FACULTY INITIATIVES SUMMARY

FACULTY INITIATIVES SUMMARY

Below is a summary of all of the initiatives and ideas that came from the two conversations held October 17, 2005 and November 3, 2005 about faculty as part of the academic planning process and was supplemented by e-mail comments and follow-up work done by the Academic Council.

We need to look at “excellence” holistically. Not every faculty member needs to be an excellent teacher, scholar and servant. But every department should have some excellent teachers, excellent scholars and people who serve the university.

We are at our core a teaching institution and our quest for prominence and excellence needs to be rooted in our teaching and the quality of the graduates that we produce as much as our scholarship.

There are differences between disciplines in what activities will give PLNU “prominence” and voice. For one discipline it might be having a faculty member publish a paper in a refereed journal, for another it might be having a group of students make presentations at a conference. Is it possible to set up a structure that would award funding for a department to do what they thought best, with the accountability to report on the results?

Teaching

Funding for curriculum development
Institute a support system or some sort of training for new faculty mentors
Improve support and structures for adjuncts
Consider multi-year contracts for some “long term” adjuncts. Are there ways that they could be given some sort of “rank” as well? Refer to the Faculty Status Committee.
How can we contribute to the professional development of long-term adjuncts? Faculty Status Committee should be the source of a definition for “long-term” adjuncts and Faculty Resources Committee should be the source of a proposal for a professional development initiative – should we have a pool of money and then have adjuncts submit proposals for professional development?
Consider smaller classes for some GE courses
Develop a system for helping faculty members with poor teaching evaluations to improve their teaching.
Develop a system for helping new faculty members with little or no teaching experience to refine their teaching skills. Perhaps they should be paired with an experienced faculty member in their department who would serve as a teaching mentor.
Consider alternative teaching evaluations – are the current evaluations formative? Do they help faculty to improve their teaching? The peer evaluations need to be changed to something that is more formative. The Faculty Resources Committee is working on this.
At each faculty meeting have a 10-15 minute presentation on a specific teaching technique done by a faculty member who is skilled in that particular approach.
The CTL website needs more exposure. Perhaps a presentation in a faculty meeting. Items currently available of which people were unaware:

Summaries of the articles that Hadley sends out periodically
The TNT professors and their “expertise” are up on the CTL website and they are resource people for helping with particular skills.
A repository of teaching ideas this is expanded as new ideas are posted

There has been some success in various academic departments with the faculty reading and discussing books on teaching. CTL has sponsored some of these and is willing to sponsor others in the future. How do we get the word out?
Use some of the “convocation” chapel times for faculty convocations related to teaching.
It would be helpful to have resources focused on the use of case studies (particularly relevant for graduate programs).
Graduate programs in particular could also use creative ideas for breaking up long teaching periods and keeping students engaged (their classes often run multiple hours one night per week).
Consider planning a one-day faculty in-service on teaching methodologies (with a variety of parallel sessions) using the expertise that already exists on our campus. This has been proposed for fall workshop but the consensus was that the faculty are too distracted with “start of the year” issues for this to be productive. A possibility is to have an “assessment day” during the year to accomplish all of the needed student assessment and run the faculty in-service concurrently.
There is a great deal to be learned from sitting in on the class of another professor multiple times during the semester. Is there a way to expand this beyond TNT? Should there be some sort of incentives for this?
How do we facilitate team teaching in GE? Are there ways to provide incentives?
How do we facilitate faculty team teaching with members of Cabinet or student and spiritual development professionals? The could be significant gains for everyone in doing this.
There is a desire for some faculty development opportunities to assist faculty in integrating faith into the classroom, particularly addressing working with graduate students. There are several ideas currently being implemented in our existing programs that should be shared.

Scholarship

Additional professional development money should be awarded based on proposals requesting funding for a specific project or participation in a particular conference
Targeted grants for faculty who teach graduate courses
Assistance in writing book proposals (paying a consultant to help, holding workshops with faculty who have been successful in writing proposals).
Assistance with writing grant proposals, including staffing to help write grants and access to data bases with granting agency information.
Release time for research. Consider research contracts of three years’ duration. After the first two years the research is evaluated and if good progress is being made, an additional year will be given. A system needs to be developed to rotate this so we do not end up with two classes of faculty members.
Is there a way to unify the PLNU grant application process (Wesleyan, RASP, Alumni, etc)?
Increase the number of small grants that provide limited release time, small summer stipends and funds for working with students.
Investigate raising donor money to sponsor release time for research.
Evaluate if the number of sabbaticals is consistent with the size and quality of our current faculty.
Consider ways to have varied schedules for sabbaticals to allow faculty greater flexibility.
How do we help faculty think well in advance about their next sabbatical and the groundwork that needs to be done in preparation for a sabbatical?
We need to further develop the “community” nature of our scholarship and share the energy and enthusiasm. Some ideas: at each faculty meeting have one faculty member give a 15 minute presentation on their current scholarship. Use some of the chapel convocation times (e.g. class chapel, ASB chapel, etc) to have a faculty convocation with 1-2 faculty presentations on their scholarship (in any of the four areas).
Institutionalize some of the things that have been supported by the Provost’s Discretionary fund (e.g. travel funds to take students to conferences).
Use some of the additional income being generated by graduate programs to develop a Provost’s Discretionary fund that can be target at the needs of graduate faculty and graduate faculty-student scholarship (this should be somehow proportional to what is available for undergraduate endeavors).
There is no institutional committee tasked with focusing on developing undergraduate research beyond the Honors Program. There are issues involving money for travel, money for materials, policies about the use in independent study units, support for faculty wanting to start doing research with undergraduates, etc that need to be investigated. If we are serious about undergraduate research, then we need the supporting structure.
Investigate if we need further structures to support graduate student research that is part of many degree programs.
More work needs to be done on encouraging faculty to pursue creative ways to think about tracing the trajectories of Wesleyan themes and applying for Wesleyan Center grants. Good and sound scholarship in any area is "Wesleyan" implicitly; some scholarship must of course be explicitly Wesleyan in theology and praxis.
Work to continue the collaboration between the Wesleyan Center and other campus units on Wesleyan practices: this would entail continued collaboration with the Center for Pastoral Leadership, the School of Theology and Christian Ministry, other Centers devoted to social and cultural issues, University Advancement, Spiritual Development.
Continue to seek creative ways to showcase the scholarship of our faculty both internally and externally.

Service

Provide additional travel money for faculty members who have a leadership role in a professional guild and need to attend related meetings.
Evaluate the current committee structure.
Provide some orientation for committee chairs along with clear job descriptions (supplement what is in the faculty handbook).
Work on making sure that committee minutes are out in the Faculty Shared folder where they are supposed to be posted. Do we need to go back to a system of brief annual committee reports in one faculty meeting each year?
Consider using the Academic Council (a.k.a. “chairs meeting”) as a quasi-faculty senate to deal with the routine and mundane items that come to the faculty meeting. This would free up time for scholarship and teaching presentations and would focus faculty meeting conversations on substantive issues. There is work to be done to define routine and substantive issues.
With the increase of deans many tasks have been professionalized and are less committee dependant. In addition, we now have several sites and a larger institution. Some time needs to be devoted to how we reduce the sense of “disconnect” that these changes have produced.
We need to leverage technology to make sure that faculty members off of the main campus can fully participate in committee meetings via video and telephone conferencing.

Institutional Support

Third Year Initiative – a seminar for third year faculty that focuses on career planning, sustaining research, etc.
The Faculty Development Committee’s role needs to be re-evaluated. Could it be the host for carrying out some of these initiatives?
Consider a Faculty Career Planning Seminar offered every seven years so that faculty can map out a cycle of scholarly work and other career development activities between sabbaticals.
Is there a way to formalize a bit more requests for funding from the “Provost’s Discretionary Fund” – particularly for items that don’t fit anywhere else such as projects that are not scholarship but would benefit the University as a whole?

Note:

CPR Group One: Data recommends:

The University needs to continue to study institutional diversity. Great strides have been made and some analysis is called for to identify our most effective strategies. In addition, a comparison needs to be made between the university’s faculty, staff and student population and that of our catchment area.
Faculty and staff data needs to be collected on an annual basis. Particular attention needs to be given to projecting trends in retirement in the coming years and making institutional financial plans accordingly. The HERI faculty survey data indicates that roughly 20% of our full-time faculty are 60 or older, 10.9% of them plan on retiring in the next three years, and 20% of the faculty have considered early retirement.
That the University continues its emphasis on having a significant portion of its courses (both graduate and undergraduate) taught by full-time faculty.

CPR Group Three: Standards 1&3 recommends:
- Continued development of creative solutions to recruit and retain faculty members in light of the high cost of living in the San Diego area.
CPR Group Four: Standards 2&4 recommends:
- Regarding integrating the mission into the classroom, more formal policies and procedures need to be explored to protect the university as it grows through more off-campus programs. Such policies should include the professional development of graduate faculty to meet the challenges of the graduate students, careful review of the syllabi, and/or consistent statement and examination of Department/School expectations for support of the mission of the University.
- Regarding institutional mission, it is recommended that further work is done to prepare adjunct faculty. PLNU should continue to hold an adjunct orientation at the beginning of each academic year and to enhance the type of issues covered during that time.
- Further inquiry into the weaker response of graduate faculty as compared to undergraduate faculty regarding the institution’s commitment to long-term success in professional development is warranted in order to understand how to proceed.
CPR Group Seven: Diversity recommends:
- Continue to recruit ethnically diverse faculty and staff who represent the demographics of California and the world.
- Continue efforts to “grow our own” ethnically diverse and female faculty members by supporting them in their doctoral studies.

Framing questions:

What the three most important initiatives open to the university to sustain and support the professional life of full-time faculty members over the span of their careers?
How can engaged teaching best be promoted and supported?
What can the institution do to assist faculty involvement in their professional guild?
Are the revamped committee and traditional governance structures operative and effective?
Are the resources for faculty support adequate and focused on the appropriate and most important activities?
Should the professional development allotment be expanded, and should the carry-over from year to year be increased?
Are sabbatical awards and support adequate for the size and scope of the university?
Should the university consider a “research contract” to support scholarship on campus?
Are class sizes adequate for effective teaching?
Should the university consider moving to a year-around schedule to support sustained scholarship and service?
What kind of support can we provide for “the development of faculty as whole persons” as opposed to just their development as it applies to students?
What committees are in place to look at these issues?
Are there creative sources of funding for some of these ideas?