Faculty Development

A Focus on Teaching and Learning at Mid-Career

Are your experienced faculty members as effective in the classroom as you would like them to be? If not, perhaps a faculty development program like the University of Minnesota’s Mid-Career Teaching Program could be the answer. Many faculty members currently in mid-career have probably had fewer teaching enrichment opportunities than their more recently hired colleagues, and just because they are experts in their disciplines does not necessarily make them good teachers. In addition, teaching is becoming more complex: student populations are more diverse than they used to be, and they often expect more from professors than students did in the past…

Rob Kelly September 8, 2008

Teaching Circles: Low-Cost, High-Impact Faculty Development

Two years ago, a midcareer colleague in the mathematics department sent around an e-mail to all faculty at our college, inviting us to read a book with her. And as simply as that, a teaching circle was formed.

A teaching circle, the term we use at my institution, is simply a group of faculty interested in discussing teaching at regular intervals, ideally over food. As my colleague said, laughing, at our first meeting, “I need a support group, and everyone needs lunch!”…

Barbara A. Mezeske September 7, 2008

A Template for Designing a Perfect One-Day Retreat

A worthwhile faculty retreat can breathe new life into the academic community. The structure and content of a good retreat can contribute to the development of college or school identity and can inspire a shared sense of reflection and forward motion. As many of us know, a retreat also can be seen as a dreadful bore, an unwelcome obligation that faculty may regard as a distraction from their real work. How many faculty feel that they cannot pause and enjoy the possibility of refreshment in the confinement of the obligatory faculty retreat? So often, retreats are positioned against the momentum of fall, of new students, of new classroom power realized from good summer reading, of the desire to be focused on the future. Retreats, by their nature, seem to speak to the past, and to reflection, just when faculty are getting warmed up to look forward…

Margaret Sullivan September 6, 2008

Improving Instruction Through a Faculty-Driven Initiative

During the 2000-2001 academic year, a group of faculty from the School of Physical Activity and Educational Services in Ohio State University’s College of Education began meeting regularly with the school’s director to find ways to enhance instruction. From these meetings came the idea for the PAES Instructional Enhancement Initiative, a faculty-driven series of instruction-related activities, which includes workshops, a book club, a quarterly newsletter, and seminars.

Rob Kelly September 3, 2008

Technology-Enhanced Faculty Learning Communities Expand Development Opportunities

Faculty learning communities provide opportunities for faculty to get together to discuss similar interests and improve their teaching and learning practices. In the past 15 years, they have become more formalized through the work of Milton Cox and others as well as through use of Web-based technologies to connect faculty in new ways.

Rob Kelly September 2, 2008

An Internship for the Professor

Reflecting on my career as a teaching psychologist, I realized I was missing something. Trained as an experimentalist and employed academically to teach courses in

Thomas J. Gerstenberger August 25, 2008

Balancing the Demands of Teaching, Scholarship, and Service

Faculty roles are defined by a combination of institutional culture and discipline standards, and achieving the right balance among teaching, scholarship, and service should be

Rob Kelly August 23, 2008

The Changing Role of the Online Learning Advocate

Early advocates of online learning focused their efforts on demonstrating online learning’s legitimacy to the broader community. Now, as an increasing body of literature supports

Rob Kelly August 21, 2008

Look to Midcareer Faculty for Learning Communities

Studies on faculty careers show that faculty research publication productivity plateaus or drops at midcareer. However, this one measure of faculty productivity should not be

Therese Kattner August 12, 2008

Electronic Portfolios for Faculty Evaluation

Tina Ashford, assistant professor of information technology, was among the first faculty members at Macon State College to use an electronic portfolio to support her bid for tenure. Although the portfolio’s format wasn’t a factor in her tenure bid, she found that it offered several advantages over the traditional paper-based format that might make it attractive both to individual faculty members and tenure and promotion committees.

Rob Kelly July 13, 2008

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