Special Issues in Chairing Academic Departments

Carolyn Allard

• Publisher: Jossey-Bass
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN: 9781118252758
• eBook ISBN: 9781118196779
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Leadership in Education

Chairing an academic department comes with a multitude of responsibilities in a wide variety of areas. As a new department chair, you immediately confront many of the basics of academic leadership: managing budgets, supporting faculty, resolving conflict, and facilitating change, to name a few of the topics covered in The Essentials for New Department Chairs, the companion to this booklet. This collection is designed to help you navigate the further intricacies of your role.

Bringing together in one place for the first time sound advice and proven strategies from experts in the field, these articles from The Department Chair provide practical tips on such topics as post-tenure review, work-life balance for faculty, fundraising, departmental planning, and preparing your administrative résumé. Every selection contains easily accessible strategies and advice that you can put to use immediately. The range of articles covers the important functions of academic departments, and the authors impart the skills and thinking you need to enhance your leadership capabilities. For brand-new department chairs this booklet will provide you with an overview of the complexities of the chair role. For those chairs with a year or two more experience this booklet will provide direction and guidance as you delve more deeply into your responsibilities.

Designed to provide a wealth of strategies in five crucial areas?faculty recruitment and evaluation, faculty mentoring and development, enhancing teaching and building community, departmental initiatives, and chair development and next steps?the expert advice and field-tested techniques presented here offer essential insights into this important chair work. This collection will equip you with lessons to draw from and best practices for leading into the future.

SECTION THREE

Enhancing Teaching and Building Community

Building a Shared Value of Teaching in a Department: What Chairs Can Do

by Mary C. Wright

Outside of Crosley Tower, the University of Cincinnati’s campus is coming alive with the start of a new quarter. Inside, the twelfth floor feels like a morgue. “The atmosphere here [in the department] is just deadly,” says John A. Powers, an associate professor who has been here for 37 years. This devastation is the fallout from a war between two faculty groups who clashed over priorities: teaching or research. One side wanted to raise the department in national rankings by focusing on publishing, the other to put a premium on teaching and advising students. (Wilson, 2002, p. A12)

Although this case is extreme, it represents many department chairs’ worst nightmares—their departments are rendered dysfunctional by a failure to agree on key values, such as teaching and research. In my book, Always at Odds? (2008), I examine two departments in which faculty perceived that they valued teaching much more than others in their department. I also look at two departments in which faculty saw a shared value of teaching across the department. In these cases, I interviewed four department chairs (and forty-six faculty about them) to better understand what both faculty and administrators can do to build a common culture of teaching.

Feeling alone in one’s value of teaching is actually quite common, especially in research universities, where surveys show that faculty often report that they place more esteem on teaching than do others in their departments. In researching departmental culture and teaching, I found that units that lacked a common commitment to teaching suffered from many problems as a result of this incongruence. Junior faculty faced tenure decisions without clear guidance as to how teaching counted in the process, or how it was to be assessed by the department. Institutional continuity was threatened as certain department members did the bulk of teaching or curricular work. Other organizational research indicates that congruence levels also hold implications for faculty attrition, job satisfaction, and time spent on teaching.

Based on my research I provide here some key examples of what chairs can do to develop a shared value of teaching in their departments. Departments can be split along many lines, and there can be factions about a number of issues. Although I focus on teaching, conflicts about other values—such as research, community outreach, service, and diversity—could just as easily divide a department, and readers in these other situations also may find the following suggestions useful.

Spread out instructional work. Administrators in congruent departments establish a plan for rotating the teaching among courses, so that many faculty teach service, required, or large courses. Similarly, curricular work is spread across the department. In creating this plan, service to these courses was factored into annual reviews or tenure and promotion.

Create peer review opportunities. Peer review helps faculty gather direct evidence on teaching standards and approaches, which assists faculty in establishing shared understandings of the constituents of effective teaching. However, I define peer review more expansively than our usual understanding of the term, where a visitor observes the class, often for summative purposes. Instead, I look at any opportunities where windows can be opened into faculty classrooms, such as team teaching, informal observations (i.e., just “to learn from someone”), and public discussion of student ratings or common assessments.

Cultivate instructional discussions among faculty. If desired, at events where all faculty are in attendance (e.g., retreats), chairs can place pedagogical discussions on the agenda to communicate the symbolic value the department accords to teaching. However, I found that if chairs wait for infrequent, high-profile events for the department to talk about teaching, this decision could misfire. Sometimes, not all faculty attend, and other times, faculty do not interpret the discussion as communicating a value of teaching. Instead, it may be more effective to establish frequent informal events, such as daily conversations and coffee breaks, where teaching can be discussed. For example, one department chair noted that refreshments for the daily afternoon coffee break were a small but important budget item because the informal meeting time was a profitable way to spread information about both research and teaching.

Develop a multiplicity of practices for evaluating teaching. A culture of teaching implies a shared value of the worth of teaching in faculty work, but it is important to state that this does not imply uniformity. Such departments need not be comprised of instructional clones, whose definitions of effective teaching are exactly the same. However, for alignment about the value of teaching to exist in a department, faculty will have a repertoire of shared understandings about what constitutes effective teaching and how to assess it. Departments that use student ratings as the sole source of information about teaching may find it problematic when faculty shoot down ratings for being invalid. Chairs need to broaden the ways in which teaching is evaluated. With faculty input, chairs can establish multiple means of measuring teaching effectiveness and student learning. For example, one department in my study had a repertoire of formal and informal practices, including teaching portfolios (which included student evaluations, peer evaluations, and metrics for student performance), circulation of student feedback, and informal peer review that took place during team teaching.

Give attention to informal departmental practices that support good teaching and clarify tenure and promotion policies for evaluating teaching. If they were not supported by follow-up discussions, faculty in my study expressed a lot of ambiguity about the meaning of formal policies that, ostensibly, established standards and practices for valuing and evaluating teaching. Through regular discussions with faculty, chairs can better understand whether formal policies are well understood, formal teaching events are well attended, and formal mechanisms for evaluating teaching are well accepted. Both accessibility (an open door) and outreach (going beyond the door) are useful for chairs to make valuable contacts with faculty. Sometimes, these discussions took place at a formal annual review meeting, but often they were informal conversations that began with, “How is it going?”

Use your time well to communicate symbolically the value of teaching. Chairs in congruent departments carefully chose some time-consuming but highly meaningful events that resonated with their faculty. These strategic activities communicated that the department values teaching because they involved a personal commitment to teaching on the part of the chair. For example, one chair taught every year—something not to be taken for granted in a large research university science department—because he felt that continuing to teach is “absolutely vital” to maintain credibility from colleagues. Faculty noted this symbolism, and I heard from several faculty that the chair performs “extremely well” and does a “top gun, bang-up job.” This success supported the chair’s conviction that valuable department members were those who “pull their weight,” meaning that the teaching load was carefully assessed and reassigned when someone was not doing enough teaching.

Conclusion

Given the time constraints department chairs face, I want to emphasize that several of these strategies are relatively informal and time efficient. Of course, use of these strategies does not guarantee that a department can become more congruent, and, as a result, more effective at classroom instruction. But in my study, chairs who used these techniques were located in departments with more agreement about the value of teaching. And departments with more agreement about the value of teaching had higher student ratings. Attention to teaching cultures also can prevent numerous problems in departments that are debating the role and value of teaching—in both faculty meetings and lounges.

References

Wilson, R. (2002, October 18). Bickering decimates a department. Chronicle of Higher Education, p. A12.

Wright, M. C. (2008). Always at odds? Creating alignment between faculty and administrative values. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press.

Mary C. Wright is assistant director for evaluation and assistant research scientist in the Center for Research on Learning and Teaching at the University of Michigan. Email: [email protected]

Motivating Faculty to Engage in Service-Learning

by Debra Burke

Increasingly, a university’s mission reflects a commitment to creating a community of scholarship dedicated to service, research, and creative activities in which the benefits of its scholarship extend to society. In recognizing the role and responsibility of universities as being a major public resource and a needed partner for community development, administrators such as department chairs must work to ensure that this articulated goal of productive engagement becomes a reality. To this end, chairs must enlighten an already burdened faculty as to why service-learning as a pedagogical approach is worthwhile, and encourage them to pursue such projects. Each of the three functions of faculty members—teaching, research, and service—may be fulfilled through service-learning activities, and that reality itself is the greatest hook for gaining faculty support for the concept.

Describing the Benefits to Faculty

First, service-learning projects contribute to the service component of a faculty member’s responsibilities, particularly given the acknowledgment of a university’s substantial role in being a valuable resource and contributing member of the local community. Second, with respect to teaching, service-learning produces positive teaching and learning outcomes because students become more involved in the class, participate more fully in class discussions, and develop a better understanding of course material. They also become more aware of and interested in community issues and, as a result, may become more connected, a factor that can enhance retention rates. Faculty who advocate service-learning also report that it provides a way to test and implement knowledge from textbooks, creates better relationships with students because of the greater emphasis on student-centered teaching, and represents a distinctive approach to learning that may complement or even replace a traditional lecture approach. It also opens the door to provocative discussions of current events, citizenship, and the application of knowledge. In sum, service-learning can enhance the teaching and learning experience for both the faculty member and the student, which will likely result in superior teaching evaluations.

Third, service-learning presents additional research and publication opportunities. There are a growing number of conferences and publications specifically dedicated to pedagogical research on service-learning. In addition, discipline-based pedagogical publications are an outlet for empirical, theoretical, and applied articles on service-learning as a pedagogical approach. Providing that the institution recognizes all of the four domains of scholarship delineated by Boyer—discovery, application, integration, and the scholarship of teaching and learning—then pursuing these research activities should be acceptable. Further, if the university’s mission supports both teaching and engagement, then the scholarship of teaching and learning in conjunction with educational opportunities focused on engagement with community partners should be recognized and rewarded. Case studies represent a final productivity outlet for discipline-specific research studies conducted for community partners as part of the curricular experience.

Assisting with the Process

There are several ways in which a department chair may facilitate an interested faculty member’s involvement with service-learning activities. First, chairs can provide resource materials to their faculty in an effort to familiarize them with best practices for this pedagogical approach. The following websites contain a wealth of such resources for faculty, including available conferences and research outlets, and should be circulated among them:

• Campus Compact www.compact.org
• Corporation for National and Community Service www.nationalservice.gov
• International Partnership for Service-Learning and Leadership www.ipsl.org
• National Service-Learning Clearinghouse www.servicelearning.org
• National Service-Learning Partnership www.service-learningpartnership.org
• National Society for Experiential Education www.nsee.org

In addition to providing information on available resources, chairs can suggest course objectives geared to this pedagogical approach, as well as feasible projects relevant to the discipline and sample syllabi provisions outlining such expectations. Tables 1 and 2 present some potential learning goals and ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Contents
• Title
• Copyright
• Introduction
• Section One: Faculty Recruitment and Evaluation
• Section Two: Faculty Mentoring and Development
• Section Three: Enhancing Teaching and Building Community
• Section Four: Departmental Initiatives
• Section Five: Chair Development and Next Steps