Resources

An essential companion for university faculty interested in conducting scholarly inquiry into their classroom teaching, this practical guide presents a formal model for making visible the careful, difficult, and intentional scholarly work entailed in exploring a teaching question. As a how-to guide, this is an invaluable resource for planning and conducting classroom research—formulating questions and hypotheses, defining a data collection methodology, collecting data, measuring the impact, and documenting the results. Inquiry Into the College Classroom is filled with richly illustrative examples that highlight how university faculty from a range of academic disciplines have performed scholarly inquiries into their teaching and leads faculty on a journey that includes: * Developing a formal model for structuring the exploration of a classroom inquiry question * Providing a practical and useful guide for faculty interested in exploring teaching and learning challenges * Detailing faculty experiences in measuring specific changes in student learning or perspectives * Demonstrating how to document classroom inquiry in a form to be shared, used, and reviewed by other faculty * Sharing useful and practical suggestions for getting started with a classroom inquiry * Highlighting different models for disseminating classroom inquiry work * Linking classroom inquiry to larger conversations about the scholarship of teaching and learning (From the Publisher)

The development of students as “stewards of the discipline” should be the purpose of doctoral education. A steward is a scholar in the fullest sense of the term—someone who can imaginatively generate new knowledge, critically conserve valuable and useful ideas, and responsibly transform those understandings through writing, teaching, and application. Stewardship also has an ethical and moral dimension; it is a role that transcends a collection of accomplishments and skills. A steward is someone to whom the vigor, quality, and integrity of the field can be entrusted. The most important period of a steward’s formation occurs during formal doctoral education. Envisioning the Future of Doctoral Education is a collection of essays commissioned for the Carnegie Initiative on the Doctorate. The question posed to the essayists in this volume was, “If you could start de novo, what would be the best way to structure doctoral education in your field to prepare stewards of the discipline?” The authors of the essays are respected thinkers, researchers, and scholars who are experienced with and thoughtful about doctoral education. (From the Publisher)

The role of an academic dean is extremely complex, involving budgeting, community relations, personnel decisions, managing a large enterprise, mastering numerous details, fundraising, and guiding a school or college toward a compelling vision for the future. But no academic dean can quickly master all of the intricacies involved in this challenging position. For instance, how do you build support for a shared vision of your unit's future? How do you interact effectively with all of the different internal and external constituencies that a dean must serve? How do you set, supervise, and implement a budget? How do you handle the volume of documents that cross your desk? How do you fire someone, ask a chair to step down, respond to a reporter on the telephone, and settle disputes about intellectual property rights? How do you know when it's time to consider leaving your current position for another opportunity? The Essential Academic Dean is about the "how" of academic leadership. Based on a series of workshops given by the author on college administration and management, each topic deals concisely with the most important information deans need at their fingertips when faced with a particular challenge or opportunity. Written both as a comprehensive guide to the academic deanship and as a ready reference to be consulted when needed, this book emphasizes proven solutions over untested theories and stresses what deans need to know now in order to be most successful as academic leaders. (From the Publisher)

The Role of Self in Teacher Development explores some of the major transition points in becoming a teacher and focuses explicitly on how issues of self and identity bear on these different points. The contributors examine not only pre-service teachers, but also the first years of teaching, the characteristics of the master teacher, and the processes of reexamining and affirming one's identity as a teacher. A recurrent theme throughout the book is the importance of balancing the personal development of teachers with their professional development. (From the Publisher)

Written for educators, administrators, policy makers, and anyone else concerned with the future of higher education, Rethinking Faculty Work shows how changes in higher education are transforming the careers of faculty and provides a model that makes it possible for all faculty to be in a position to do their best. This important resource offers a vision of academic workplaces that will attract superb faculty committed to fulfilling the missions of the universities and colleges where they work. (From the Publisher)

Immerse yourself in exploring the heart of teacher leadership! Practicing the art of teacher leadership requires self-reflection, creativity, and discipline. This comprehensive reader brings together the top voices in the field, encouraging teacher leaders to examine the tensions in their practice. Edited by recognized leadership experts Richard H. Ackerman (author of The Wounded Leader) and Sarah V. Mackenzie, this must-have resource contains classic essays and contemporary gems that explore teacher leadership in insightful and surprising ways. This well-organized compendium features stories and lessons from teacher leaders that explore current issues, underlying feelings, and fresh perspectives. Within a five-part structure, each section begins with an introduction and closes with questions designed to encourage reflection and discussion. Readers will be able to use * Stories, essays, and research findings for insight and exploration * Protocols to structure conversations about common issues * Ideas for inspiring and motivating other educators to examine and improve their practices * Contributions from teacher leader experts such as Roland Barth, Barnett Barry, Mary Dietz, Gordon A. Donaldson Jr., Michael Fullan, Sam M. Intrator, Marilyn Katzenmeyter, Linda Lambert, Ann Liebermann, Gayle Moller, and many more Revealing the inner world of teacher leaders will prompt readers to think more deeply about their own leadership. (From the Publisher)

Adjuncts have become the lifeline of a vast majority of colleges and universities. They teach many of the foundation and core courses taken by first and second year students, they teach professional courses in which their own life experiences are invaluable, and they step in on short notice to fill in for regular faculty engaged in research or away on sabbaticals. A survey of over 4,000 institutions conducted by the US Department of Education reveals that adjuncts are being hired at a much higher rate than full-time faculty. This is due partly to increased enrollment, partly to reduced budgets, partly as a deliberate administrative strategy, and partly to convenience. The importance of adjuncts to the college or university cannot be overstated. This book provides academic administrators and faculty developers with proactive, practical and results-producing approaches that can help transform fragmented faculties into inclusive and cohesive teaching and scholarly communities. Structured in an easy-to-follow, practical format, this book provides an invaluable resource of thoughtful and pragmatic approaches to ensure the both quality and satisfaction on the part of the institution and the adjuncts. Topics are presented in a thematic sequence that allows decision-makers to focus on their priority areas; guidance is provided for systematic planning and implementation. The contents focus on connecting adjunct faculty to core institutional functions and structures: Connection #1 - To The Institution; Connection #2 - To The Department; Connection #3 - To The Profession & The Discipline; Connection #4 - To Teaching; Connection #5 - To Students; Connection #6 - To Scholarship. (From the Publisher)

High-performance mentors are not born. Even experienced educators need training in order to provide constructive support to entry-year teachers. James B. Rowley's mentoring framework has been used to successfully train thousands of teachers to acquire the six essential behaviors of high-performance mentoring: committing, accepting, communicating, coaching, learning, and inspiring. With more than twenty years of experience in training mentor teachers, Rowley blends real-life stories with established research to help readers * Understand mentoring as a performance continuum with escalating developmental stages * Improve assessment, communication, and coaching skills * Reflect on the mentoring process and analyze mentoring relationships * Utilize mentoring as a pathway to personal and professional growth Designed for both experienced and novice mentor teachers, this book will also be an enormously useful resource for mentor program coordinators, trainers, staff developers, and principals who want to assure that participants grow in their teaching practice as a result of the mentoring experience. (From the Publisher)