Faculty Development

Strategy Mapping: An Essential Tool for New Academic Faculty

Finding your path to tenure as a novice educator can be daunting and anxiety provoking. It is reported that challenges for junior faculty are most often related to decoding expectations of the academic organization and creating relationships with colleagues (Kahanov et al, 2012). Few tools exist to help new faculty navigate the complexity of the first years of academic life.

This article will introduce readers to a process called strategy mapping. The result of the process of strategy mapping is a tangible document called a strategy map. Though strategy mapping is a process that originated within the business world, its applicability within academic settings holds much promise. Within academic settings strategy maps can be used to prioritize teaching, research, and service expectations, particularly for novice educators who have little experience in the academic environment. This article will further demonstrate how the strategy mapping framework aligns with organizational expectations of academic life; how strategy maps can be used to optimize goal setting for new educators; and how strategy maps can be used as a tool to optimize structure and direction within formal mentorship relationships.

Keith Adamson, PhD January 23, 2019

Reflections on Teaching: From Surviving to Thriving

Editor’s Note: In part one of this article, the author shared openly some of the mistakes he made early in his teaching career. In this entry, he outlines some of the changes he’s made to his teaching over the years and the principles he uses to guide his teaching.

I had known it all along at some level, but now it suddenly became glaringly obvious to me. Deep down, sometimes out of conscious reach, students want to be transformed and their lives made more useful, productive, and powerful. I added the following new goal to my personal mission statement:

Chris Palmer November 8, 2018

Reflections on Teaching: Mistakes I’ve Made

I started teaching at American University at the age of 56 after a rewarding career as an environmental and wildlife film producer. That was almost ten years ago, and I’ll be the first to admit that I really didn’t know what I was getting myself into. I had never taught before and I wasn’t even sure where to begin. I had no teaching philosophy beyond some vague, unarticulated feeling that I wanted my students to do well. And so, I started asking lots of questions.

Chris Palmer November 7, 2018

Mentoring: Feeding the Brain, Cultivating the Heart, and Building Courage

As educators, we are privileged to build relationships and help thousands of students reach their full potential each year. At times, we have had nearly 750 students in our first-year undergraduate anatomy course, which meant that we were graciously offered the support of approximately 20 learning facilitators for that iteration of the course. First off, we acknowledge that the official term used in our institution is Teaching Assistant (TA), but let’s be honest—we are in this as a team, so let’s break down that hierarchy of who really is the “teacher” here and who is the “assistant.” We call them learning facilitators regardless of what their contract says.

Klodiana Kolomitro, PhD, and Les MacKenzie, PhD September 11, 2018

Teaching Squares Bring Cross-Disciplinary Perspectives

I regularly hear colleagues complaining that they never have time to discuss teaching, and I know this is true in my liberal arts and sciences campus at this large research university. We devote so much of our time to teaching students, preparing classes, grading student work, and doing research that there’s little time left to compare notes with our colleagues, even those next door. On those rare occasions when we do, it’s often a pleasant surprise. Interesting teaching strategies are being implemented all around us. When this happens to me I often think, “I wish I could come see how you do that!”

Neil Haave, PhD July 31, 2018

Let’s Practice What We Teach: Flipping Faculty Development

Faculty everywhere are flipping their classes, but can we flip faculty development? That’s the question I asked myself when I flipped the pre-conference workshop at the 2016 Teaching Professor Technology Conference. What I discovered is that we can “practice what we teach” and design faculty-centered learning experiences much the same way we design student-centered learning experiences.

In this article, I provide a few recommendations for flipping a faculty development workshop. For further inspiration, the article concludes with a showcase of the work created by the participants in my workshop last fall.

Barbi Honeycutt, PhD July 30, 2018

Take Advantage of Opportunities to Sustain Your Instructional Vitality

As my work on career-long growth and development for college teachers progresses, I continue to fret about the haphazard way we take care of our instructional health. To begin (and this is not our fault), we work hard and are way too busy. Whether it’s teaching five courses a semester or teaching less but having a research agenda that must be moving forward and continuously productive, we have precious little time for one more thing that might interfere with the frenetic motions required to keep our heads above water.

Maryellen Weimer, PhD July 26, 2018

female professor in front of white board

Rejuvenating Experiences: Tales of an Unlikely Classroom Collaboration

The end of a long academic year is probably the time when we are most open to the idea of a rejuvenating instructional experience. In a recent workshop, I heard two teachers describe just such an experience. They team-taught an introductory English lit course with content that explored veteran experiences. Before the workshop started, it was clear they were an unlikely team. She was the rather typical English prof, a tad disorganized, fussing with the technology, comfortably relaxed before the group. He was a former Marine, standing off to the side, trying to look relaxed but actually more at attention than at ease.

Maryellen Weimer, PhD July 24, 2018

Flexible Faculty Development Opportunities

One of the most persistent challenges for instructional designers is finding a convenient time to schedule faculty development training sessions. If scheduled during the summer, the workshop is subject to poor attendance because faculty are preparing for the fall. If it is scheduled in the fall, teaching responsibilities and committee work can impede professional development attendance. The same holds true for the spring semester.

Sabrina Johnson-Taylor PhD July 23, 2018

Taking Risks in Your Teaching

Often in workshops when I’m speaking about the process of implementing change—deciding what to change and how to change it or considering whether to add a new instructional strategy—the question of risk lurks in the choices being considered. When attending a workshop or program that offers a range of instructional possibilities, teachers typically respond to some favorably. I see it—they write down the idea, nod, or maybe ask a follow-up question to be sure they understand the details. Not all the ideas presented get this favorable response. Occasionally, the response is overtly negative. But more often there is no response. The idea doesn’t resonate.

Maryellen Weimer, PhD July 19, 2018

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