One of the main mechanisms for faculty development at Century College is the idea of teaching circles, in which five to eight faculty members work with a trained faculty facilitator to design and implement a project related to a topic chosen by the group at its initial meeting.
Effective Strategies for Hiring the Best New Faculty
Colleges and universities have traditionally relied on search committees to select new faculty members. To ensure a successful new hire who can teach, publish, and serve the institution, search committees need a blueprint for their work—a set of strategies to lead them from the creation of the job advertisement to a productive on-site interview. The use of behavior-based interviewing (BBI), an interview style based on the premise that past behavior is the best predictor of future performance, can guide those who hire in every step of the selection process.
Interdisciplinary Goals, Disciplinary Faculty: Bridging the Gap with Faculty Learning Communities
Temple University set out to develop an innovative, interdisciplinary general education (GenEd) curriculum for students, addressing significant questions and issues of our time, including globalization and sustainability. In the process, we discovered an opportunity to develop interdisciplinary knowledge, attitudes, and collaborations among the faculty pioneers who would design and teach these boundary-breaching new courses.
MnSCU's Center for Teaching and Learning
Minnesota State Colleges and Universities' (MnSCU's) Center for Teaching and Learning (CTL) is a system-wide center that serves all of the state's institutions, an approach that has the advantage of bringing together good ideas from across disciplines and institution types. While this model is unusual, there are some interesting practices that could be adopted on a smaller scale at individual institutions or among institutions.
Serenity and Academic Leadership
In an exercise I often use in administrative workshops, participants are asked to select one of their favorite words and then to reflect on what that word might reveal about their philosophies of academic leadership. It inevitably happens that the participants ask me to do the same, and the resulting discussions are always interesting. As it happens, my favorite word in the English language is "serenity," and, as one workshop participant phrased it rather bluntly, "If that's what you're looking for in life, you've chosen the wrong profession." That conclusion certainly seems reasonable. Academic administration frequently requires leaders to enter into situations fraught with conflict, strong emotions, hurt feelings, constant change, confrontation, and moral indignation. At times, academic leaders are lightning rods for anger, simply because they happen to be in charge, and people often have a need to direct their anger at something. How can a person who values peaceful co-existence survive in, let alone succeed at, this type of daily challenge? Is there any role for serenity in academic leadership today?
The Bright Spot of Development in a For-Profit College
In a time when for-profit postsecondary institutions are more highly scrutinized than ever in terms of achieving student outcomes and criticized for emphasizing the quantity of student enrollment over quality of learning, there is a growing need to provide evidence of good practice that encourages authentic learning.
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