Can “Tired” Faculty be Rejuvenated?

The session focused on a study of 72 campus CTLs who responded to a survey on what practices made the biggest positive impact to help “tired” faculty. For the study, “tired” faculty were defined as those who were 50 and older, senior faculty having rank and tenure.

Participants were asked to rank 11 development activities

1. Create mentoring programs – “tired” faculty mentor younger faculty
2. Reflect on teaching and learning – highly structured facilitated meetings for senior faculty which featured open ended questions about their philosophy of teaching and learning and their ideas about why they became an academic, building their career, and frustrations.
3. Develop additional teaching skills – including lecturing clearly, assessing student learning, effective use of technology, cheating/plaguerism, and working with difficult students.
4. Videotape classroom instruction – setting up a pre-recording about the focus of the teaching and how the teaching is done. Recording is the property of the faculty.
5. Provide financial resource help – grant support for instructional resources and course development
6. Combine student ratings with skillful consultation – simple, practical suggestions
7. Facilitate innovation in the classroom – ideas to help increase use of technology, group work, service learning to improve student learning
8. Encourage short-term, non-teaching assignments – having faculty become a dean, work with assessment, etc. for a given amount of time.
9. Help faculty give something back to the community – work on major projects: new faculty orientation, fund raising, task forces to improve student learning.
10. Encourage interdisciplinary or team teaching
11. Support faculty exchanges – year at another institution, fellow for new inst. Policies/procedures, Fullbright.

Survey Results

Especially effective development activities were:

• Create mentoring programs
• Combine student ratings with skillful consultation
• Encourage short-term, non-teaching assignments
• Reflect on teaching and learning

Somewhat effective development activities were:

• Develop additional teaching skills
• Videotape classroom instructions
• Provide financial resource help

Least effective development activities were:

• Support faculty exchanges
• Encourage interdisciplinary or team teaching
• Support faculty exchanges

These activities may offer the beginning of a conversation with faculty development teams as they look at ways to develop programming to motivate “tired” mid- and later-career faculty.

POD Session: Educational gobbledygook: Does language discourage faculty from becoming faculty developers?

David Green from Seattle University led this session sharing the results of a comparison study of educational research literature to discipline based literature. Faculty from the U.S. and the U.K. participated in the study. The session participants were asked to show on a grid as to how they prefer to gain their knowledge based on the scales of simple to complex language and simple to complex ideas. The was a correlation of responses between the study’s and the session’s participants.

How this applies to our work as CTL system and campus faculty developers is to be sure that we use a more simple language to describe the simple and complex ideas which is what faculty prefer. Providing this language, is critical to help other faculty feel comfortable to join our ranks as faculty developers and supporters. Few faculty have the time to learn a new complex language, whether perceived or real. Once again, we hear that the KISS philosophy applies in the language we use in discussing educational research.