The report, “Undergraduate Teaching Faculty: The 2010–2011 HERI Faculty Survey,” is produced by the Cooperative Institutional Research Program (CIRP) at the Higher Education Research Institute (HERI) at UCLA, which issues the national faculty report every three years.

Stress fueled by financial concerns
The report found that institutional budget cuts in particular represented a top source of stress among faculty at public colleges and universities, and stress related to personal finances was highest among faculty at public four-year colleges.

Full-time faculty at public universities (86.1 percent) and public four-year colleges (83.4 percent) reported that institutional budget cuts cause “some” or “extensive” stress. In contrast, only 47.2 percent of full-time faculty at private universities and 62.5 percent of full-time faculty at private four-year colleges reported stress from budget cuts.

Additionally, a greater percentage of faculty at public institutions felt stress from their teaching load and from working with underprepared students than did their counterparts at private institutions. Despite these differences across institution type, faculty at all types of institutions experienced high levels of stress in the form of self-imposed expectations (84.8 percent) and a lack of personal time (82.2 percent), as they have in years past. However, this is the first year that stress related to economic hardships rivaled these top sources among faculty at public institutions.

Part-time faculty lack institutional support
The report also found disparities between full-time and part-time faculty. Despite their significant and growing presence on campus — part-time faculty now account for roughly 700,000 of the 1.8 million faculty at two-and four-year institutions in the United States — many part-time faculty do not have access to key institutional resources, according to the HERI report.

Only 18.4 percent of part-time faculty had access to a personal office, and less than half of part-time faculty (47.7 percent) had a shared office. About two in five (42.0 percent) reported having access to an institutionally provided personal computer on their campus, and a similar proportion reported having access to a phone and voicemail.

“The precipitous rise in the employment of part-time faculty at colleges and universities has not been accompanied by institutional policies and resources designed to support part-time faculty in their efforts to be effective educators,” said Kevin Eagan, a co-author of the report and HERI assistant director for research.

Increased student-centered teaching
The report found positive trends relating to undergraduate teaching. An increasing percentage of male and female faculty used student-centered teaching methods, including class discussions, cooperative learning and student presentations. While 78.9 percent of women and 68.3 percent of men used class discussions as a teaching method nearly a decade ago, 88.0 percent of female faculty and 78.3 percent of male faculty used this teaching method in 2010–11.

“These results are important, as they illustrate the increasing tendency to place students at the center of instruction, an approach that shifts the focus from teaching to learning and leads to improved student attitudes and learning outcomes,” said Marcelo Suárez-Orozco, dean of the Graduate School of Education and Information Studies (GSEIS) at UCLA.

However, extensive lecturing continues to be a widely used teaching method across different fields, particularly in science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) fields. While the use of extensive lecturing has been shown to negatively affect student outcomes, the good news is that more female faculty in STEM (60.3 percent) used cooperative learning methods in the classroom, exceeding male faculty in both STEM (40.7 percent) and other fields (52.6 percent). Female faculty in the social sciences and humanities were also most likely to use cooperative learning in the classroom, at 71.8 percent.

Faculty facts at a glance

• 74.2 percent of all faculty at four-year institutions felt stress from institutional budget cuts.
• 82.2 percent used class discussions as a teaching method.
• More than one-third of part-time faculty did not have access to an office on campus.
• More women than men used student-centered instruction methods in undergraduate classes, and women were less likely to use extensive lecturing.

The 2010–2011 Faculty Norms report is based on the responses of 23,824 full-time faculty members at 417 four-year colleges and universities. The data have been statistically adjusted to provide a normative profile of full-time faculty at four-year colleges and universities in the United States. The report also includes results from 3,547 part-time faculty working at 266 four-year colleges and universities.

HERI has been surveying faculty in higher education since 1978, and this report is the eighth in a series of surveys administered triennially. This is the first report on a national survey of undergraduate faculty at four-year institutions that offers a comparison of faculty across general disciplines.

To view a summary or to order a copy of the report, “Undergraduate Teaching Faculty: The 2010–2011 HERI Faculty Survey,” (S. Hurtado, M.K. Eagan, J.H. Pryor, H. Whang, & S. Tran), visit www.heri.ucla.edu.

In a 5-4 ruling, the Court found that the First Amendment does not prevent employees from being disciplined for expressions they make “pursuant to their professional duties” and that “public employees are not speaking as citizens when they are speaking to fulfill a responsibility of their job.” Although faculty at state institutions are public employees, the Court declined to say if its decision would apply to speech related to scholarship or teaching, leaving that for lower courts. Since then, a number of cases nationwide have been decided based on Garcetti—some in favor of faculty, some against, said Deborah Gonzales, founder of Law2sm, a legal consulting firm.

During the recent online seminar Academic Freedom and Free Speech: What You Need to Know, Gonzales and Rob Jenkins, an associate professor at Georgia Perimeter College, outlined a number of these lower court rulings related to the First Amendment rights of faculty and offered suggestions on how faculty and administrators can protect themselves.

“I think it’s very important for faculty and administrators to understand Garcetti, to understand these cases that are out there, and how they’re being applied, and that they’re also aware of some of the consequences and ramifications,” said Gonzales.

Gonzales and Jenkins also provided a long list of academic freedom do’s and don’ts for faculty members and administrators. We’re including some of them here:

For Faculty Members:
Don’t assume that you can write or say whatever you want in a public forum and that you will be protected by the First Amendment.

Do understand the courts’ rulings, in Garcetti v. Ceballos and subsequent cases, regarding First Amendment protection for public and private employees.

Don’t assume you can say whatever you want to in your classroom and that you’ll be protected by academic freedom.

Do familiarize yourself with your institution’s statement on academic freedom and policy manual, as well as with your professional organization’s guidelines for the proper exercise of academic freedom.

Don’t be intimidated into silence by the Garcetti ruling.

Do have the courage to stand up for what you believe in a civil, professional, and appropriate manner.

For Administrators
Don’t ignore the potential impact of Garcetti on your faculty and your institution.

Do familiarize yourself with the relevant rulings and their possible ramifications.

Don’t assume that your faculty members are familiar with Garcetti and its impact on them.

Do make sure that faculty members know about the rulings and understand how to protect themselves both in and out of the classroom.

Don’t assume that Garcetti won’t affect your institution.

Do take steps to protect your institution and its faculty, staff, and administrators through training, policy revisions where necessary, and other appropriate steps.

“The point that we’re really trying to get across here more than anything else is that the federal government isn’t going to protect the right of faculty members to speak out,” said Jenkins. “For so long, we’ve relied on the government, and we’ve assumed that we’d be protected by free speech, or we’ve mistakenly thought that academic freedom was, you know, somehow written in stone. The Garcetti ruling makes it abundantly clear that that’s not the case. The government isn’t going to take care of it for us. We have to take care of it ourselves. In general, I believe that higher education should encourage speech not squelch it. I think that should be one of the underlying principles behind our approach to academic freedom in this post-Garcetti environment.“

Begin with the end in mind.[2]

• I often feel so dissatisfied at the end of the day or week. Like I didn’t get much done. It helps if I instead first figure out what matters most to me—the big picture, what I really want to “accomplish” or even “become”—and have such big, aggressive goals guiding me.

First things first.

• Focus most time on the important and not urgent. That’s the planning, prevention, and systems work.
• Rank tasks in order of importance, and squeeze in the less important stuff when you can get to it.

Don’t just list priorities; schedule them.

• Keep your planner, not your email, in front of you. Lists tend to nag at you and grow ever longer. Schedule the biggest priorities for times when you’re at your peak energy; see the time blocked out on your calendar and you’ll have a visual symbol and reminder of what your goals are for the day.
• Set a timer or alarm for a scheduled priority to keep on task. Snooze it as you must, but use it to get things done and move on.
• For any task, specify the most concrete next step. Rather than setting the task as “Write up report” and taking hours to do it, I put “Start jotting report notes” and give myself just a half hour (often setting a kitchen timer to move me along). This breaks large projects into small, concrete steps that feel satisfying along the way.

Schedule only two or three “big rocks.”

• Big rocks story: An efficiency expert filled a 5-gallon tank with big rocks and asked, “Is it full?” People said, “Yes.” He replied, “Wrong,” and poured small rocks in around the bigger ones. He asked, “Is it full now?” People said, “Maybe.” He replied, “Wrong again.” He took tiny pebbles and filled in the spaces. He asked, “Is it full now?” Catching on, people said, “No.” He said, “Right,” and filled in the rest with water. Someone asked, “What’s the point? That no matter how much you do, you can always do more?” The presenter replied, “Wrong. Put the big rocks in first, and everything else falls into place. Do what matters most each day first, and the other stuff will get done or fall into place.”

Chunk tasks together, like with like.

• To crank through tasks quickly, get into a momentum with similar work. So, handle most emails all at once. But moreover, handle all your in-box at once, and then all those requiring action at once, and then all emails requiring reading at once, and so forth.
• Likewise, run through calls one after another, so that when you’re at the phone, or walking and using your cell, you are cued by your system to get it all done at once.

Process email quickly.

• Run down your in-box by filing in groups: Act/Reply, Read 1 Day, Handled Archive, Delete.
• Likewise, I get into a momentum with Act/Reply tasks, so that I often take only two to five minutes each, because I’m in “crank through” mode.
• Cultivate selective ignorance and tolerance for incompletion (Ferriss, p. 82). And remember, as Ralph Waldo Emerson said, “There are many things of which a wise man might wish to be ignorant.”(Emerson in Ferriss, p. 83).

Finally, for peace of mind, alternate between getting things done and enjoying the moment.[3]

Roben Torosyan is the associate director of the Center for Academic Excellence and assistant professor in the Graduate School of Education and Allied Professions at Fairfield University.

Note: All the ideas above are not mine but drawn heavily from the works cited below.

References
[1] Ferriss, T. (2007). The 4-hour work week: Escape 9-5, live anywhere, and join the new rich. New York: Random House/Crown.

[2] Slim summary: Covey, S. R. (2003). The 7 habits of highly effective people personal workbook. New York: Simon & Schuster.

[3] Lyubomirsky, S. (2008). The how of happiness: A scientific approach to getting the life you want. New York: Penguin.

Excerpted from “Time Management Reminders to Myself.” Academic Leader, 26.11 (2010): 8.

It wasn’t the worst course I ever took, but it was probably the most disappointing. Each class the professor would stand in front of us with his handwritten notes, which had that yellow tinge paper gets after years of use. He never once strayed from his script to mention the presidential election that was going on at the time. I’m sure he had his reasons. Maybe I misunderstood the whole goal of the course, or maybe he was simply bored. As 20-year-old college students, we were definitely bored.

I hadn’t thought about that class in years, not until I was watching the online seminar 15 Practical Strategies to Re-energize Mid-career Teachers and realized that at some point my professor probably had gone from what was once a comfortable teaching routine into a deep teaching rut. It happens, but there are ways of keeping it from happening to you. The key is to keep learning and trying new ideas and building on the techniques that work, rather than become contented with the status quo of “this is what I’ve always done,” says Dr. Ike Shibley, an associate professor of chemistry at Penn State Berks and himself a mid-career teacher.

“One of the best ways to keep fresh intellectually is to constantly be challenging your own mental abilities,” Shibley says. “Learning helps you as a faculty member stay energized.”

During the seminar, Shibley outlined 15 strategies for keeping yourself engaged, enthused and excited about teaching. The strategies require various time commitments – from minimal to substantial. Here are just a few of the strategies he discussed:

Strategies that require a minimal time commitment

• Create a new assignment – New assignments can force you to reconceptualize how you’ve been teaching a particular section of your course, and over time may even lead to an entire course redesign.
• Use a new text – As part of the switch to a new text, you should adjust your notes and teach the course in the order the author uses. It will lend a new perspective to your course content.
• Use a supplemental text – Books about academic subjects that are written for the general public can help get students interested in your discipline.
• Read a pedagogical article/book – Whether it’s College Teaching, which publishes peer-reviewed articles on how instructors across all academic disciplines can improve student learning or one of the many discipline-specific journals, reading pedagogical literature is critical, Shibley says.

Strategies that require a moderate time commitment

• Teach a new course – Whether new to you or new to your department, teaching a course for the first time is more work, but it’s also energizing.
• Audit a course – Find a course with interesting content and a great teacher and ask if you can audit his or her course – pay attention not only to the content but the pedagogy as well.

Strategies that require a substantial time commitment

• Mentor new faculty – Helping a colleague think about their teaching can rejuvenate your own.

“All of these strategies are about trying to keep yourself energized so that your students have the best learning experience they can possibly have,” says Shibley. “As a teacher, you can’t do everything for the students, but you can commit to your own improvement so that the next opportunity you have to interact with learners those learning interactions are happier, stronger, healthier, and altogether better. You will improve over your career and I’m hoping that these 15 strategies give you the ways to do that.”

Seen in this way, interviews are often less about demonstrating the qualities you possess in order to convince the committee that you deserve the position than they are about not demonstrating the qualities that might rule you out from further consideration. It is not uncommon for search committees to discover that a candidate who has all the right qualifications “on paper” acts so inappropriately that one begins to wonder, “Is this person actively trying not to be offered the job?”

In fact, this experience occurs often enough that, as a public service, we would like to provide tips on how to talk your way out of a job during an interview. Follow these simple guidelines, and you’ll significantly increase the likelihood that the position will be offered to someone else.

1.Treat the interview like a vacation. If your goal is to eliminate yourself from serious consideration even before you set foot on campus, simply approach the interview as though it were a free vacation. Treat the administrative assistant who’s arranging the trip as though he or she were a personal travel agent, insist upon extending your visit a few extra days for sightseeing or personal purposes, inquire about bringing along members of the family (when the institution hasn’t specifically invited them), and try to conduct personal business between interview sessions. These simple actions will convey the impression that you’re the sort of person who’s willing to inconvenience others for your own purposes and thus not the type of colleague anyone would want. Many people at the school will decide that they don’t want to hire you before they’ve even met you.

2. Act like you’d be doing the institution a favor by working there. Interviews force candidates to strike a precarious balance: They have to talk extensively about their own accomplishments without appearing arrogant or overly impressed with themselves. But if you really don’t want to be offered the position, it’s easy to get around this inconvenience. Simply convey the impression that you’re overqualified for the position or too good for the institution and you’re well on your way to talking yourself out of a job. After all, “You’d be fortunate to have this person on your staff” is something for a candidate’s references to say, not for you to say yourself.

Successful candidates tend to mix discussion of their own attributes with positive statements about the position, program, or institution. Your goal should be to turn the conversation back to yourself any time it begins to drift to any of the needs or goals that other people may have. Remember that search committees want to hire people who seem excited about the prospect of working there, not those who will condescend to accept an offer of employment that is beneath them. So, do whatever you can to place yourself in the latter category.

3. Focus on what you’ll get out of the position rather than what you’ll contribute. Administrators and search chairs see an immediate red flag whenever candidates seem to care only about the salary, benefits, and other personal advantages of a job. Certainly, no one expects you to take a position without adequate compensation, and there will be an appropriate time during the interview process for serious candidates to inquire about the salary range and benefit package. But if you’d like to get out of the running fast, give the people you’re talking to the impression that all you’re really interested is what you’ll get out of the job, rather than what you’ll put into it.

For instance, several of your meetings are likely to conclude with someone asking you, “Do you have any questions for us?” Rather than having a few substantive questions in mind and perhaps asking about the salary range after you’ve discussed five or six other issues, lead with this question immediately. The person you’re talking to is likely to conclude that, if he or she makes the mistake of hiring you, your first priority will always be advancing your own interests, not those of the institution as a whole. In fact, you’re likely to be the sort of person who will be in your supervisor’s office constantly, complaining about your compensation package and wanting a raise. Most colleges and universities have plenty of employees like that already, and they’ll probably conclude that it’s a good idea to diversify the staff so that it includes a greater number of collegial, team-spirited employees.

4. Ask for or even demand special treatment. No search committee will refuse to make special accommodations for a candidate who requires reasonable assistance because of a disability. But they’ll probably resent making a lot of changes to the itinerary because of a candidate’s individual requests. It can be a logistical nightmare to set up even the most basic interview schedule because of the complexity of everyone’s schedule. So, when a candidate starts requesting changes to that schedule, the problems arise very quickly. By asking for special treatment, you’ll make it clear that, if you’re already “high maintenance” even before you’ve been offered the job, you’ll make their lives miserable once you’re hired.

Jeffrey L. Buller is dean of the Harriet L. Wilkes Honors College at Florida Atlantic University. He is the author of The Essential Department Chair: A Practical Guide to College Administration (2006), The Essential Academic Dean: A Practical Guide to College Leadership (2007), and The Essential College Professor: A Practical Guide to an Academic Career (forthcoming). All are published by Jossey-Bass.

Excerpted from “How to Talk Yourself Out of a Job.” Academic Leader, 26:12 (2009): 3, 7.

Like composition programs housed in other English departments, Appalachian State’s program has come to rely more heavily on non-tenure-track faculty to teach composition, as tenure-track faculty members’ teaching loads have gone from four-four to three-three. As recently as 10 years ago, the majority of composition courses at the university were taught by tenure-track faculty. Generally only two tenure track faculty members from outside the rhetoric and composition program choose to teach composition today.

Although there were long-term non-tenure-track instructors in the department, they were not permitted to teach more than five courses per year. So there was still a need to recruit and prepare more instructors each year.

“In 1998, no non-tenure-track instructors who taught composition for us were fully employed, and only two, who taught at three-quarter time, had benefits,” says Georgia Rhoades, director of the Writing Across the Curriculum (WAC) program. “Because these faculty often taught at other institutions and had no role in service or scholarship, they weren’t fully invested in the program and had little voice in their workplace.”

Earlier this decade the department voted to convert a tenure-track faculty line into a full-time non-tenure-track position, and the university established three-quarter- and full-time non-tenure-track contracts with benefits for non-tenure-track faculty members who had been teaching at least three-quarter time for three years.

In addition to these changes, the composition program worked with publishers to provide professional development for this growing contingent of non-tenure-track faculty, bringing in authors who were experts in teaching English composition. The department had relied on an evaluation system in which non-tenure-track faculty were visited by two tenure-track faculty members. Instead, the composition program created a mentoring structure in which non-tenure-track faculty worked with other non-tenure-track colleagues all year, visiting each other’s classes, discussing classroom practice, and writing evaluations.

“All those experiences made the non-tenure-track faculty feel more professional and more involved, and they began to volunteer for service on committees. That worked fairly well, except they weren’t allowed to vote. We had a population that was politicized [and] professional and had a stake in the department. They were getting to do the work of the department but were not really able to participate fully, because they weren’t able to vote on the issues, so obviously that led to difficulties,” Rhoades says.

Changes to general education further widened the difference in workplace identity between most tenure-track faculty, who were not teaching composition, and the non-tenure-track faculty, who taught most of the composition courses. In 2007, Rhoades and Beth Carroll, director of the University Writing Center, began faculty development for the composition teachers to prepare for a new sophomore course, Writing Across the Curriculum. The new general education program, which began this fall, uses a vertical writing model in which students the following writing courses: an introductory composition course in the English department in the first year, an introduction to WAC after taking 30 hours, a third-year writing course, two writing courses in the major, and a capstone course that has a writing component.

In addition to their teaching duties, five composition faculty serve as consultants for the Writing Across the Curriculum program (for which they receive course release time). This is bringing non-tenure-track English faculty members in contact with a broader constituency. Also, the University Writing Center (housed in the recently created University College) also employs some non-tenure-track composition faculty.

“The WAC program blends non-tenure-track and tenure-track faculty from all disciplines with different expertise, based on principles of Freirean dialogue. WAC consultants and faculty from all disciplines are learning from each other in a structure in which rank is not a factor. The tenure-track faculty in the disciplines recognize that the non-tenure-track faculty have an expertise in teaching writing that they can learn from, and those of us in the WAC program can rely on faculty in the disciplines to teach us about their writing and what they hope to see in their students’ writing,” Rhoades says.

Excerpted from “Changing Roles, Improved Conditions for Non-Tenure-Track Faculty.” Academic Leader, 25.11 (2009): 8.

Based on the premise that past behavior is the best predictor of future performance, behavior-based interviewing calls upon candidates to tell about their previous skills, knowledge, and experiences. Savvy interviewers on the search committee ask BBI-style questions that start with “Tell me about a time when…” or “Describe how you have….”

Envision the new position
To make a behavior-based interview work, everyone involved on the search committee must be able to envision the position and must know what skills, knowledge, and experiences a successful candidate possesses. Then, questions addressing those skills should be written. Committee members should take notes and evaluate the candidates’ answers with a premade rubric. Every effort should be made to have the same structure for the overall interview schedule, and to have an identical list of questions posed to candidates at a given time.

Writing and evaluating answers
Questions about teaching, publishing, and service are determined in advance by the search committee. Examples include:

1. Describe how you teach a lesson. What do your plans include?
2. Tell us about a lesson that went well and why it went well.
3. Your teaching here will be (undergraduate, graduate, etc.). How have you motivated students at this level to excel academically?
4. Tell us about your research and publishing agenda. What has guided your success in getting writing completed and submitted?
5. How have you involved students in your research?
6. Where have you shared your research in the past (conferences, etc.)?
7. What are ways that you have served your institution in the past?
8. Tell us about any committee work you have done.

Of course, the ultimate behavior-based interview strategy is to observe the candidate teaching. Instruments for rating candidates’ answers in the structured interviews and their sample lessons should be written in advance.

Evaluating answers
The simplest rating instrument is one with three categories—unacceptable, acceptable, and target. Other evaluators prefer a numeric scale of 1 to 5 or 1 to 7. For the search committee, list all questions and then put the rating system at the side. It is then easy to see how many target answers are given or how many high scores are attained.

“PAR” and “STAR” may help you evaluate answers. PAR stands for problem, action, and result. If a candidate is asked about a concern or problem in teaching, then he or she should be able to talk about that problem, an action taken, and a result learned. Likewise, STAR represents situation, task, action, and result.

When creating a quick evaluation tool for students and observers of a candidate’s lesson, consider unacceptable, acceptable, and target, or a sliding scale of 1 to 5, where 1 is “no” and 5 is “definitely.” The categories might include the following: instructor introduced the lesson well, instructor organized the material efficiently in the body of the lesson, instructor was clear in explanations, instructor seemed enthusiastic, etc.

Key reminders:

1. The behavior-based approach helps in sorting large numbers of applicants. Make an evaluation rubric for each set of credentials received, looking specifically at a candidate’s match with the job description, experience teaching at this level, etc.
2. Keeping a list of illegal questions in front of faculty and students in open interviews will help prevent someone from asking about family, race, religion, etc.
3. Some candidates may be able to talk about teaching but still not be able to actually teach. However, a candidate who cannot describe any aspect of a lesson doesn’t know how to teach a lesson, either.

Using the behavior-based style of interviewing can help search committees have a basis for structuring interviews.

Dr. Mary C. Clement is a professor of teacher education at Berry College.

Excerpted from Behavior-Based Interviewing Strategies for Hiring New Faculty, Academic Leader, vol. 25, no. 8, p. 7.

It also comes down to something else, which often is harder to define but just as important: Does the person fit with the culture and mission of the institution?

“If you hire someone and you do everything exactly the way you’re supposed to and legally are in a good position, but the person is not a fit for the institution I think you’ve sort of lost the battle,” says Brian Van Brunt, director of counseling at Western Kentucky University.

In a recent online video seminar, Hiring Faculty: How to Make Your Most Critical Decision, Van Brunt and Jason Ebbeling, director of residential life at Southern Oregon University, discussed several core concepts of the faculty hiring process, and how to properly navigate the legal risks while searching for the best candidate for your institution.

The steps involved in the hiring process include:
Brainstorm the position – Members of the search committee should think about the traits they want to see in candidates and what the key functions of the position are.

Match position with HR – Align the duties and traits identified during brainstorming with HR requirements. Are there some job duties that can’t be required? Do some traits (e.g. young, energetic) conflict with what can be asked?

Post position – Determine where you will advertise the position, and what your hiring timeline is. What kind of information do you want from candidates?

Paper review of applicants – Decide in advance who will review the files and how you will handle incomplete files. Be prepared. Given the tough job market, you’re likely to receive a large number of applications, including those from under-qualified and over-qualified candidates.

Phone interview – Determine who will be on the phone interview team, create a set of approved questions and decide whether questions will be asked randomly or in a set order. Keep an objective tally of each candidate’s answers.

Campus interview – It’s important that each candidate receives the same type of on-campus experience. If there’s a teaching component to the campus visit, make sure each candidate is teaching to the same type of students. Consider how to handle travel reimbursement, and whether benefits will be discussed.

Hiring decision – The final hiring recommendation should be based on a clear process of qualitative and quantitative written documentation. It’s a good idea to have one person take notes of the group discussions involving the candidates. Laws on mandatory release of this information vary from state to state so it’s critical this person is trained in what to document and what not to document.

“There’s often this sense that we can quantitatively analyze every single faculty candidate on a 1 to 100 scale,” says Ebbeling. “But hiring isn’t just a science. There’s an art to hiring as well so I think as much as we want to have that quantitative analysis, I would say that we also want to make sure that there is some room for some qualitative factors to come in as well.”

An expert panel of authors, editors, and faculty familiar with pedagogical literature selected one winner and two finalists from a pool of more than 100 submissions.

The winning article
Carrithers, D., Ling, T., and Bean, J. C. (2008). Messy problems and lay audiences: Teaching critical thinking within the finance curriculum. Business Communication Quarterly, 71 (2), 152-170.
Find the article at http://bit.ly/9RBjHk.

Finalist articles, listed in alphabetical order
Kraemer, E. W., Lombardo, S. V., and Lepkowski, F. J. (2007). The librarian, the machine, or a little of both: A comparative study of three information literacy pedagogies at Oakland University. College & Research Libraries, 68 (4), 330-342. Find the article at http://bit.ly/9YwVih.

Pollard, E. A. (2008). Raising the stakes: Writing about witchcraft on Wikipedia. The History Teacher, 42 (1), 9-24. Find the article at http://bit.ly/api3cC.

To be considered for the award, the article had to be at least 1,500 words in length and published after 2007 in a discipline-specific or cross-disciplinary pedagogical periodical, or a general higher education publication. The piece could address any topic related to college-level teaching and learning.

The 2010 Teaching Professor Conference
The winning authors were recognized last month at the 2010 Teaching Professor Conference in Cambridge, Mass. and received a $1,000 stipend provided by McGraw-Hill. The Teaching Professor Conference, the premier conference devoted exclusively to pedagogy and teaching excellence, was attended by 800 college educators from 48 states and three countries. The popularity of the conference continues to grow, with this year’s event selling out nearly a month before the opening date.

“In today’s tough economy, where budgets for travel and professional development often are the first to go, it was exciting to meet so many dedicated professionals working to improve the teaching and learning experiences at their colleges and universities,” said Ricky Cox, Teaching Professor Conference chair and a professor at Murray State University. “This conference is very special to me, and each year I come away with new strategies that I can implement in my classroom and make new friends whom I can turn to for insight and inspiration.”

The 2011 Teaching Professor Conference will be held May 20-22 in Atlanta. Magna will issue a Call for Nominations for next year’s Scholarly Work on Teaching and Learning Award later this summer.

So conclude the authors of a recent interview study that looked for answers to a number of questions that pertain to faculty in their mid-career years. The authors wondered about expectations for mid-career faculty and what they experienced, especially in the way of challenges. They asked about professional support—what mid-career faculty received as well as what they might wish to receive.

Very little attention has been paid to this particular career span, even though it’s the longest, which means it contains the largest cohort in the academic workforce. There’s expansive (and still-growing) literature on new faculty and some on seniors, but almost nothing on the middle years. One of the challenges frequently cited by interviewees in this study (all faculty at a research university) was this lack of attention. One interviewee said, “Once you’ve gotten tenure, you are sort of in charge of your own fate. You’ve achieved a certain level of professional maturity that indicates the department doesn’t need to oversee or nurture your next promotion. That’s kind of up to you.” (p. 50)

This particular study looked at all aspects of academic careers during the middle years, not just teaching. However, a lot of what came out of the interviews related to teaching or emerged from it. There is much about teaching that can contribute to “dull routines.” The same courses are taught with the same foundational content semester after semester. Every class is different, but students still ask the same questions, many use the same poor study routines, and too many accomplish way less than they could. Yes, every semester and every course is different, but after a few years of teaching, they’re not all that different. It’s easy for teachers to find their way into comfortable routines that, before long, become deep ruts.

Those interviewed for the study also regularly reported that more work was added to an already-full workload. Mid-career faculty teach the same number of courses and are expected (if they want to be promoted) to maintain the same level of scholarly output. In addition to that, during the mid-career period, they are often asked to assume administrative tasks, be it chairing the department or accepting some major committee assignment. This additional work can be a source of renewal, but the faculty interviewed often described it as an additional responsibility that required energy from already-depleted reserves.

Once teachers get more comfortable with the content, develop structures that guide their way through courses, and come up with activities and assignments that work reasonably well, teaching becomes an easy target for cutting corners. Students new to the course for a certain semester don’t know what’s missing from last semester. Colleagues who see each other’s teaching only on rare occasions have no reason to suspect any changes. And for the faculty member who has stopped doing one thing and is cutting back on another, a host of reasons can be summoned to justify what, taken separately, are small changes.

It doesn’t help that, in addition to being left to their own devices during mid-career, teachers encounter few mechanisms that mandate accountability. Annual performance reviews happen in most departments, but will the evidence submitted show any signs of change?

Teaching grows tiring gradually, not all at once, even though everybody’s pretty well used up by the end of the semester. That tiredness is transitory, cured by a brief break. The kind of tired teaching that really erodes classroom experiences for students (and teachers) happens when the content stays the same course after course and when the teacher cuts corners here and there, gradually decreasing the time and energy devoted to the course. Pretty soon, the magic is gone. All that teaching has the potential to be vanishes. What’s left is a job, a steady paycheck, and a retirement plan (that will hopefully have enough time to recover).

Most faculty find the autonomy of academic positions highly attractive. But being left alone also means that faculty assume the responsibility of taking care of their instructional health and well-being. As with other health issues, prevention and early detection are the best remedies. The time to make instructional health a priority is during those mid-career years.

Reference: Baldwin, R., DeZure, D., Shaw, A., and Moretto, K. (2008). Mapping the terrain of mid-career faculty at a research university: Implications for faculty and academic leaders. Change (September/October), 46-55.

Excerpted from Those Long Years in the Middle, February 2009, The Teaching Professor.

Teachers have patients, although we generally call them students. Our “patients” also come to us with problems of one kind or another, usually a deficiency of knowledge or trouble with learning. Whether it’s in the classroom or in the office, we must try to diagnose learning difficulties that range from cognitive to emotional to physiological. The most striking similarity between the medical and the teaching professions is that both require caring practitioners. Groopman and Gawande make the importance of caring for patients breathtakingly clear.

In How Doctors Think, Groopman argues that physicians must treat the patient, not the disease. In medicine, specialists get more praise because of their extensive knowledge of specific ailments; yet specialists in many ways have an easier job because they have fewer options to consider. A general practitioner must try to narrow a set of symptoms into a possible diagnosis and then select which specialist a patient needs to see.

As teachers, we also deal with many students who present nonspecific ailments but still need an accurate diagnosis if they are to be helped. Specialists in a discipline might know their content area incredibly well, but knowledge of a discipline helps little when dealing with the average patient. In a sense, the best teachers are general practitioners: those who diagnose student problems and direct them to the resources that help them remain in school and continue their academic lives.

Groopman discusses a study of physician wait time that illuminates the time restrictions that exist within the medical profession. A physician usually asks the patient to describe his or her symptoms, and after an average 18 seconds, interrupts the patient. Wow! But how often do teachers fall into the same trap? Understanding student issues and needs requires extended listening; yet our time is so precious—papers to grade, papers to write, meetings to attend—that we often rush to judgment about our students. We rely on stereotypes, concluding that students are lazy, unorganized, belligerent, or arrogant, without trying to truly understand what lies behind those behaviors. This rush to judgment causes us to care for students in ways that may not address important learning needs.

Gawande’s Better is worth the read for his exploration of the question “How do I really matter?” He makes these suggestions to doctors: “ask unscripted questions” (getting to know the patient), “don’t complain” (an all-too-common pastime), “count something” (scholarship), “write something” (share the results of your counting and think about ways to matter), and “change” (physicians too often get into ruts).

Each of these five suggestions applies to the teaching profession in uncanny ways. The best teachers matter because they get to know their students, they remain optimistic despite the critical milieu of academe, they assess their own teaching as well as consider the ideas of other pedagogical scholars, they share their findings at conferences and in print, and they continue to develop as teachers. Teachers (like physicians) can always do better, and Gawande’s list points the way.

Dr. Ike Shibley is an associate Professor of Chemistry at Penn State Berks.

Excerpted from Saving Academic Lives, The Teaching Professor, June-July 2008.

Could it be that the two sides are actually debating different propositions? That’s what Michael Prince, Richard Felder, and Rebecca Brent (all well-known in the field of engineering education) propose in the article referenced below. The first proposition rests on the notion that research has the potential to support teaching. The second side is arguing whether it has done so in practice, and the evidence supporting that it has not is comprehensive and persuasive.

In an extraordinarily well-referenced article, these authors move the discussion forward by exploring the effectiveness of three strategies that could strengthen the research-teaching nexus:

1. bringing research into the classroom,
2. involving students in undergraduate research projects, and
3. accepting broader definitions for scholarship.

They review the literature to see whether and how much each of these strategies has improved undergraduate teaching, ways each nexus might be strengthened, and what further research questions merit attention.

Briefly, here’s what they discovered about each. “Integrating research into the classroom in the way integration is normally conceived—i.e., instructors discussing the content of their research—has not been shown to occur frequently or to improve instruction.” (p. 286) What these authors propose as a richer potential nexus are those forms of teaching (inquiry-based approaches and problem-based learning, for example) that mirror the research process. In this case, “a faculty member’s research provides experiences that have the potential to enrich instruction by introducing students to the research process and to important research skills.” (p. 285)

The effects of undergraduate research experiences have been studied in some detail. Does the opportunity for students to be involved in research projects strengthen the teaching-research nexus by producing better learning for the student? The authors answer that question with a qualified yes. Involvement in undergraduate research does correlate positively with retention and with the decision to pursue graduate study. Students evaluate their experiences positively and say those experiences helped them learn. But direct evidence of impact on learning is scant.

“[T]here is very little evidence that undergraduate research has much of an effect on students’ content knowledge.” (p. 288) Another limitation of this nexus: very few students have the opportunity to be involved in undergraduate research projects, and those that are tend to be the very best students.

As for whether broader definitions of scholarship make it easier for faculty to integrate their research and teaching work, the authors found “limited but encouraging evidence” that these models do help faculty make stronger connections between teaching and research.

It is time to move past the old teaching vs. research debate and this article provides a new and useful way to consider and talk about these related but very different parts of a faculty member’s job. “The primary goal of research is to advance knowledge, while that of teaching is to develop and enhance abilities. Researchers are valued mainly for what they discover and for the problems they solve, and teachers for what they enable their students to discover and solve.” (p. 283)

Reference: Prince, M. J., Felder, R. M., and Brent, R. (2007). Does faculty research improve undergraduate teaching? An analysis of existing and potential synergies. Journal of Engineering Education, 96 (4), 283-294.

Excerpted from Teaching vs. Research: Finally, a New Chapter, The Teaching Professor, March 2008.

Interestingly most of the research on the subject is rather dated. To believe it applies now, you must assume that senior faculty teaching today are the same as seniors were in the ’70s and ’80s. Given everything else that has changed in higher education, I’m not sure how valid the assumption might be.

Second, as with so many other topics in social science research, the limited results that do exist are not consistent. For example, one study from 1974 found that only 6 percent of the variance in ratings could be attributed to age. On the other hand, a 1989 study of 106 psychology faculty members (all faculty members are probably not like psychology faculty members) was able to document an overall negative correlation of .33 between age and general teaching effectiveness.

However, one of the definitive sources on senior faculty (see reference below), after a review of research on the topic, offers this conclusion: “In summary, no studies found a large negative association between a faculty member’s age and effective teaching. If a negative effect exists, it is small. It is clear, however, that senior faculty are interested in, committed to, and devote significant time to teaching.” (p. 31)

That last conclusion is justified in part by a study of New Jersey senior faculty who participated in a lengthy 50-question interview. The researchers wondered if these veterans still found “joy” in teaching. “The data were clear: the overwhelming majority enjoy teaching and care a great deal about student learning.” (p. 25)

That’s encouraging, but not everything that came out of these interviews was. The daily obligations of teaching keep even senior faculty very busy, leaving little time to focus on teaching per se. “Without periodic opportunities to revitalize their professional lives generally and their teaching lives in particular, faculty members report that their ‘teaching vitality’ tends to slip.” (p. 24)

And despite these needs for renewal, half of these interviewees said that they did not discuss teaching with their colleagues. Only one in 10 reported talking to colleagues about instructional topics such as books, lab materials, and student complaints. And this kind of pedagogical conversation wasn’t happening for this cohort in departmental meetings either. Only one in 14 reported that classroom teaching was discussed at those meetings. If faculty in this cohort talked about teaching, it was through some institution-wide faculty development program.

According to these data, “seniors” do care about teaching, and they don’t decline precipitously in their effectiveness as measured by student ratings. But for these folks, those who know their institutions and colleagues best, teaching remains a private, isolated activity; and if it is this way for those with years of experience, it’s not a big stretch to assume the same for faculty in all age cohorts.

References: For a good review of the research on age and teaching effectiveness see, Bland, C. J., and Bergquist, W. H. (1997). The Vitality of Senior Faculty Members: Snow on the Roof—Fire in the Furnace. ASHE-ERIC Higher Education Report, Vol. 25, No. 7. Washington, DC: The George Washington University, Graduate School of Education and Human Development.

The results of the interview study of New Jersey faculty appear in, Finkelstein, M. J., and LaCelle-Peterson, M. W. (1993). Institutions matter: Campus teaching environments’ impact on senior faculty. In Finkelstein, M. J., and LaCelle-Peterson, M. W. (eds.) Developing Senior Faculty as Teachers. New Directions for Teaching and Learning, No. 55. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

Excerpted from Senior Faculty and Teaching Effectiveness, The Teaching Professor, March 2008.

A very well-documented recent book (reference below) highlights these changes by describing three different kinds of faculty appointments. What these appointments are called at the local institution does vary a great deal, but virtually all colleges and universities employ faculty who teach in each of these categories.

The first and easiest to understand is the traditional tenure-track appointment. Because there has been such an influx of new faculty entering higher education (primarily as retirement replacements), new tenure-track appointees have been surveyed and interviewed at length.

Much is known about their experiences as beginners in the academic community. Taken together, research indicates that new tenure-track appointees are concerned about three aspects of their jobs:

1. the lack of comprehensive, clear and rational guidelines and procedures for the tenure process,
2. their sense of a lack of community at their institutions and among their colleagues, and
3. the difficulty of balancing the demands of their personal and professional lives. A significant number of new faculty are not finding these traditional appointments as attractive as former faculty did.

In 1978, 58 percent of all faculty were in tenure-track positions. Now, 32 percent of all full-time faculty have contract-renewable appointments and 46 percent of all faculty members teach part time. These full-time non-tenure-track positions increased by 88 percent between 1975 and 1998.

Institutions use these more flexible positions in a variety of ways. In some fields and professional programs they are used to hiring experts who have lots of experience but may not have the academic qualifications for a tenure-track position. Some institutions have responded to concerns about the number of part-time teachers by converting formerly part-time positions into full-time jobs.

For some professionals, this kind of appointment represents a viable career alternative. However, the ways that faculty are treated in these positions depends very much on the institution. In most places, salaries are lower than for those holding tenure-track appointments and teaching loads are heavier. But at some institutions, these positions are permanent (with multi-year contracts), promotions are possible, and full fringe benefits accompany the positions. Faculty holding these positions may have voting privileges and be eligible for professional development opportunities. In other places, faculty in these positions are marginalized by both the institution and their faculty colleagues.

Finally, institutions appoint some faculty to fixed-term positions. Here the work is mostly part-time, for a specific time period, like a semester or year, and these contracts come with no guarantee of renewal. The percentage of faculty in these positions depends both on the type of institution and the academic discipline. Thirty-seven percent of faculty with fixed-term contracts teach only one course, although 16 percent teach more than three classes. Most receive less than $3,000 per course and no benefits for their teaching services. Most teach with virtually no institutional support. There is little or no office space, equipment, or support services available to them. There are few professional development opportunities provided. Seventy-one percent of part-timers do have jobs outside academe, and their college teaching, on average, provides about 27 percent of their total income.

Reference: Gappa, J. M., Austin, A. E., and Trice, A. G. Rethinking Faculty Work: Higher Education’s Strategic Imperative. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2007.

Excerpted from Changes in the Academic Profession, The Teaching Professor, May 2007.

Some students will go out of their way to make you look bad. If there are relatively few such comments, the professional consequences aren’t all that bad unless a draconian administrator uses them to justify sanctions against you. The personal consequences often are more serious. You wonder where you went wrong. You dream of retirement.

But the pedagogical consequences are dramatic. Such comments take aim at the very soul of teaching. They haunt you during the teaching day—make you hesitate to take risks in your interactions with students. You pull back from challenging the students in the way they need to be challenged if they are to learn how to think analytically and critically.

They make us worse teachers by intimidation. The effects are insidious and often beyond our conscious awareness. We drop paper assignments and essay sections on exams—multiple-choice exams are so much easier to grade, and then there’s that all too convenient test bank from the textbook company. “Education” goes on because texts are read and taught, answers selected, and grades assigned. But real learning—the kind that involves interaction with a tough-minded opponent or starts with a sheet of blank paper and requires the student to write—is bypassed. The hurtful comments did their share to make it so.

I just thought someone had to say that.

Glenn Hartz is a professor at The Ohio State University Mansfield.

Reprinted from Hurtful Student Comments, The Teaching Professor, January 2008.

Based on the stories in the book and her own experiences, Stanley recommends the following strategies to help retain faculty of color:

• Grow your own—Consider hiring candidates who attended graduate school at your institution. The relationships they formed as students can help them feel more connected to the institution as faculty.
• Try to understand the experiences of faculty of color—Talk about diversity issues in exit interviews as well as in ongoing conversations with faculty who remain at the institution.
• Cluster hiring—Faculty of color often feel lonely, isolated, and “constantly under the microscope.” To alleviate these feelings, hire more than one faculty member of color at a time when possible.
• Provide mentoring—“I wouldn’t be where I am today without mentors,” Stanley says. “They were not afraid to give me constructive and critical feedback when I needed it. They didn’t walk on eggshells around me. They helped me navigate landmines and helped me get into certain networks that I probably wouldn’t have access to. But I think in academia … ‘mentoring’ sort of connotes that somehow you’re deficient in some way, and, quite frankly, some faculty don’t seek mentoring because they don’t want to be perceived as deficient.”
• Limit service activities—Faculty of color often take on a lot of service responsibilities as a way to give back to the community. Department chairs or administrators should act as a buffer between the faculty and those who ask them to serve on committees to protect these faculty members’ time and enable them to engage in activities that count toward promotion and tenure.
• Encourage a deeper dialogue on diversity—People are often reluctant to broach the subject of diversity for fear of appearing racist, sexist, or homophobic. But the issues must be out in the open, or else there won’t be any progress. Stanley appreciates her mentors’ candor in talking about diversity. For example, they often ask Stanley’s opinion as to whether something they said might be perceived as racist. ‘They always tell me, you can call me on things I’m doing wrong.’ And I consider these individuals strong allies for diversity. When Stanley gets upset over something she perceives as racist, “they never say to me, ‘Well, Christine, I think you’re being too sensitive’ or ‘You’re reading too much into it.’ Instead, they ask, ‘Why do you feel that way?’ or ‘Why did you reach that conclusion?’”
• Take action to prevent faculty of color from being lured away—“Don’t wait until the negotiation stage with the other institution. Sit down and have a conversation with that person, and say, ‘I’ve heard you’re interviewing with another institution. Is there anything we can do to keep you here?’”
• Provide opportunities for advancement—If a person color being interviewed doesn’t see many people of color in leadership positions, that could be seen as an indication that the institution has not progressed very far in its diversity goals.

Excerpted from Retaining Faculty of Color, Academic Leader, March 2006.

I am just about to retire from Penn State and leave my faculty position teaching undergraduates. I’ll still be working; there’s this newsletter to edit and a world of faculty who still need advice, ideas, and encouragement to do their very best in the classroom. But you don’t end 33 years of college teaching without thinking about those things that will and won’t be missed on campus. Here’s my list.

Things I’ll miss:

• The nervous anticipation of going to class, rehearsing my lines as I drive to campus, thinking about all that’s possible, believing that I just might be able to make some of it happen.
• Those days in class when students get it. Sometimes that new understanding shines from their faces, sometimes they make a comment that attests to how well they’ve got it, and sometimes they report the details in a paper. Sometimes they give you credit. Even if they don’t, it’s still an event worthy of witness.
• Those days in class when I get it. When I see how to connect content to students; efforts to learn to appropriate processes; and students to the insights, ideas, and motivation of other students.
• Seeing seniors at graduation and remembering how they looked that first day of their first semester in college.
• Watching students who started out failing or doing poorly learning to succeed.
• Colleagues whose passion for teaching spreads enough hot coals to light new fires and rekindle others when their embers burn low or die out.
• Colleagues who use their fine minds, keen intellects, and inquisitive sensibilities to tackle teaching and learning with intellectual robustness.

Things I won’t miss

• Those bright, capable students who don’t care and won’t make an effort. Those students full of potential who happily do work just barely above the line that marks acceptable.
• Colleagues who have given up on teaching and are doing time in the classroom—the ones who’ve locked themselves out of meaningful, trusting relationships by using policies and practices that render all encounters with students adversarial.
• Colleagues who blame students for what they aren’t accomplishing as teachers.
• End-of-course student evaluations that ask irrelevant questions and give administrators data from which to draw dubious conclusions.
• Peer reviews where the Lake Wobegon effect devalues any teaching that is truly above average.
• Grading papers so full of grammatical errors that it’s difficult to see beyond them to the ideas behind them.
• Students so full of excuses there’s no room left for learning.
• Students with whom conversations never get past the points—those taken off, missed, totaled, awarded for extra credit, given, earned, offered as bonus, secured surreptitiously, or bought on the black market.
• Those days in class when I can’t make it happen, when my best efforts don’t make a difference. Those days when passivity, like fog, settles over the classroom, when students yawn and nod off and no amount of enthusiasm cuts through the chill of complacency—those days when only the cold signifies that this place isn’t teaching hell.

If you’re retiring this year, please share some of the things you will and won’t miss by clicking on the Add Comment button.

Faculty enjoy the occasion because it means the grading for this semester is finally over. That’s always a relief. It’s also about sharing the celebration with our favorite students—the ones we advised, our majors, those who took more than one of our courses, who stopped by the office to chat—the ones we’ll really and truly miss. Graduation is the chance to see those students who have come the furthest—the ones we really didn’t expect to make it, given our first encounters with them in class. No, they aren’t graduating with honors, but they made it and that may represent a bigger accomplishment than the really bright grads with those GPAs pushing 4.0. And finally, there are those students (usually just a few) we are just glad to see go. Most of these students have reputations among faculty, and their march across the stage is accompanied with more than the normal amount of applause from the faculty section.

It’s a fun event, filled with celebration and a few accolades for faculty, if we’re lucky.

I had another less positive thought about graduation, though. I started wondering what it would be like to be at an event where the students who enrolled two or four years ago but then dropped out might march past us for review. Would we be surprised by the number? Would their average GPAs be something other than what we expected? How many of them would we expect to see employed and employed doing what? What would they say about their experience in college and their decisions not to continue?

Graduation is not a dark event and I don’t want to make it one. We have every reason to celebrate right along with our students and their families. Our investments of time, energy, and hard work allow us to own part of these students’ success. I just don’t want us to forget that for every graduate there are others who aren’t getting a degree. For a while they were on campus and in our courses. It is a day for remembering them, too, as we reflect on the role teachers play in every student’s success or lack of it.

Recently, when talking with another professor about challenging students, we noticed some similarities between some of the student behaviors we were discussing and some behaviors we had observed in colleagues over the years.

Like kids, some professors may not always be a delight to be around, are impulsive, and have difficulty delaying having their needs met. Others behave like the school bully, have tantrums, and can be cruel when angry. A third group may exhibit excuse-making and avoidant behaviors, and seldom complete work in a timely manner. They tend to be off-task, late to meetings, unprepared, or forgetful of the meeting’s agenda.

1. Stop the name-calling. The more you think of the person in terms of a negative label, the more you’ll observe behaviors that confirm your negative characterization of the individual. You may become less annoyed and more compassionate toward the individual if you “think differently” about him or her.

2. Use rational detachment. You can’t control what words come out of another’s mouth, but you can control how you respond to the comments. Don’t reinforce that behavior by giving them the reaction they’re seeking. Remain rationally detached from the situation as though you are a third party observing the meeting.

3. Use cognitive restructuring. Since your colleagues have had a number of years to become the way they are, it’s unlikely you will effect a huge change in their behaviors. Instead, you will have to change your responses to their behaviors. If you tell yourself that your colleagues truly believe that their proposals are motivated by what’s best for students, you may listen more attentively to find the jewel behind the suggestion. In contrast, if you walk into the meeting saying that it will be a waste of your valuable time, you probably won’t be disappointed.

4. Choose your battles. You can decide during each and every interaction whether the issue is important enough to go to battle over at this very moment—or at all. Sometimes we find ourselves getting stuck in an interaction that later we can recognize was really trivial.

5. Smile and laugh. It’s amazing how a “group laugh” will help you move past some difficult sticking spot in your curriculum negotiations. When the drama becomes too overpowering and you seem to be losing perspective, lighten up!

6. Celebrate your successes. When you have a successful meeting or interaction, acknowledge it, and use it as an opportunity to build some positive relations to help out when the next difficult situation occurs.

Navigating rough waters with colleagues will give our students the best faculty and programs they deserve. The interpersonal skills you refine will make the working environment more pleasant for everyone. The only person you can truly control is yourself; so take charge.

Jacqueline Waggoner is an assistant professor of education at the University of Portland.

Excerpted from When Colleagues Are Brats, Academic Leader, August 2005.