Friendship as a Teaching Strategy for Graduate Students
This article first appeared in Academic Leader on July 25, 2016. © Magna Publications. All rights reserved. Professors play an integral role in cultivating the hearts and minds of their students through the creation of a vibrant intellectual community. Fostering intellectual curiosity and academic integrity enables students to grow professionally and personally. A…
Creating an Effective Mentoring Program
This article first appeared in Academic Leader on March 17, 2017© Magna Publications. All rights reserved. Recruiting and hiring new faculty is time intensive and expensive. Despite the difficulties, hiring decisions are clearly among the most important that academic administrators ever make. Success of college programs and universities is directly correlated with…
Understanding and Managing Perceptions of Academic Rigor
This article first appeared in Academic Leader on August 25, 2017 © Magna Publications. All rights reserved. Faculty and students are not on the same page about what makes a course rigorous. Draeger, del Prado Hill, and Mahler (2015) find that “faculty perceived learning to be most rigorous when students are actively…
Conversations about Course Ratings: Encouraging Faculty to Make Changes
Talking with faculty about end-of-course ratings is generally a high-stakes conversation where merit raises, promotions, or permanent contracts are on the line or at least hovering in the background of the exchange. Most chairs, program coordinators, or division heads would like to use the conversation for more formative purposes—to engage…
Establishing and Supporting a Faculty Mentoring Program
For many new hires, tenure-track or not, there isn’t a road map for navigating that challenging first year of teaching. A faculty mentor program can help ensure every new hire has a guide, friend, confidante, and role model. The end result of such a program should be a more confident…
How to Evaluate Your Faculty Development Services
Faculty developers across the nation are working on developing methods to evaluate their services. In 2010, the 35th Annual Professional Organizational and Development Network Conference identified assessing the impact of faculty development as a key priority. It was this growing demand that spawned my interest in conducting a 2007 statewide and a 2010 nationwide investigation of faculty development evaluation practices in the U.S. This article will describe how to develop a customized evaluation plan based on your program’s structure, purpose, and desired results, based on contemporary practices discovered through this research.
The Failing Student and the Adjunct Professor
Adjunct faculty members indicated they inflated students’ grades in order to help ensure they would receive positive student evaluations, that these students would register for another class they taught. Is the increasing use of adjunct faculty behind grade inflation?
Starting a Pedagogy Book Club
One simple way of creating a forum conducive to professional development among faculty is the establishment of a pedagogy book club.
Making Faculty Development an Institutional Value and a Professional Practice
Sometimes faculty development programs are inherited by an academic leader, and other times they have to be built. In either case the academic leader needs to heed some wisdom from the Chinese classic the Tao Te Ching. Faculty development is a long journey wherever one starts; like a journey of 1,000 miles, it begins with the first step. Faculty development is also to be understood as a destination. Only if one has a clearly identified end for it will it achieve its desired destination—a highly effective and participatory faculty.
Faculty development program success begins with recruiting faculty to a specific institution’s mission during the recruitment and interview process. Bringing faculty into an institution who are not committed to its teaching, research, and service mission incentives and imperatives will lead to mismatches between faculty career aspirations and institutional resource commitments. Such mismatches undermine collegiality and undercut faculty development efforts. Hiring faculty who are overly focused on their discipline versus teaching and the school’s mission will lead to faculty dissatisfaction and turnover, with negative consequences for the classroom and within academic departments.
