Library Resources for Faculty Development

Klipfel and Cook introduce readers to the theory of and research on learner-centered teaching practices, creating a practical guide for implementing these practices in your own work. In a changing job market, librarians need to have more confidence in adapting their skills to the teaching and learning environments of today's libraries as centers of long-term learning.

This book is the ultimate guide for the new college instructor. It teaches you how to handle your nerves and work effectively with young adults and all ages of college students. Classroom management, syllabus creating, grading and assessment are also covered.

Develop a solid foundation for teaching and learning with this definitive, step-by-step guide to curriculum design and evaluation.

The Productive Online Professorassists those who teach online and blended courses with managing their personal productivity. Faculty are often expected to provide support and feedback to learners outside of normal work hours in non-traditional classes. Programs that are designed with more asynchronous content may cause faculty to perceive that it is difficult to ever press the "off button" on their teaching.The author offers guidance and suggests software tools for streamlining communication and productivity that enable faculty to better balance their lives while giving rich feedback to students.

"The syllabus is one of the central documents of academic life, the one thing every teacher needs to write and every student needs to read. Most syllabi begin with a course description, a statement of what the course is about. But how do we get there? How will our students get there? And where is there? This book by William Germano and Kit Nicholls is a field guide to, and collegial chat concerning, this fundamental but often overlooked document. It describes how syllabi work and don't work, offers advice and encouragement to the professor trying to finish yet another syllabus, and reimagines our students' encounters with our syllabi by reconsidering our own relationship to them. Sampling syllabi from a range of disciplines across the sciences, social sciences, and humanities, Syllabus asks such questions as: what is a reading list, and what is it for? how do we build human time into the semester's clocktime? and can a syllabus be a living thing? Germano and Nicholls argue that at its heart, a syllabus is not really about what students have to know, or what the instructor will do, but what the students will do. A syllabus designed around doing is not only a faster and more effective way to move students toward knowledge, they contend, but also, importantly, an invitation into a community of practice-one that includes the students, the instructor, and countless others who will enter the classrom through readings, images, designs, and theories. Reimagining the syllabus as a sort of constitution-a founding document that creates a community out of a group of disparate individuals-they show that a syllabus is, above all, a privilege and a responsibility, as one of the few forms of writing that can quite directly call others to act"-- Provided by publisher.

Beyond anecdote and opinion, what do we really know about how tenure works? Presenting a picture of academic subcultures, this work offers the results of research on key empirical questions.; Tenure is the abortion issue of the academy, igniting arguments and inflaming near-religious passions. To some, tenure is essential to academic freedom and a magnet to recruit and retain top-flight faculty. To others, it is an impediment to professorial accountability and a constraint on institutional flexibility and finances. But beyond anecdote and opinion, what do we really know about how tenure works? In this unique book, Richard Chait and his colleagues offer the results of their research on key empirical questions. Are there circumstances under which faculty might voluntarily relinquish tenure? When might new faculty actually prefer non-tenure track positions? Does the absence of tenure mean the absence of shared governance? Why have some colleges abandoned tenure while others have adopted it? Answers to these and other questions come from careful studies of institutions that mirror the American academy: research universities and liberal arts colleges, including both highly selective and less prestigious schools. Lucid and straightforward, The Questions of Tenure offers vivid pictures of academic subcultures. Chait and his colleagues conclude that context counts so much that no single tenure system exists. Still, since no academic reward carries the cachet of tenure, few institutions will initiate significant changes without either powerful external pressures or persistent demands from new or disgruntled faculty.

Landing a tenure-track position is no easy task. Achieving tenure is even more difficult. Under what policies and practices do faculty find greater clarity about tenure and experience higher levels of job satisfaction? And what makes an institution a great place to work? In 2005-2006, the Collaborative on Academic Careers in Higher Education (COACHE) at the Harvard Graduate School of Education surveyed more than 15,000 tenure-track faculty at 200 participating institutions to assess their job satisfaction. The survey was designed around five key themes for faculty satisfaction: tenure clarity, work-life balance, support for research, collegiality, and leadership. Success on the Tenure Track positions the survey data in the context of actual colleges and universities and real faculty and administrators who talk about what works and why. Best practices at the highest-rated institutions in the survey - Auburn, Ohio State, North Carolina State, Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Iowa, Kansas, and North Carolina at Pembroke - give administrators practical, proven advice on how to increase their employee satisfaction. Additional chapters discuss faculty demographics, trends in employment practices, what leaders can do to create and sustain a great workplace for faculty, and what the future might hold for tenure. An actively engaged faculty is crucial for American higher education to retain its global competitiveness. The Author's analysis provides colleges and universities a considerable inside advantage to get on the right track toward a happy, productive workforce.

Professor Mommy is designed as a guide for women who are trying to combine the life of the mind with the joys of motherhood. The book addresses key questions - when to have children and how many, what kinds of academic institutions are the most family friendly, how to juggle research and teaching with your children's needs, etc. - for women throughout all stages of their academic careers, from graduate school through full professor. The authors tackle these issues not only during the infant/toddler stages, but also follow the demands of motherhood all the way through the empty nest.

Academic Motherhoodtells the story of over one hundred women who are both professors and mothers and examines how they navigated their professional lives at different career stages. Kelly Ward and Lisa Wolf-Wendel base their findings on a longitudinal study that asks how women faculty on the tenure track manage work and family in their early careers (pre-tenure) when their children are young (under the age of five), and then again in mid-career (post-tenure) when their children are older. The women studied work in a range of institutional settings-research universities, comprehensive universities, liberal arts colleges, and community colleges-and in a variety of disciplines, including the sciences, the humanities, and the social sciences.Much of the existing literature on balancing work and family presents a pessimistic view and offers cautionary tales of what to avoid and how to avoid it. In contrast, the goal ofAcademic Motherhoodis to help tenure track faculty and the institutions at which they are employed "make it work." Writing for administrators, prospective and current faculty as well as scholars, Ward and Wolf-Wendel bring an element of hope and optimism to the topic of work and family in academe. They provide insight and policy recommendations that support faculty with children and offer mechanisms for problem-solving at personal, departmental, institutional, and national levels.