A Bottom-Up Approach for Faculty Development: A Latent Class Analysis on Teaching Innovative Practices and Needs for Improvement

The aim of the paper is to present the results deriving from a bottom-up initiative of a network of seven Italian Universities (the AsdUni project) aimed at establishing a national systemic approach to faculty development. After a qualitative research focused on teachers’ beliefs, practices and needs, the results have been used to identify different combinations of the teaching practices and needs through a latent class analysis. Findings are presented by ten emerged clusters, containing different features, experiences, needs of the teachers involved. This classification can be used to design tailored strategies of staff development and to improve teaching quality in higher education.