ExamPro, but it's a test generator….
[Publisher] doesn't have that any more. I just bought it for $100, but I got my professional development money at [4- year institution] to pay for it." She also used her money to stay current in the field of nutrition, stating, "Last year I used it for CEUs (continuing education units). Then Nutrition Dimensions, I think they have these booklets, or 15, I'm supposed to maintain professional accreditation." This year, she was excited to use her fund to head to conference on science skepticism, stating: I'm going to this Northeastern Conference on Science and Skepticism in July thanks to my professional development funds." At first, she had a little sticker shock when she saw the price of the conference, but once she realized she could use funds for it, she decided to go for it: The conference I'm going to, when they first started, you could buy a pass for $1,000, it was like the early ... I'm like, "Oh my God. I'm never going to be able to go to this." But that was starting on Thursday and it included all these different things. But, the registration was $270, so I'm going in on Friday, and then on Saturday, then I'll come back Sunday….And I was looking, and I'm thrilled to use the money for this. We've had this benefit for two years.
Wanda made good use of the funds available to her, but was worried because, "Well, not enough of us are using it, and I'm afraid it's going to get taken away if people don't use it." She could be referring to educators like Philip, who also said he has access to professional development funds through the union at the community college he teaches at, but made no mention during our interview of ever accessing them Rachel, Malcolm, and Wanda all mentioned during their interviews times when they had asked for funding. Rachel likes to attend seminars and workshops based on her area of content expertise, and figured it couldn't hurt to ask for some funds: My husband's a physician and sometimes I hear about lectures through the medical school and I'll go to that, one thing I signed up for was like a day seminar and I was going to go anyway and then I asked the chairman and he said, "Yeah, we'll pay." That kind of thing. If I see something that I think is relevant to the causes that I teach, I'll go.
Rachel also participated in a study abroad semester one term as a volunteer, describing: And you know, I still had to pay my way so I did a couple lectures on infectious disease like the ZIKA virus and it was just, it was just good timing anyway and then she had an extra set of hands and eyes on site for the students and they were doing some independent studies when we got to these ecosystems -eco stations around Costa Rica so it was fascinating for me. I was really excited to go with her….the dean ended up giving me some money for it, too.
Rachel volunteered to go, but as she presented information and acted as a second chaperone, her dean saw value in that and added some additional funds. Malcolm advocated for some funding to use to buy materials for his classroom, describing: I actually talked [four-year institution] into ordering me a working aquifer.
They argued, "This is not a lab class." But I knew they were allowed $5,000 per class. [I said], "All I'm asking for is $2,300 here." I was persistent. If there's anything I can ... If you wanted to use one word that would be a description of who I am, it would be persistent. I don't stop, and I hounded them. Now, for the last maybe five years, I lug the aquifer in, hook it all up, ask them all up, and I have them see how an aquifer operates.
Malcolm can now show his students how an aquifer operates using his model system that he persistently advocated for. Wanda also spent some time advocating for her second institution to order and use clicker technology that was being used at her first institution. When I asked if he had to fight for them, she replied, "I am always advocating for myself. I've never assumed ... And that's something that is an adjunct.
I've never assumed that I have support, so when I do have support, I'm appreciative." Natasha participated in professional development fellowship offered through her institution, where she learned the role-playing pedagogical approach called Reacting to the Past (RTTP): The heart of the grant is to recruit faculty members, so they opened up the application process, which included adjuncts, which they don't always….So part of the fellowship was that they would pay for your registration fees to go to the consortium that they do at Barnard where this guy -the RTTP is.
At the same time, Natasha actually criticized her lack of access to funding as the worst part of being an adjunct in terms of her professional development: You don't have professional development funds. And so a lot of it is on your own time and when you don't make a lot of money, I mean, it's an excuse right, cause obviously right, if I really wanted to I'd figure out a way to make it happen….There's lots of really good adjunct teachers who with given resources would be amazing but they don't have any resources so it's a job, it's a paycheck and you can't criticize them for that….I do what I can within my limitations.
It is clear that having access to funding, either as part of a union collective bargaining agreement, because of advocating for money to use for their own professional development, or participating in grant-funded programs offered by institutions, is important to most of the participants.

Workshops/Conferences
Several of the participants identified attending workshops and conferences that focused specifically on teaching, not content, and considered them to be helpful. Sofia mentioned a visiting professor who facilitated a workshop on campus that helped her with more active techniques in the classroom, saying, "The physics professor from [prestigious tech institution] who came here and gave a lecture on student response systems and think-pair-share, I do a lot more of that, which I never did." Melinda had just finished an online workshop course through her institution on how to become an online instructor and found it valuable to her development: The only other course that I've kind of taken is I've just recently taken an online course. And that was interesting as well because you hear what other instructors do. That was a good way to get feedback….It's how to teach online instead of face to face. So, I'm just certified. I haven't taught any online courses, but I can now do it.
Melinda mentioned a few ways in which learning about online education has helped her in her face-to-face courses: I don't know what it was called, it was like a doodle thing, and you actually write in and then sketch it out like. I think I applied that….So yeah, there was a lot of cool ideas. Kind of like, oh, that's kind of interesting.
Melinda also said that it helped her organize her courses as well, stating, "I think it helped me a lot with the structure and I kind of added that structure to the syllabus." Malcolm described attending a regional teaching conference, and while he found it somewhat helpful, he was frustrated because of his limitations at his being involved in the sort of strategic conversations on a formal level, which is unusual for adjuncts. And then going to some conferences, which is also challenging for adjuncts because of the economics of it, helped a lot.
Natasha found value in attending the training, not just because of the pedagogy, but the story behind how the pedagogy was developed.
Some participants found value in attending teaching workshops and conferences, but not as much as expected. This is different from what full-time faculty in STEM departments found useful -Bouwma-Gearhart (2008) found that full-time faculty ranked workshops, courses, and seminar as their top choice in professional development.

Seeing the "big picture"
The last factor that a couple of the participants identified as positive, or potentially positive, was being able to see the "big picture," or being able to see their position in the grander vision of the university. It was only mentioned by Natasha and Rachel. Natasha volunteered as part of the curriculum development team for one of the general science courses she taught for a while, and found that working on that team was the most influential piece of professional development she had: I think being involved in curriculum development and those conversations on a formal level were really helpful, um, because I understood more about this institution's goals for the students….Yeah, the big picture, which I don't think adjuncts are ever privy to that. So I think that was really helpful. I do think now the culture has changed a little as a result in this institution involving adjuncts because know they disseminate that information to the adjuncts so, I think they realized that that was an important bridge to make and I think this place is unique for adjuncts anyway, so I think that the curriculum development stuff was probably the most influential.
Understanding the institutional goals of the institution and allowing the adjunct to be aware of that was something that Natasha valued, but was a unique experience for her as an adjunct because she was on that committee. It was not an experience all adjuncts at her institution were exposed to. On the other hand, Rachel lamented the fact that she did not get to see the big picture at her institution. When she was asked what part of being an adjunct limited her development, she responded: I don't do any advising. And, I think that leads to a connection and an understanding of the campus philosophy and thought process and I don't have.
So, like if you know. On this campus everybody takes Civ -Western Civ and it is five semesters and it's a shared experience with all of them….And I think that if I advised students and I could get a better handle on that experience that….So I don't do any advising which leads back to the whole idea that one of the things I like the best is talking to the students. So for me, that is a problem. I don't have to, to do the, the a lot of the politics in departments or the politics in the college, that doesn't really faze me and that's a nice thing but the downside is that I think I have more of a limited interaction with the students.
For Rachel, she is aware that there is a "big picture" she is ignorant of and feels that it would be more valuable, even as an adjunct, to take on a little more work advising students, just to understand that big picture. None of the other participants mentioned anything along these lines, potentially indicating that they have no idea of the "big pictures" in which they work.

Research question #5
Research Question #5: What do veteran adjunct faculty, who teach in the natural sciences, perceive as factors that provided negative results in their development of higher pedagogical skills? The factors that the participants identified as negative towards their pedagogical development had to do with the lack of support for their teaching. They identified that they: had little initial support when they started teaching as adjuncts, or even as graduate student teaching assistants, having to "learn by the seat of their pants"; they are rarely, if ever, observed while teaching by superiors; the workshops that they have attended are mechanical and forgettable; and that they are not formally trained in education. Several of them also identified some of the common pitfalls of being an adjunct, including the timing of their schedule and their "second-class citizen" role in the department.

Lack of teaching support
Many of the participants cited a lack of support for their teaching as a negative factor in their development. This ranged from "being thrown in the classroom" with very little direction, even as graduate teaching assistants, to not being observed by superiors, to being offered mechanical or forgettable trainings and workshops. A couple participants even identified that they were not formally trained in education.
Being "thrown in the classroom" Several of the participants described their first teaching experiences as being less than stellar because they weren't given a lot of support in their first classrooms.
For some, this went all the way back to their first teaching experiences as graduate teaching assistants. It was Philip who described his teaching assistant position as, "They throw you in the classroom." Natasha also had a less than exemplary teaching experience as a graduate student: I got the syllabus and that was it. And I mean, I had my previous experience as a student I guess, but no formal… yeah. The instructor didn't say, "This is what my objective is and how long they should be there." Sofia also stated that she had no support as a graduate student, recalling: I didn't ever teach, I was a lab assistant in one course. But I was not in charge of the course or anything. Research or lab assistant. Whatever it was…You know it was so long ago I don't remember if I actually taught it or just set things up --I did not have much responsibility.
And when asked if she felt she had support as a teacher in graduate school, Sofia replied, "Nope, none whatsoever." Malcolm and Melinda did not teach in graduate school, and only Wanda took a specific course on teaching as a graduate student.
Rachel did not say anything positive or negative about her graduate teaching experience.
The feeling of "being thrown in the classroom" continued for many of the participants as they began their professional teaching careers as adjuncts. Natasha In Melinda's case, she feels that she still lacks guidance in terms of what she is supposed to teach, even six year after starting.

Spotty observations by superiors
Four of the participants had never been observed by a superior, either a chair or a dean, in their careers. When asked if they had ever been observed, Malcolm Rachel, Natasha, and Wanda had been formally observed by a superior, but none of them really found the experience particularly helpful in terms of development.
Rachel recalled when asked if she had been observed, "That's a good question. I think yes, I think the chairman sat in once." When asked if she got any feedback, she replied, "No. Not really." Wanda has been observed a few times, but the feedback that she got was minimal at best. She recalled: Yeah, this one woman, I remember, it was at [four-year institution], [she] hasn't been here for a while. I slept horribly, and I knew I did horribly. And I talked to her afterwards and she was like, "Why do you want me to evaluate you? We know you're one of our better teachers." I said, "Because, maybe there's something else I can improve." She described another instance with a different observer: I mean, this one guy, he was head of the department at the time, and for some reason, when he came into my classroom, he was totally awed by the fact that I told ... That the class started, and I went like this, and students took their hats off. I didn't have to say anything, they took their hats off. But that's because for the first three weeks, I'm doing this. Take your hats off, take your hats off. It's Pavlovian, you know? He was so impressed with that, so I'm like, okay.
Natasha has also been observed a few times in her career, although not at the first institution she worked at. Natasha was, however, pretty critical of the observation process as a whole. When asked about her first observation, which was at a community college she worked at concurrently with her current institution, and the feedback she received, she recalled: It was a rubric, and then notes...which is sort of funny because he's a scientist so I'm not sure he was any more qualified to evaluate the effectiveness of a teacher but the rubric helped, right, you know? So, I mean, yeah.
She was then observed every term that she taught at the community college by the dean or a representative of his office. When asked if the continued observations were useful, she replied, "No." She continued: I shouldn't say it wasn't useful. Minimally useful… because… it never was feedback that was applicable for the course. It was always for jobs that one hour time slot of your three hours a week or whatever, so, useful in the sense of okay, maybe you're not projecting your voice loud enough for people to hear you, you know, mechanical things, but as far as like, are you… is your course effective and useful to your students? It's not useful because there was no collection of artifacts or any of that. So um, yeah, technically useful but not.
When asked about being evaluated at her current four-year institution, Natasha had some more positives, but still wasn't overly impressed with the feedback: I think they're, yeah, I think they're helpful. It definitely -I think [Dean of General Education] is more, has been the most helpful because he has a lot of context on application of education principles so I would say that out of the all of them he was the most useful, but a lot of it too was mechanical, right? Like how to make things more engaging, not the actual what those things are didn't exist. Right, like, the students are expecting you to do this, right, so don't do that, right? Like it was more mechanical stuff.
But she did see the value in the dean's perspectives: It is clear from the evidence above that observations by superiors happen infrequently, if ever, in an adjunct's career, and as evidenced by those that have been observed, those occurrences don't have a lot of impact on the development of pedagogical skills.
As Natasha stated above, observations serve as an important checkpoint and should be done on a regular basis to keep faculty from perpetuating practices that are not effective in the classroom. The problem with them currently, is that they aren't being done with any regularitytake for instance Rachel who has worked for her institution for 15 years and has been observed teaching once. What tools for evaluation are chairs and supervisors using, if not observations? Are they relying on student evaluations, which have been shown to be biased again women (Boring, 2017;MacNell, Driscoll, & Hunt, 2017, Sprague & Massoni, 2005 and people of color (Reid, 2010)? Or are they relying solely on the grade outputs of the faculty? Observations and debriefing may be the best evaluation technique for evaluating faculty on teaching, but it is used so infrequently that it becomes ineffective.

Mechanical and forgettable trainings/workshops
Several of the participants identified attending trainings or workshops put on by their institution's equivalent to a center for teaching and learning. For most of them, they found the workshops mechanical or practical in naturereally only covering topics like how to use a learning management systemor wholly forgettable. When asked if those mixers were useful to her, she replied "Um, I actually made ittook it upon myself -because they weren't that useful." It was at that point she made connections with business professors to enhance her classes made up of primarily business students. She also found that even when she held a full-time position at her current institution as a laboratory instructor, she found the offered professional development lacking. When asked if she had support in that position, she replied, "No, none, none, none. There would have been for maybe if you were teaching a course that wasn't a lab, they had stuff. But it didn't relate to the lab. It wasn't helpful." Melinda described an onboarding program that consisted of a set of workshops that she took when she began teaching at her current institution. '"They did in the beginning….Yeah, they actually offer five professional development courses. So that was six years ago, and I kind of don't remember the topics." When asked if they were useful, she replied: I'm not sure. All I can remember is that I felt that it was more about the student body than it was about the faculty. I think that's what I kind of got out of it, like work around the students, work around the students. I sort of got that kind of message.
She did mention that there was an incentive to take the courses. "It was optional but they kind of recommend you to take it, and then they actually do pay you to take those courses….So I think that's why faculty do take it." She did reflect that it may be more useful now that she has an idea of her position, stating, "I mean, it might be more It is clear from the evidence above that while some of the participants participate in trainings and workshops offered by their institutions, on the whole they are not very useful and sometimes forgettable. There was also evidence, for some of the participants, that formal professional development of their teaching was not a priority right now in their careers.

Not formally trained in education
Two of the participants highlighted the fact that they are trained scientists, not trained educators. Rachel mentioned this when she was describing a switch in courses

Adjunct pitfalls
Some of the participants identified commonly cited pitfalls that adjuncts face as negative factors towards their development, including the unfortunate timing of their schedules and the fact that they sometimes feel they are "second-class citizens." For these participants, the timing of their courses prevented them making meaningful connections, which as reported in Research Question 4 above, is one of the participants' most highly cited positive factors towards their development. They also found that their schedule, life, and the timing of workshops didn't really fit together in practice.

"Second-class citizens"
A few of the participants mentioned ways in which they felt that they weren't necessarily completely integrated into their departments or institutions. It was Rachel that said "I do feel a bit like a second-class citizen in the faculty level of it." But she also said that because she had been there for 15 years, "I do feel I know everybody and they appreciate what I bring to the

CHAPTER 5 CONCLUSION
The final chapter in this dissertation reports the following: a summary of the study, including its significance, design, and analysis of the data; conclusions and interpretations of the findings; limitations of the study, and suggestions for future research.

Summary of the Study
This research was inspired by the researcher's interest in the pedagogical choices of faculty in the natural sciences, as well as her own personal experiences with professional development as a long-term adjunct professor teaching in the natural sciences. As consistently reported by the popular media and academic news publications, there is an "adjunct crisis" in academia. Institutions have shifted into hiring more contingent (adjunct and non-tenure-track) positions to cover more sections of courses at a significantly lower cost, including pay and benefits, than tenure-track faculty (AAUP, 2017;Snyder, et al., 2016). Despite this "crisis," very little research has been conducted that focuses on adjunct faculty in general, even less in specific disciplines of study, and there have been even fewer studies highlighting the voices of adjunct faculty themselves.
The majority of research that focuses on adjunct faculty focuses on their effectiveness as instructors, mainly utilizing large-scale databases and quantitative research methods to determine if adjunct instructors are less effective than their fulltime counterparts (Bettinger & Long, 2010;Bolge, 1995;Burgess & Samuels, 1999;Chen, 2012;David, et al., 1985;Deutsch, 2015;Eagan & Jaeger, 2008;Ehrenberg & Zhang, 2005;Fedler, 1989;Harrington & Schibik, 2001;Jacoby, 2006;Jaeger & Eagan, 2009;Johnson, 2011;Landrum, 2009;MacArthur, 1999;McGuire, 1993;Muller, et al., 2013;Ronco & Cahill, 2004;Rossol-Allison, 2011;Sonner, 2000;Wallin, 2004;Wickun & Stanley, 2011). When taking the literature as a whole, the prevailing hypothesis that adjunct instructors are less effective is found to be inconclusive, as there are studies that show adjuncts perform worse, the same, or even sometimes better, on a number of metrics, including retention rates, graduation rates, and grades. It has also been found that the instructional practices of adjunct faculty are fairly similar to their full-time counterparts. Although the research does show that adjuncts tend to use collaborative and active techniques or learner-centered activities (Baldwin & Wawrzynski, 2011;Eagan, 2007;Leslie & Gappa, 2002;Schuetz, 2002;Umbach, 2007;Webb, et al., 2013) in the class a bit less than full-time faculty, several of the studies noted that knowledge of evidence-based approaches to teaching were low across both groups. To answer these questions, a qualitative multiple-case study was designed that purposefully sampled adjunct faculty that taught at four-year institutions with more than five years of teaching experience, no K-12 certification, and no formal education in the field of education. Seven participants were selected after their department chairs shared a recruitment survey. The participants subsequently participated in 60-to 90minute interviews about their experiences as adjunct faculty. Course syllabi were also collected via email. Interview data was coded and categorized using the constant comparative method of data analysis developed by Glaser and Straus (1967). Memberchecking was used to ensure that my interpretation of their experiences was trustworthy. Cross-case analysis was employed using the methodology described by Stake (2006). Individual cases were analyzed for recurring themes that were pertinent to the research questions, each new individual case building and being incorporated into a framework. Once all of the cases were analyzed and coded at least once, the existing framework was then used to reanalyze the interviews a second time, and themes were honed and simplified. The themes were then presented using the participants own words and phrases. A summary of the themes will be presented below, organized by research question.

Summary of Findings
This section of this dissertation will summarize the findings of the five research questions and draw conclusions based on those findings, linking them to the existing literature on the subject.

Research question #1
Research question #1 asks: How do veteran adjunct faculty, who teach in the natural sciences, describe their teaching? During the interviews, participants were asked questions reflecting on their past and current teaching, as well as what they think effective and ineffective instructors look like. Overwhelmingly, the participants responded that teaching in the sciences should be relevant and engaging, while also prioritizing developing personal connections with their students.

Making science relevant
Every participant made mention of the fact that science should be relevant to their students. Each of the participants had, at some point in their careers, taught nonmajors students, and those experiences made it very clear to them that part of being an effective teacher is to make sure that students can access science at a level that is appropriate for them. For the participants in this study, it was important to them to make science relevant to their students. For some participants, this happened through the use of simple, relevant analogies that connect science concepts to the lived experiences of the students in the room. Many of the participants also responded that they employ current events and focus on topics that intersect with their students' lives in order to make sure that their content is relevant to their students. Rachel, Wanda, and Melinda all take the idea of making science relevant for their students a step further and really focus their teaching around developing critical thinking skills.

Engaging students: Utilizing a variety of teaching practices
Another important indicator of effectiveness that the participants in this study described was whether or not their students were engaged in learning. All of the participants described using some form of alternative teaching practice in their classrooms at this point in their careers, however, nearly all of the participants described beginning their teaching careers using passive, teacher-centered techniques, such as employing lecturing or writing on a chalkboard or overhead projector as the only approach used in the classroom. The only exception to this was Sofia, who had significant experience with inquiry-based science education training while she was a scientific researcher. Each of the participants used a spectrum of alternative teaching practices, from very basic where Malcolm incorporated crosswords to work on vocabulary to Sofia who organized her course around inquiry-based, hands-on approaches.

Making personal connections with students
One of the major drawbacks to being an adjunct professor, some might say, is that adjuncts do not have the time to develop deep personal connections with their students. Several of the participants in this study made mention of the personal connections they make with their students in the classroom. The making of personal connections is a departure from the literature, where the underlying assumption is that adjunct faculty do not make connections.

Research question #2
Research question #2 asks: How do veteran adjunct faculty, who teach in the natural sciences, describe their development of pedagogical skills along the Dreyfus and Dreyfus (1980) Novice to Expert Skill Model? The second research question that guided this research was based on the Dreyfus and Dreyfus (1980) Novice to Expert Skill Model of development that was modified and expanded by Berliner (2004) to describe the development of teaching skills in teachers. Using a participant's responses to the interview questions, I was able to categorize particular characteristics of their teaching throughout their careers that highlighted their development of expertise over time. The participants were also asked to self-identify with the stage of development they felt they were at when they began teaching and currently. The following section will highlight the characteristics of each stage of development: novice, advanced beginner, competent, proficient, and expert, and how the participants identified with each stage. The characteristics of each stage are also summarized in Appendix A. Also included at the end of each stage are policy recommendations that would best serve teachers at that stage of development.

Novice stage
Not a single participant in this study self-identified as a novice when they began teaching their first classes professionally. While a few of them described novice behaviors, like Natasha describing standing in front of the board feeling confident that she knew enough about photosynthesis but had no idea how to actually go about teaching it, for the most part, by the time they were teachers of their own classes, the participants in this study had skipped over the novice stage of development.
Four of the participants in this study had experienced teaching in graduate school, but only one of those actually took a course in "how to teach." Several of the participants, even those who did not teach in graduate school, referred to teachers they had in their undergraduate and graduate programs that illustrated mostly "bad" teaching practices for them, and they decided they did not want to be like that.
Another possible life experience that was cited by some of the participants was their experiences as parents. In this study, four of the participants identified that their experiences raising their kids taught them that the world isn't as black and white or concrete as you might wish that it was, which helped them decide what kind of a teacher they wanted to be.

Advanced beginner stage
The participants in this study described a lot of fear and uncertainty as they began their careers as advanced beginners. The highlights examples of being marginally effective as teachers, but also described how they missed critical details, like how teacher perception of a topic can influence student perception. They also described having difficulty dealing with challenging situationslike when student come to class smelling of drugs.

Competent stage
By the competent stage of development, teachers have developed their own "rules" to teach by, and they become emotionally invested in their performance in the classroom, because now it isn't the "rules" that will fail them, but their own choices (Berliner, 2004). At the same time, competent teachers begin to impose rigid rules so as to keep control of their classes, now that they are responsible for the "rules." By the competent stage, teachers begin to see the impact of their teaching approaches on student learning, and because of that, they spend a lot of time trying to figure out what works to engage students, and what doesn't work. All of the participants in this study described the trial and error process and experiences that shaped their teaching approaches throughout their careers.

Proficient stage
A proficient teacher begins to react to situations with much more flexibility and situational awareness, but can still take a lot of time deliberating when decisions need to be made (Berliner, 2004). For example, Natasha began to see herself as an organizer of knowledge in her anatomy and physiology courses, because she realized that just repeating content to her students wasn't as effective as helping them understand how to organize the knowledge in their minds. Rachel also began to shift her pedagogies based on feedback from her studentsreally getting a feel for what they actually needed from her as an instructor. The participants in this study also began to release the inflexibility of competence, and planned for more flexibility in their courses to deal with situations that may come uplike a class not understanding the material during the first go round. Personal connections were also described, resulting in flexibility in terms of student interactions -those rigid rules weren't as rigid as before, because the students became people to the faculty.

Expert stage
Expert teachers think quickly on their feet, reacting to situations without thinking too hard about them. They also are completely aware of their situational context, having a good idea of the needs of the students that they serve. Expert teachers also have a very good idea about their weaknesses and can account for them in the teaching. The participants in this study spent a lot of time describing the students they serve and the contexts in which they serve them, and detailed the flexibility with which they can switch contexts, like Philip who teaches two very different populations at a university versus a community college. Or like Rachel who, after meeting with a student, recognized an overreaction to a poor grade and helped the student through that situation. Or Malcolm and Wanda being very aware of students with mental health issues. . Expert teachers are also very aware of their limitations as a teacher, and typically "farm-out" topics to experts, or seek out professional development to help them with very specific needslike Sofia really focusing on how to be a better discussion facilitator.

Research question #3
Research Question #3 asks: How do veteran adjunct faculty, who teach in the natural sciences, self-identify their current stage of pedagogical skills along the Dreyfus and Dreyfus (1980) Novice to Expert Skill Model? Six of the seven participants self-identified as experts, while one, Sofia, self-identified as proficient.
Two interesting findings were revealed when focusing on this research question: 1) Most of the women adjunct faculty in this study at first underestimated their pedagogical skills before settling on expert after reading the list of expert characteristics, which could be indicative of Imposter Syndrome and 2) Two of the participants self-identified at the stage of expert, but based on their responses to interview questions, probably exist further down on the spectrum of skill development.
One participant in particular, Malcolm, was very confident in his abilities as an instructor based on grades and student feedback, but had never been formally observed as a teacher and didn't really give answers indicative of having expertise in teaching.
This may illustrate the Dunning-Kruger effect.

Imposter syndrome in women adjuncts
One of the more interesting findings from this research included the fact that nearly all of the women interviewed were reluctant to consider themselves experts in teaching, despite describing expert practices in their current teaching and having more than 10 years of experience as teachers. This revealed itself in quotes from the women adjunct faculty stating that they were reluctant to say they were an expert in teaching because they knew other teachers that were better, or that they did not want to think they are experts because of their ego, but that it probably wasn't the case.

Dunning-Kruger Effect in adjunct faculty
This bias may have been illustrated by Malcolm, and to a certain extent Melinda. Both individuals self-identified as experts, but based on their responses to certain questions, they really didn't fit within the expert stage. Malcolm in particular was very confident in his abilities as a teacher, using only his students' grades and student evaluations as an indicator of his ability. When asked why he thought he was an expert, he described a situation where his students were more successful on a multiple choice exam than one of his colleague's students. He described using primarily a content transmission approach, being very clear to his students about the content he taught, and that it was his job to distill it down for them to memorize. To him, that was learning. Melinda was a little less extreme, mostly being very confident that her courses didn't need any more modifications in the way she taught them. She was also a bit less confident, as she did waver a bit before settling on Expert. Neither individual had been observed by a superior, and because they had been left unchecked, they had the assumption that there was little to modify in regards to their teaching.

Research question #4
Research Questions #4 asks: What do veteran adjunct faculty, who teach in the natural sciences, perceive as factors that provided positive results in their development of higher pedagogical skills? The participants in this study were very clear that the positive factors that influenced their development of pedagogical skills were mostly peer interactions and an internal self-drive to find the best way to teach their content areas, as well as having access to funding of some sort. Secondarily, some did find formal workshops and trainings helpful, although many of the participants stated that the workshops and trainings they had attended were mechanical and forgettable, turning those experiences into negative factors. A few of the participants identified having a sense of the "big picture" and their role in the university as a whole, either through curriculum development or advising students, as a positive or potentially positive factor in their development of pedagogical skills.

Research question #5
Research Question #5 asks: What do veteran adjunct faculty, who teach in the natural sciences, perceive as factors that provided negative results in their development of higher pedagogical skills? The largest negative factor described was a lack of external support for their teaching, either because of "being thrown into the classroom" with no guidance as to how to run a classroom early on in their careers, spotty observations by superiors, insufficient trainings and workshops being offered to them, as mentioned above, and not having formal education training. The participants did identify a couple of commonly cited adjunct pitfalls as negative factors as well, including the timing of their schedules, which did not allow them to interact with their peers as much as they might like, thwarting the positive factor described above. Some of the participants also identified feeling like a "second-class citizen" at times, either through a loss of office space or not feeling completely supported by their superiors should a challenge arise, which also negatively impacted their development.

Policy recommendations based on skill development
This research has shown that adjunct faculty that teach in the natural sciences do in fact show a development of pedagogical skills along the Dreyfus and Dreyfus (1980) Novice-to-Expert Skill Development model. As such, adjunct faculty members that fall in any one of the five stages of development have different professional development needs based on that stage. Table 2 highlights the recommended sources of professional development for each stage and the following section offers explanations for those recommendations.  (Easton, 2009;Renninger et al., 2007;Smith & Wright, 2000), allow the new faculty the opportunity to develop relationships with other members of the institution community (Smith & Wright, 2000), and to give them the tools to smooth out their first teaching experience in terms of mechanics (Smith & Wright, 2000). Orientations should include both mechanical workshops, like understanding the learning management systems, how to use email, and how to submit final grades, and pedagogical workshops that get adjunct faculty thinking about the type of teacher they want to be (Schwartz, 2007;Yee, 2007).
Orientations and onboarding that include pedagogical development materials could help to fill in the gap in the "the rules" that novices utilize when they approach their teaching.
As the adjunct professors in this study, and quite possibly many adjunct professors in the profession come into teaching as advanced beginners, it is ideal that at this stage there is appropriate professional development to help deal with the characteristics indicative of advanced beginners, such as dealing with challenging students. Mentoring programs (Nanna, 2018;Peters & Boylston, 2006;Santisteban & Egues, 2014;Savage, Karp, & Logue, 2004) of incoming adjunct faculty could be particularly effective at this stage in their teaching development because the mentor could serve as a sounding board as necessary when the new adjunct encountered a difficult student or found themselves to not be as effective as they want to be. Huffstutler and Varnell (2004) also mentoring opportunities to combat the prevalence of impostorism in academia today. As was reported in the findings chapter, peer interactions were very important to the participants in this study, especially in their first classes. Fostering a relationship between a veteran adjunct and an incoming adjunct could increase the likelihood of peer interactions that could help adjuncts navigate teaching in their early years.
It is at the competent stage of development where centers for teaching and learning and faculty development staff with expertise in pedagogy should become the most important source of professional development. Those with expertise in pedagogy can guide adjunct faculty through how learning occurs, and the best approaches to ensure learning happens in their classrooms. Instead, what was described a lot by the participants in this study, was a lot of individual professional development occurring through the use of the internet, which is not uncommon (Durso, 2011;Sherer et al. 2003;Sunal et al., 2001). Many of the participants described going online to see how other teachers had taught a particular concept and tried it out in their classrooms with modifications if necessary. Not only did professional development occur in a silo, with no pedagogical expertise to guide it, the adjunct faculty in this study also spent unnecessary time looking for information that may have been available to them through someone with expertise in pedagogy.
It may be at the proficient stage of development that professional development may need to move beyond simple workshops and seminars to the more long-form, semester-long workshops, courses, or learning communities (Barker & Mercier, 2007;Lambert & Cox, 2007;Webb, Wong, & Hubball, 2013). It is at this stage where major shifts in pedagogical thinking occur, and it would be helpful at this stage of development to have long-term support systems in place so that an adjunct faculty member could rely on one person, or group of people, to help walk them through major changes in their classrooms.
At the expert level, one might assume that professional development may no longer be necessary, but that is far from the truth. Expert adjunct faculty would be a fantastic resource to tap into in terms of mentoring incoming adjunct faculty. Another part of the expert stage that the participants described was the ability to recognize their shortcomings and how to navigate around them. Wanda brought in guest speakers to cover content she wasn't an expert in, Rachel used video resources, and Sofia changed pedagogies to deal with her lack of discussion facilitation skills. Even experts need help to further develop their skills, and as described in Chapter 2, it is also part of being an expert to continuously seek out opportunities to further develop their skills (Bereiter & Scardamalia, 1993). Expert teachers also derive their knowledge from outside of their own experiences, seeking the help of other experts to guide their actions (Kreber, 2002). This just goes to show that professional development does not ever stop, nor should institutions feel that because someone has been teaching for a long time, they have no need for assistance.

Policy recommendations based on adjunct experiences
This next section will highlight policies that would help to enhance the positive experiences of the adjunct faculty in this study, as well as mitigate the negative factors that may have slowed their pedagogical growth.

Developing relationships with peers.
Institutions need to meet adjuncts where they are in terms of professional development. As mentioned above, adjuncts find value in peer interactions, including mixers, brown bag lunches, and other formally organized activities. It might be wise, for institutions to begin experimenting with such activities. A local institution, that I happen to work for, implemented a coffee hour once every two weeks in the library where faculty could mingle with staff from the institution's center for teaching and learning and with other faculty. It was a specific time and place to ask questions, share what they were doing in their own classrooms, and get feedback from peers, with the added benefit of crossing disciplines.
Dropping down a level, departments can implement similar activities, and typically do to share experiences regarding research. Organizing a monthly, bimonthly, or even once-per-term opportunity for all faculty, both part-time and fulltime, within the department to get together and share teaching experiences could be an effective way to encourage faculty to try new things in the classroom. Offering it more often and at different times could alleviate the fact that adjuncts teach at very different times as their full-time counterparts and allow them to attend at least some of the meetings.
Another peer interaction that was highly valued by the participants in this study was informal conversations with their peers, either part-time or full-time. This is where office space for adjuncts becomes important, not only for the use to aid students during office hours. Even if adjuncts are given a shared space, in the same areas as other adjuncts, or even better with full-time faculty, informal conversations should spark naturally eventually. Instead, many adjuncts do not have space, even for office hours, and walk straight from their cars to their classrooms and back, or find other places on campus to work, therefore limiting the opportunities for informal peer conversations.
Also of value to some of the participants in this study were peer observations, or the ability to shadow another instructor, especially in their early teaching days.
Departments should be encouraging new adjuncts to shadow veteran instructors of the courses the adjuncts will be teaching. This can happen while an adjunct is teaching a course concurrently. Natasha, Sofia, and Rachel all found having the ability to observe a seasoned teacher helpful to their development of skills. This is also something that doesn't need to be limited to new adjuncts. As teachers develop their skills and try new pedagogies, it would be helpful to encourage others to observe a class in action, as sometimes, even just sharing it in a mixer or brown-bag lunch isn't enough to encourage others to try it out.

Self-drive: Individual professional development
Another factor that the participants found positively impacted their pedagogical development was their internal self-drive, which for the most part manifested itself as spending a lot of time online, searching for different ways of teaching their particular content area. This is another place where institutions and departments can meet their adjuncts where they are. Adjunct do live a transient lifestyle for the most part, sometimes working for more than one institution and don't spend a lot of time on campusthey come to campus to teach and for office hours and then they leave. They don't get as much time to connect with their peers in person as they might like, so there is little time to share interesting resources, and as such, adjunct faculty have to put in the leg work to identify good online teaching resources on their own. Departments can, and have, mitigated this through the use of their institutions' learning management systems, enrolling every member of a department, or even of a shared course, to a course page on the learning management system dedicated to sharing appropriate resources that anyone can add to. Institutions can also do as above, or create an easily-located website, for resources that could be helpful to any discipline institution-wide. Making sure that the page is continuously updated and organized, as well as identified to new, and even reminding current adjunct faculty could reduce some of the leg work put in by individual faculty members.

Funding.
Several of the participants in this study indicated that they changed an aspect of their teaching or participated in professional development most often when they had access to funding, either through departmental funds or professional development funds earmarked by collective bargaining agreements developed by their unions.
Several of the participants described instances where they had merely asked for funding for teaching supplies, and to that all I can recommend to adjunct faculty is to ask for funds, with the worst outcome being that the request is declined. As to the second source of funding, union organization for adjuncts is on the increase, and adjunct faculty should be making sure that professional development is wrapped into the collective bargaining agreement. And then using the funds. Wanda indicated that she was nervous her professional development funds would be taken away under the next contract because her colleagues had not been using the funds.

Workshops/Conferences.
A few of the participants in this study had participated in workshops put on by their institutions, or had attended conferences. In regards to the workshops offered by institutions, adjuncts should be encouraged to attend, but it is imperative that those workshops be useful and valuable to the faculty, otherwise an institution runs the risk of pushing away faculty interested if the workshops are not up to par, as the participants in this study indicated how unhelpful workshops had been for them in the past. As for conferences, funding should be available, perhaps not on a yearly basis, perhaps not fully covering the cost of attending a conference, but should be available to help cover the cost of attending conferences. Without funding, it is likely, as Wanda indicated before she realized she could use professional development funds, that adjunct faculty will skip out on attending useful conferences. Between airfare, gas prices, food prices, hotel, and conference rates, an adjunct is very easily priced out of even the smallest conferences.

Seeing the "big picture."
It is vital that adjunct faculty become a part of the institutional systems for which they work, serving on committees and partaking in service. While it can help the adjunct develop that "big picture" of the institutional mission and values that will help their growth, it will obviously serve to aid the institution in their growth as well.
As numbers of adjunct faculty rise, they become more and more a part of the higher education landscape and can serve as resources, bringing ideas from other institutions and industry into the fold. Leaving them in the dark, making them feel unconnected, is not going to help them be better teachers. Adjunct faculty should feel like their voices count and are heard by those higher in the hierarchical scheme of academia.

Lack of Teaching Support.
"Being thrown in the classroom." Several of the participants described the notion of "being thrown in the classroom" without any support structures, even as graduate student teaching assistants. We cannot expect that anyone with content knowledge is a capable teacher the first time they are put in a classroom. And yet, only one of the participants in this study was offered the opportunity to "learn how to teach" while in graduate school by taking a single course. Ideally, pedagogical development should be a significant part of any post-graduate degree program. With the higher education landscape changing as much as it is, with less tenure-track positions and more contingent positions, it is likely that unless students move into industry after graduation, they will likely hold a teaching position at some point in their career. Luckily, teaching professional development programs are on the rise in higher education, training graduate students in educational principles and pedagogies alongside their research training.
At the same time, adjunct instructors should not be "thrown into the classroom" without knowing what support systems are in place and can help them succeed. Peer observations, as mentioned above, serve as an excellent first step.
Onboarding programs, like orientations can be helpful, even more so if they happen at a departmental level rather than an institutional level, as institutional level orientations tend to focus more on the mechanical aspects: email, human resources, grading, etc.
Mentoring programs, connecting one individual with another single individual are also helpful right at the beginning of an adjunct experience. Of course, this requires that adjuncts be hired on a timely basis, and not days before the course begins.

Spotty observations.
Observations are necessary to check adjunct faculty, especially if there is little informal communication happening as well. As talked about above, Malcolm and Melinda both overstate their abilities as teachers, and do so confidently. Neither had been observed, and perhaps an observation would trigger them to identify their ignorance of education principles and pedagogy to help them move upward on the spectrum to Expert. Observations also serve as a simple checkpoint to check the progress of an adjunct faculty member. Both Natasha and Melinda came from industry and both made mention of the lack of oversight of teachers in academia. Melinda actually said that the biggest downfall to being an adjunct was no indication of her growth as a teacher. The person most likely to responsible for this growth oversight would be a department chair or course coordinator, and observing a class with a short debrief once a year would serve as a checkpoint to an adjunct faculty member's development.

Mechanical and forgettable trainings/workshops.
It is important to note that every one of the participants had access to various types of professional development throughout their careers, including professional development opportunities provided through their institutions. Every participant described some type of institution-sponsored workshop or training that they had access to as an adjunct faculty member. This is a good sign, considering there are many adjunct faculty who do not have access to institution-sponsored activities. And yet, for the most part, the participants in this study seemed apathetic and unconnected to the institutional supports. For some reason, the institutions are not meeting the specific needs of these adjuncts.
At this point in their careers, these adjuncts have been bored or found no use for the workshops/trainings provided to them by their home institutions. This may well be in fact to the notion that adjuncts are transient and appear to have a high turnover rate, so centers for teaching and learning cater their workshops to an influx of new faculty every year. However, as mentioned in Chapter 1 approximately 30% of the adjunct work-force has worked for their current institutions for over 10 years, as was the case for 6 of the 7 participants in this study. The seventh participant had been working for her current institution for 6 years, so very well enmeshed into the institutional culture at that point. Several of the participants mentioned that the workshops were basic how-to trainings, like how to organize a learning management system. Trainings as such are important, especially to newcomers, but if that is the only type of professional development opportunity an institution offers, or even appears to offer, then it is not surprising when faculty of all levels don't seek out support.

Adjunct pitfalls.
Overwhelmingly, the participants in this study were very content with being adjunct faculty, and had very little to complain about in terms of the commonly held pitfalls of adjunct faculty. However, two adjunct pitfalls were identified by the participants in this studythe timing of their schedules and being treated as a "second-class citizen." Both of these pitfalls are remedied by the same recommendationsrecognizing the role that adjuncts play and that they are important members of an institution and deserve to be recognized as such.
All too often, it is easy to overlook that adjunct teach the classes full-time faculty don't want to teach, including early mornings, evenings, and weekends. They are not always available to attend professional development sessions scheduled at those times, and may not be able to attend others during the day due to other jobs.
Obviously, it is impossible to accommodate everyone, but varying the times and days of professional development can serve to expose more adjuncts to more opportunities Nixon (2007).
As to the "second-class citizen" feeling, it is important for adjunct faculty to have the space to work and meet with students, but it is more important for adjunct faculty to feel valued and feel like their superiors have their back if/when things go awry. The more valuable an adjunct faculty member feels, the more likely they will put in more work to make themselves more valuablea self-fulfilling prophecy. If they don't feel valued, they will likely step back and disconnect themselves from the job as much as they can, doing the bare minimum.

Limitations
There were several limitations to this research, one being the small number of participants. This could have been remedied by stretching out my recruitment area -I focused mainly on southern New England to send recruitment emails to department chairs. I did also use social media sources to try and recruit adjunct faculty nationwide, but none of those recruitment efforts resulted in any eligible participants based on the initial survey. All of my participants were geographically located in southern New England as a result, including from Rhode Island, Massachusetts, and Connecticut. Based on informal social media conversations with other adjunct faculty across the nation, New England is one of the "better" places to be an adjunct in the country, as adjuncts are better paid and there are a lot of opportunities due to the large concentration of postsecondary institutions in the region. This could have skewed the participants' feelings towards being an adjunct.
I could have also attempted to reach out to adjuncts individually, but I had decided to go through chairs so as to have a sort of permission to talk to their adjuncts, or at least give the chairs the heads up that someone was talking to their adjuncts about their experiences. Going through the chairs required them to be willing or proactive enough to forward the recruitment survey to their adjunct corps. Reaching out directly to the adjuncts themselves when possible may have increased recruitment. This, however, would have required adjunct faculty to be listed appropriately on their institutions' websitessome of which I had difficulty even identifying department chairs.
Another large limitation of this study was not only the sample size, but also that the majority of the data was reliant on participant self-reporting. Self-reporting can result in participants misremembering their history, embellishing stories, or even outright lying. Typically, to combat the limitations in self-reported data, there is triangulation that occurs. I attempted to collect syllabi from the participants in the study, but only a few submitted them. Those that were submitted were not really useful in triangulating the data. Adding observations of each of the participants in their current courses would have strengthened the trustworthiness of the data.
Another limitation to consider was the "type" of adjuncts I interviewed. All of my participants identified either as freelancers or career-enders. The majority of the participants were fairly content with their status as adjuncts as they had chosen to go that route in their lives, either because it was a logical path to take after long careers in the sciences or that it worked for their families, allowing them to spend more time with young children, and they continued with the flexibility being an adjunct afforded them. I think the largest weakness was that I did not have the opportunity to interview any aspiring academicssomeone who wanted to move into a full-time position eventually. Natasha was the only participant who might have been identified as an aspiring academic, but after more than 10 years as an adjunct, has a pretty jaded view of what a full-time position would be like and her likelihood of obtaining one without a terminal degree. I feel as though the boundaries I set before the recruitment phase severely limited my ability to recruit aspiring academics, especially the requirement that my participants had five or more years of experience as an adjunct. It is possible that someone who is an aspiring academic would not spend five years working as an adjunct, as they would be proactive about landing a full-time position out of graduate school in less than five years. Aspiring academics may have offered a unique perspective, especially in regards to professional development, because they would be eager and willing to do as much as they could to better their chances at landing a fulltime position. As it was, the majority of freelancers and career-enders interviewed in this study were fairly apathetic to the professional development offered to them and didn't spend very much time at all focusing on pedagogy, except that which they could research on their own time online. I also did not have the opportunity to interview any professionalsadjunct who teach "on the side" of another profession. This may have just been a result of time and interest, as many professionals dedicate more effort to their full-time jobs, rather than their adjunct positions.

Suggestions for Future Research
The first step to take in furthering this research would be to expand the pool of participants to include as many perspectives as possible, possibly removing the five year requirement, and looking at the development of skills even in "new" science adjuncts. It would be interesting to also expand the research to include science adjuncts at two-year community colleges, to see if they are offered better opportunities for professional development, and as a result, show a different pattern of development in the pedagogical skills. Community colleges employ up to 70% adjunct instructors, and as a result, sometimes show much more dedication to supporting their adjunct instructors through appropriate professional development programs. Four-year institutions, as the ones focused on in this study, only report on average about 25% of their science faculty as being adjunct or part-time.
Another interesting avenue for continuing this research would be to expand it out to include veteran adjunct teaching in any discipline. The popular news media consistently reports on the "adjunct crisis," and the majority of adjunct faculty focused in these articles are in the humanities. As funding for the humanities in higher education decreases, as do full-time positions, which are typically not being filled as the previous generation of professors retire. This has left a staggering amount of graduates without avenues to enter into academia full-time. They fill their schedules with introductory writing, literature, and media courses, working for several institutions at one time. Not that this doesn't happen in the sciences, but it is far less common. It would be interesting to see if their development patterns are similar, despite the difference in discipline, and also what professional development opportunities they find valuable.

Concluding Thoughts
This study highlighted the need for more research on adjunct faculty populations. There is so little research that uses the voices of adjunct faculty to answer the questions we so often ask of the adjunct population. It is easy to stick to numbers and surveys to make observations, but some of the nuance gets lost in the data. I interviewed seven individuals, all whom were very passionate about their teaching, all of whom had a motivation for being an adjunct that was fairly different from the narrative of adjunct life that comes out in the popular press. But it is that narrative, of adjuncts scrambling for positions, working for multiple institutions, changing jobs semester by semester, all in the hope of that elusive full-time position, that institutions have focused on, essentially ignoring their adjunct populations because they might not be there next term. And the seven individuals I interviewed were very faithful to their institutions, all but one teaching for more than 10 years. It is time to shift that narrative to include all adjuncts, and meet them where they are in terms of professional development.
Teaching professional development is certainly increasing in higher education, but it has a long way to go, especially at institutions where research is more of a priority. And while this study focused solely on adjunct faculty, it is likely that many of the findings stated and recommendations made throughout this chapter would be relevant to novice and developing full-time faculty members as well. But again, the key is to not ignore the adjunct faculty when it comes to professional developmentit should be equally offered to all instructors at an institution. Even if an adjunct faculty is transient, everyone is best served when teachers are supported and trained, because those skills are transferable to other positions in academia.
Science education in higher education is important so many reasons, both for majors and non-majors. For majors, having a good science teacher may result in a few more students being retained, likely more women and people of color, both to diversify and increase the amount of STEM graduates which are needed in our quickly technologically advancing society. For non-majors, the last formal science course they take in higher education should be with a teacher that makes science relevant and engaging to them, so that when they graduate they have a better appreciation of science. As long as their last science course ever isn't a bad experience, they will continue to find science interesting and continue to be scientifically literate. We want all of our teachersincluding our adjunct facultywho are teaching science in higher education to be the best teachers they can be, and they cannot do that by "being thrown in a classroom" with little to no support.

APPENDIX A: Novice to Expert Skill Development Model
Adapted from Dreyfus and Dreyfus (1980), by Berliner (2004

APPENDIX B: Recruitment Script -Emails to Department Chairs
Dear (department chair name), My name is Heather Miceli. I am a doctoral student at the University of Rhode Island and Rhode Island College, in the Joint PhD in Education program. I am also a part-time faculty member at Johnson & Wales University and Roger Williams University teaching science/biology.
Under the advisement of Dr. Kathy Peno, of the Education Department at the University of Rhode Island, the purpose of my research is to better understand how teaching skills develop in adjunct faculty members in the sciences and what professional development opportunities were most influential in the development of those skills. The benefits of this research include information that may help postsecondary administrations to enact policies that better serve their adjunct populations. If you could, please forward this email to any and all part-time adjunct faculty members in your department that may be interested in participating. If they are interested in participating, they would need to fill out a short 5-minute survey to determine if they fit the requirements for the study. Participants need to have been an adjunct faculty member for at least 5 years, have no formal education in the field of Education, and not have K-12 certification If chosen, participants will be asked to participate in an approximately 90minute interview, either in person, via phone, or via Skype. If you are an adjunct with five or more years of teaching experience as an adjunct, have no formal education in Education (as a field of study), do not have a K-12 certification and are interested in participating in this study, please fill out the short 5-minute survey linked here to determine if you fit the requirements for the study.
i. Union support for PD ii. Asking for money d. Seeing the "big picture"their value to the institution e. Trainings and Workshops