Since it’s that time of year when New Faculty Orientation is almost upon us, we’re once again excited and renewed about the opportunity. Yet, a little over a decade ago when we took over new faculty development at our university, we didn’t like the plate we were served. All new tenure-track hires were put through a solid Monday-through-Friday week of activities that began at eight in the morning and lasted until five. Four days of sitting still in administrator-as-talking head information sessions were broken up one day by a five-hour bus ride, only occasionally with air conditioning and roller-coasting through the hills of eastern Kentucky. Mostly, new faculty were herded through HR, payroll, IT, benefits, ID picture-taking, parking, etc. with the result that by Friday afternoon their minds had been numbed by information overload, and the University had spent nearly $10,000 in the process.
Did you notice in this never-ending parade of indoctrination and torpor what key elements of a college professor duties weren’t even mentioned?
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Of course, we weren’t immediately given the reins of this white elephant. As is the academic way, we had to get ourselves put on the New Faculty Orientation Committee (NFOC), then sit through endless hours of meetings dominated by administrators, PowerPoints, and tittering (higher education’s equivalent of laughter). Gradually, by volunteering to look into problems or put together part of the week, we were ceded some power. And each year we moved up the hierarchal ladder toward control. Eventually, various members on the NFOC decided they had performed sufficient university service, retired, or took another job, and, of course, we expressed a willingness to take over leadership.
One of the first things we did was to look at a few years’ surveys of what new faculty members were telling us about their week-long experiences. Then, studying at the obstacles to overcome, we identified our strengths and brainstormed various meta-principles for innovation in the experience of new faculty. In so doing we derived four sweeping ideas for change.
1. Simplification
As former professors of English, we had often taught Henry David Thoreau’s classic. In fact, his retreat to Walden (1854) was an experiment designed to confront life in order to distill it to its basic necessities, and because “Our life is frittered away by detail,” his motto became “Simplify, simplify.” Later, we came across Learning To Think Things Through (2000), wherein Gerry Nosich advocates reducing complicated things (e.g., college courses) to their “fundamental and powerful concepts” in order to help students learn them deeply.
Applying that principle to New Faculty Orientation, we decided to make two major changes right away to the traditional week-long program; after all, as long-time faculty members, we were very aware how much value professors place on time. First, we cut the number of days down from five to three, and then we lopped off the afternoons. Research had taught us that faculty more and more were viewing the profession as a nine-to-five job and that they were part of a generation raising millennial students—i.e., helicopter parents. Let’s give them time, we reasoned, to take their kids to some morning activity—usually school—and be there when it ended.
Related Reading: Why Successful Faculty Development Requires Innovation
2. Focus
In a previous post we pointed out that your unit’s focus/goal must be what your boss says it is. What do you do, though, when you aren’t given much direction? At most institutions, whether the goal is expressed or not, administrators are very happy to save money. One byproduct of simplification was that three days cost the university less than five, and eliminating a costly bus trip made financial dollars and cents.
Remember our description of New Faculty Orientation? What did you find missing? Our university’s historic mission was teaching (yes, it was once a teachers’ college), yet in the five days of indoctrination, not one word was said about teaching. We coined the motto EXCELLENCE IN TEACHING IS JOB ONE, made posters to that effect, and started signing our email with the phrase. We decided to devote one third of our week to teaching, and to stress its importance, we would lead with it. Day One became Pedagogy Day. In our next post we’ll describe how this day works.
3. Atmosphere
In our first attempt at our new three-day approach to new faculty orientation, we still had two-days with a host of administrators greeting faculty and telling them what was expected of them. Most importantly, we realized that even though many had once been faculty, they had gone over to a dark side, where the preferred method of instruction was the PowerPoint lecture (to be fair, that approach was probably the preferred pedagogy when they joined the dark side).
We decided that even these administrator-heavy days had to be fun and interactive. Furthermore, that which was basically pure background information (e.g., the history of the University, how the counselling center works) could be presented in other forms such as email or even a large three-ring binder. Topics that demanded greater treatment became part of our fall round tables (e.g., dealing with distressed students, the disabilities office, veterans affairs)—essentially a series of one-hour workshops.
These three meta-principles have served us well and have been melded into our unit’s mot — “Helping teachers help students learn deeply.”
Author
Charlie Sweet is currently Co-Director of the Teaching & Learning Center (2007+) at Eastern Kentucky University. Before going over to the dark side of administration, for 37 years he taught American Lit and Creative Writing in EKU’s Department of English & Theatre, where he also served as chair (2003-2006). Collabo-writing with Hal Blythe, he has published well over 1000 items, including 15 books; of his 11 books with New Forums. Meet Charlie.
