Planning Community-Based Faculty Training and Professional Development at Your Institution
External faculty development has many benefits for improving teaching and academic programs, but these courses and training also come with limitations. The direct creation of an academic institution’s own faculty training and courses is one practical option to expand faculty professional development opportunities aligned with evidence-based teaching practices, institutional needs,...
How to Talk to Faculty Who Receive Low Course Evaluations
This article is the second installment on conversations about course ratings. The first installment explored how to frame a discussion with a faculty member who receives average ratings semester after semester. This second scenario may be the most challenging for department chairs. It’s the conversation that needs to occur with a faculty...
Understanding Course Evaluations: Resources for Faculty and Chairs
Despite a great deal of research on course evaluations, institutional policies and practices are not always well informed by that research. Faculty are often not as informed as they should be either. Anecdotal evidence, myth and folklore tend to prevail. It’s good to encourage faculty to learn more about how...
Developing and Evaluating Teacher Effectiveness at Colorado State University
An international conversation around an increased focus on high-quality teaching at R1 institutions has been gaining momentum for several years. A recent shift in the conversation, focused on identifying fair and valid measures to evaluate effective teaching, continues to grow. On the one hand, individual departments and colleges look to...
Strategies for Creating a Collegial Department
In assessing an individual for tenure, promotion in rank, reappointment, or merit pay increase, how important are the following factors in the future success of the individual? How much potential do they have to greatly affect the work of the department? Positive attitudes Collaborative work Flexibility Positive interpersonal relationships within...
Coaching: Developing Your Faculty One Conversation at a Time
Coaching is a relationship frequently leveraged in the business sector but is not a well-established paradigm in higher education. Academics, however, can benefit just as much from a coaching approach, and the field is beginning to gain traction for training academic leaders (Robison & Gray, 2017). This article defines coaching,...
Lessons for Engaging and Retaining BIPOC Students
How do we attract historically underrepresented groups of students to our institutions—that is, first-generation college students; Black, Indigenous, and other students of color; and students from low-income backgrounds? How do we best serve them at our institutions? How do we retain them and support them to persist and graduate? Academia,...
Providing Leadership and Support to Professionally Develop Adjunct Faculty
Adjunct faculty may be the most overused and under-resourced groups of individuals in higher education. Many departments and courses would not function, or at least not function well, without adjunct faculty. Yet despite being in many cases essential members of a department, adjuncts receive modest pay, typically by the course...
Conquering the Fear of Authenticity
I will never forget the time I hired a team of social media experts to provide professional development for my fellow faculty members at a small college. As they deftly covered how to best use Facebook, Twitter, and other social media to connect with students, they suggested that it was...
Leveraging the Library as a Strategic Academic Partner
Academic libraries play an important role in supporting teaching, learning, and scholarship. But at many colleges and universities, library and academic staff tend to operate in silos. How can academic departments and libraries work together more effectively—and how can campus leaders encourage this collaboration? At colleges and universities where libraries...
