Pedagogical Wellness: A Community of Practice & Microcredential

Reframing educator well-being as an instructional design problem — and building a sustainable structure to study it.

Context

Faculty wellness in higher education is most often treated as a personal responsibility: another wellness webinar, another mindfulness app, another reminder to take a walk. That framing is well-intentioned and, in practice, largely inert.

It leaves faculty doing more — adding wellness to an already overflowing list — and it leaves the structures that generate the strain untouched.

Health sciences educators carry a particular version of this load. They teach across clinical, classroom, and online contexts; they translate rapidly evolving science into curriculum; and they hold the emotional weight of preparing students for work in human suffering. The standard institutional response — episodic wellness programming — does not match the structural nature of the problem.

Challenge

The challenge was to design a faculty development model that took pedagogical wellness seriously as a teaching and learning question, not a self-care question — and to build the scholarly infrastructure to study whether the model worked.

That meant three things at once:

• Reframing wellness as design. Position well-being as something instructional design choices help cause or prevent — pacing, workload, feedback structures, community — rather than something faculty fix on their own time.
• Building, not broadcasting. Create a sustained Community of Practice with shared inquiry, not a one-off workshop series.
• Producing scholarship. Treat the CoP itself as a research site, with IRB-aligned design, so participants’ experience contributes to a transferable evidence base.

Approach

With Early Researcher Grant funding from the POD Network, I designed and launched a Pedagogical Wellness Community of Practice that operates simultaneously as a faculty development structure and as the intervention arm of a mixed-methods scholarship study.

Several design moves are deliberate:

• Anchored inside the SoTL Collective. The CoP sits within the broader Scholarship of Teaching and Learning infrastructure, so participants inherit IRB-aligned scaffolding, shared methods, and a dissemination pipeline.
• Faculty-named questions. Sessions begin from the questions faculty actually carry — workload, presence, recovery between teaching cycles, the cost of caring well — rather than from a pre-built curriculum.
• Mixed-methods scholarship. The study combines pre/post measures with qualitative narratives, with the explicit goal of producing instruments that other institutions can adopt.
• Microcredential pathway. A Pedagogical Wellness microcredential is in development as the structural artifact of the work — a way for faculty to make their participation legible to chairs, deans, and promotion files.
• Transparency about generative AI. Wherever AI is used in study materials or facilitation, the role is named openly with participants, modeling responsible practice rather than asserting it.

Outcomes

The work is in active execution, with the following outcomes secured to date:

The most consequential outcome may be conceptual: the project is helping to shift the local and national conversation about faculty wellness from individual coping to structural design — which is the only conversation that produces sustainable change.

My role

As Principal Investigator and lead designer, I authored the funded proposal, designed the study and the CoP curriculum in parallel, coordinated IRB alignment, and now facilitate the CoP and lead data collection.

The work draws on instructional design, qualitative research, faculty development, and project management — and is shaped by my own experience as a working parent and scholar-practitioner balancing leadership with caregiving, which has made the question of sustainable scholarship not theoretical for me.

What I learned, and what’s next

Two early insights have shaped how I will write up this work.

First, the framing matters more than the curriculum: participants engage differently when wellness is positioned as a shared design problem rather than a personal deficit.

Second, microcredentialing is not the prize at the end — it is the structural artifact that makes the work survive a calendar year, because it gives the institution something to recognize.

Next: complete the data collection cycle, finalize the microcredential design for institutional approval, and submit findings to POD Network and the Journal of Faculty Development. The instruments and CoP design will be made available as an open-access toolkit so peer institutions can adapt the model.

Selected artifacts

• Funded grant: Promoting Pedagogical Wellness Through a Community of Practice: A Scalable Faculty Development Model — POD Network Early Researcher Grant, 2025–2026.
• Connected scholarship: Pedagogical Wellness CoP — anchored within the SoTL Collective at UNT Health, with cross-CoP visibility and dissemination.
• In development: Pedagogical Wellness microcredential — institutional design and approval pathway scoped for next academic year.
• Forthcoming: Mixed-methods study findings and open-access facilitation toolkit for peer institutions.
• Related projects on this site: Scholarship of Teaching and Learning Collective · Project Management for IDs Collaborative · ID2ID Peer Mentoring