Pedagogical Foundations in Professional School Settings

Hello all, I'm interested in your feedback on this, as it's something that I've struggled with since starting my job.

A little background, I was a high school teacher for around a decade, and I now work in a professional school setting as an academic advisor. I work with students to build study skills, and connect with them university resources to ensure they are successful during their time here.

My problem is, the people in charge of teaching, even though they are content area experts, have no pedagogical knowledge aside from going through the same courses as these students, albeit many of them have been out of school for decades.

I am trying to stress to faculty members that providing clear course and session objectives isn't "dumbing down the course material" but rather provides these students with a way to structure their limited study time. One of the problems with the academic culture here is that if the material was presented in ANY way, whether on a presentation slide or in an assigned reading, it is fair game for an assessment question. That question doesn't necessarily need to align with an objective. Students might have multiple, 100+ slide presentations loaded with scientific information that they are expected to "know" in order to do well on an assessment, and the assessment item might be something along the lines of "what % of the population suffers from this specific disorder," when there was no indication that THAT piece of information was what they needed to hold onto from the presentations.

I guess my question is - how applicable do you think foundational pedagogical concepts are in a professional school setting? Is is appropriate to ask professional school level professors to apply frameworks such as backwards design to their lessons to make sure assessments are actually assessing the intended objectives?

Submitted September 24, 2025 at 07:52AM by OldYellerSnowCone https://ift.tt/lWd2ig3