By: Alvin Evans and Edna Chun, DM
Consider the experience of Jordan, a fourth-year political science major, who was told by his professor that many African-American students do not pass her class (Brooms, 2017). This stereotyping can create a self-fulfilling prophecy, or what Claude Steele describes as a “stereotype threat,” which impacts students’ performance by challenging their academic ability or competence.
By: Kami Barrett and Jeffrey L. Buller, PhD
Mentoring is a common yet powerful way for people to learn a variety of personal and professional skills. Most adults can identify a person who, at some time in their lives, had a significant, positive influence on them. While some…
By: Susan Hines, EdD
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.
By: Rob Kelly
Wartburg College in Waverly, Iowa, has a centralized office to foster experiential learning across disciplines. This administrative structure, which grew out of a Lilly Vocation Grant, offers several advantages over more traditional, decentralized support structures.
An amazing metamorphosis sometimes affects academic leaders between the time they interview for the job and the time they begin their position. As candidates for the position, prospective administrators are usually overwhelmed by the quality of the students and faculty. They’re impressed by the curriculum and mission of the institution, college, or department they may soon lead. They’d be honored to join such an elite group of talented individuals. But then, by some mysterious transformation that begins the day they sign the contract, they arrive on the job with all kinds of ideas about how to rescue this now not-quite-so-impressive unit.
Every academic leader invests time in strategic planning groups, presidential cabinets, councils of department chairs, dean’s council meetings, and similar regularly scheduled meetings. Academic leaders occasionally leave the campus for meetings of professional societies or to participate with other academic leaders in retreats. What few institutional leaders do is develop a meaningful retreat on campus or at a location close to campus for a day to day and one-half of their academic team including deans/assistant deans, service units (registrar, counseling, support services), institutional research, budget officer, etc.), head librarian, and the secretaries servicing major officers.
Faculty development now more than ever is necessary to an institution’s viability. But as my fellow faculty developers know, the task is not an easy one. Before any effective program can be implemented, three major challenges must be overcome.
Fourth, no matter how well intentioned and no matter how much material is covered, student learning will be severely limited by lack of retention. Retention in learning must be built into syllabus construction and course delivery from the first day of class. A useful guide to have all new faculty read is L. Dee Fink’s Creating Significant Learning Experiences: An Integrated Approach to Designing College Courses (2003). Courses that generate both significant and sustainable learning involve challenging students; using active forms of learning; having teachers who truly care about their subject, students, and teaching and learning; having teachers who interact positively with their students; and creating a good system of feedback, assessment, and grading.
In recent years, there has been more attention given to the reality that most PhD programs do not prepare future faculty for college teaching. Even when college teaching is addressed, it is frequently in the context of sharing insights in teaching subject matter from innovators in the various disciplines. So the reality persists in colleges and universities that most PhD graduates are well prepared in their (possibly narrow) subject fields but are ill prepared to teach in the college classrooms of today and tomorrow.
By: Ken Alford and Tyler Griffin
Teaching at the collegiate level is a wonderful yet complex career. We hire people and expect them to teach effectively, publish frequently, serve as effective committee members, and maybe even serve as successful administrators. How many new hires on your campus arrive fully prepared and competent to fill that job description?
Too often, a college’s expectations are not matched with appropriate training and resources for faculty members, especially during the more formative years. When a faculty member fails to meet expectations or falls short in the rank-advancement process, the time-consuming and costly process of recruitment and hiring must begin again.