THE AUTHOR

L. Dee Fink served as director of the Instructional Development Program and an adjunct professor of geography at the University of Oklahoma for twenty-nine years. He received his PhD and MA degrees from the University of Chicago and his BA from Capital University in Columbus, Ohio. When he first came to Oklahoma from graduate school in 1976, he taught courses in geography and higher education. In 1979 he proposed and established the Instructional Development Program and has served as its director ever since. At Oklahoma he was also a faculty member for fifteen years in the College of Liberal Studies, a special program of interdisciplinary studies for adult, nonresidential students, and served as the first director of Oklahoma’s Gateway to College Learning, a course intended to orient freshmen to college. In 2005 he retired from the University of Oklahoma in order to devote more time to consulting with universities nationally and internationally on ways to promote better teaching and learning throughout the whole campus.

His work as a campus-based instructional consultant for more than twenty-five years provides the primary basis for the ideas in this book. He has observed the classroom teaching of hundreds of faculty members, consulted with them individually to enhance student learning in their courses and solve teaching problems, and led numerous faculty discussions and workshops. These consulting experiences, in addition to his own teaching experience, have given him an intimate feel for the situation, thoughts, feelings, and actions of college teachers.

He has also been active nationally and internationally in faculty development. He initiated the Great Plains regional consortium for faculty developers in 1981, has been a member of the Professional and Organizational Development (POD) Network in Higher Education for over twenty years, served on the POD executive committee, and codirected the workshop called “Getting Started in Faculty Development” at the annual POD conference for several years in the 1990s. He has served on the editorial boards of the ASHE Higher Education Reports and the Journal of Staff, Program, and Organization Development. In 2002, he was elected president of the POD network, which is the largest faculty development organization in the world.

In 1989 he was a recipient of the American Association for Higher Education’s Jaime Escalante “Stand and Deliver” Award, and in 1992 he received the Outstanding Faculty Award from the College of Liberal Studies at the University of Oklahoma.

One of his first major publications was an empirical study of a hundred beginning college teachers that appeared in Jossey-Bass’s New Directions for Teaching and Learning, no. 17, in 1984. Since then he has published numerous articles and book chapters on college teaching, evaluating college teaching, new faculty members, and instructional development programs. He is also coeditor of Team-Based Learning (Stylus, 2004). The URL for his professional Web site is www.finkconsulting.info.