POD and NCSPOD Conferences

I’ve been on the road for the past couple of weeks attending two national conferences for faculty, professional, and staff development: the Professional and Organizational Development Network in Higher Education (POD) conference in Houston and the North American Council for Staff, Program and Organizational Development (NCSPOD) conference in St. Paul. These two events and organizations have intersections in faculty and professional development, but have at least one key difference in that NCSPOD encompasses staff development while POD does not.

This was my fourth year at the POD conference and my first year at NCSPOD and it has been interesting to see and hear from conference attendees about the overlap in faculty and staff development. From what I have been able to ascertain, there is little. However, the idea of overlap and collaboration is a good one. In our own center, for example, we are striving to bring together faculty, administrators, and others at MnSCU campuses in order to align efforts toward the betterment of their institutions. In theory, if the institution has a strategic goal of increasing student persistence we can assume that goal will be much easier reached if faculty and staff development efforts are all focused on it.

So, how does this look “on the ground?” I can say from my experience at the NCSPOD conference that it gets complicated. Simply deciding on sessions has been challenging. Sessions that sound on the surface as though they may pertain to my work have turned out to be too focused on the needs of staff. Others that sound as if they have nothing to do with my work very well may have relevant. Taking a step back, I have to admit that some of the language used by the presenters, being foreign to me, may be the only turn-off. This leads me to believe that at least some of our efforts to integrate administrator, staff, and faculty development efforts may be hindered by language barriers. Are we saying the same things, but in the language or vernacular of our areas? Do we need to start by breaking down those language barriers? In your own work on the ground, this may be a good place to start.

More soon on specific POD and NCSPOD conference sessions.