The success of higher education institutions rests on their ability to increase student enrollment and retain learners. The foundation of achieving this lies in building
The challenges for faculty working with students in the 21st century are rising. How can faculty meet the many challenges facing higher education? In the
Every college wants to boost diversity on campus. Every college wants to help their students succeed in the classroom and after graduation. And in our
I’ve been a professor for nearly 30 years, charged with teaching hundreds of students about psychological development. They learn how humans adapt to physical, cognitive,
Mentorship can take various forms and serve numerous goals, however, McKinsey (2016) summarized the many definitions succinctly by stating that to mentor “is to provide
Most faculty schedule at least three office hours per week—that’s 2,700 minutes a semester. If you have 135 students, that’s 20 minutes for each student.
Our “office hours off campus” idea transpired from a speech given by Dr. Iain Campbell at a publisher’s workshop we attended. Dr. Campbell teaches large
One joy of a faculty member in academia is the opportunity to train the next generation of scholars who will continue our work to innovate
Editor’s Note: This is an excerpt of a work that is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. To read the article in its entirety, visit the Teaching & Learning Inquiry website. http://tlijournal.com/tli/index.php/TLI/article/view/125/77
Educational research shows that close student-faculty interaction is a key factor in college student learning and success. Most literature on undergraduate mentoring, however, focuses on planned programs of mentoring for targeted groups of students by non-faculty professionals or student peers. Based on the research literature and student and faculty testimony from a residential liberal arts college, this article shows that unplanned “natural” mentoring can be crucial to student learning and development and illustrates some best practices. It advances understanding of faculty mentoring by differentiating it from teaching, characterizing several functional types of mentoring, and identifying the phases through which a mentoring relationship develops. Arguing that benefits to students, faculty, and institutions outweigh the risks and costs of mentoring, it is written for faculty who want to be better mentors and provides evidence that administrators should value and reward mentoring.
The challenge of faculty evaluation is to simultaneously foster faculty development and fulfill the institution’s goals and mission, says Larry Braskamp, professor of Education at Loyola University Chicago and advocate of a humanistic approach to faculty evaluation.
“Evaluation involves setting the culture and climate for faculty to develop, and it has to take on an openness and respect for the individual to experiment and fail. You encourage faculty members to self-assess.
