June, 2007

The Academic Leader - June, 2007 - Full Issue PDF
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Encouraging Faculty Involvement in the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning
Despite the admirable goal of improving student learning by assessment, many faculty members are uneasy about participating in assessment-related activities. They resent having assessment mandates imposed on them by administrators and fear that opening their courses to public scrutiny might negatively reflect on them personally. One way to overcome these negative feelings about assessment while promoting improved student learning is to encourage faculty to engage in the scholarship of teaching and learning (SoTL).

A Practitioner Model for Ethical Leadership
Academic leaders are often called upon to make difficult ethical decisions. From the daily issues of resource allocation to the unexpected misconduct of faculty or students, few ethical decisions are black and white. To deal with such issues, Perrin Cohen, an associate professor of psychology at Northeastern University, together with his colleague Donna Qualters, an associate professor of education and the director of the Center for Teaching Excellence at Suffolk University, recommends the Awareness, Investigation, and Response (AIR) model (Cohen, McDaniels, and Qualters, 2005), which provides an interdisciplinary framework for reflective ethical inquiry.

The ‘Gotta Wanna’ Principle
By Sandra Allen, MA, MBA
Quick: How do you motivate someone you don’t often see? Sound like the opening of a bad joke? Not at all. Therein lies the fundamental challenge of managing professionals whose very career choice rests on the simultaneous hunger for freedom and dignity. Freedom translates as being independent of rigid constraints that govern an individual’s approach to fulfilling his responsibility. Dignity rests in being viewed as a professional whose skills and knowledge serve a higher purpose.

Scheduling Courses for Flexibility and Student Success
With the growth of distance education and changes in student demographics, the traditional class schedule, when a class meets two or three times a week, may no longer be what students want or need to meet their educational goals. In its place, institutions are offering online, hybrid, and accelerated courses, which provide greater flexibility and can improve student learning and retention.

Why New Department Chairs Need Coaching
By Russ Olwell, PhD
For faculty, being asked to step in and consider becoming a chair does not always follow a smooth or particularly well-thought-out process. The request might come during a phone call to an associate dean asking if she needs help while she is out of town for a funeral, or at lunch with a current chair. Most faculty, who have no management or supervisory training, need real support to make this transition, but today’s “lean and mean” university structure provides relatively few resources to help them.

Parting Shot: What Would Epictetus Do?
By Thomas R. McDaniel, PhD
Most of us who have found our way into academic administration (surely, few of us actually plan such a career) have learned to survive the whitewater rafting experiences of academe by drawing on reserves of stoic patience and calm rationality we never knew we had. That is to say, Epictetus lives today in many an academic administrator’s office, perhaps sitting like some modern-day Jiminy Cricket on the administrator’s shoulder, saying, “Patience, my friend. Be strong and endure, for this too will pass.”