Resources

For assistant professors envisioning tenure, this completely revised publication is about as close to being a mentor as a book can be! Using a representative institution and a prototype assistant professor, Mentor in a Manual provides invaluable counsel for those on the tenure track. Twelve chapters take the new hire through each step with advice on making it through the mazes. (From the Publisher)

In question-and-answer form, Ms. Mentor advises academic women about issues they daren't discuss openly, such as: How does one really clamber onto the tenure track when the job market is so nasty, brutish, and small? Is there such a thing as the perfectly marketable dissertation topic? How does a meek young woman become a tiger of an authority figure in the classroom and get stupendous teaching evaluations? How does one cope with sexual harassment, grandiosity, and bizarre behavior from entrenched colleagues? Ms. Mentor's readers will find answers to the secret queries they were afraid to ask anyone else. They'll discover what it really takes to get tenure; what to wear to academic occasions; when to snicker, when to hide, what to eat, and when to sue. They'll find out how to get firmly planted in the rich red earth of tenure. Ms. Mentor's wisdom grows out of many a real-life experience: she guarantees that some readers will squirm. She lavishly dispenses witty advice, and valuable information, while despising psychobabble, postcomprehensible jargon, and pontification by anyone other than herself. She also insists that sisterhood is, and must be, powerful. Readers of Ms. Mentor's Impeccable Advice for Women in Academia are in for an unusual treat. (From the Publisher)

This rich and insightful book explores the critical process of mentoring and presents practical tools for facitlitating the experience from beginning to end. It is based on Laurent A. Daloz's popular and widely used conept that mentoring is a learning journey, in which the mentor and mentee serve as companions along the way. Now leaders, managers,teachers, and leaders form any career, professional, or educational setting can successfully navigate the learning journey by using the hand-on worksheets and exericses in this unique resource. (From the Publisher)

Hiring new tenure-track faculty and seeing them through to tenure is an onerous responsibility for department chairs, with significant departmental and institutional consequences. The Department Chair's Role in Developing New Faculty into Teachers and Scholars is designed to help chairs with the three critical stages of junior faculty socialization: 1) recruitment and hiring; 2) the first year; and 3) evaluating new faculty performance. The authors offer concrete advice and activities; make extensive use of real-life situations; and provide generic examples of letters, checklists, and orientations that can be adapted to individual contexts. This book provides the tools chairs need to adapt habit and intuition into effective management practices. The advice will help department chairs achieve the mission and objective of their own units, as well as their colleges and campuses. (From the Publisher)

If we believe that the welfare of individuals and the organization are one and the same, the points of compatibility and mutual support must be found and nurtured. If we value the "developmental culture" of an academic institution, the concerns of individuals for growth, change, advancement, recognition, and support can be brought into harmony with the goals of the "organizational culture" for stability, continuity, and community. The twenty-first century will bring new challenges to higher education. Academic institutions must renew their responsibility to support the developmental needs of all their members. This commitment to support human growth is also part of institutional regeneration. An integrated, comprehensive model of personal and organizational development that includes mentoring for students, faculty, staff, and administrators can make a significant contribution to the best use of human resources, community building, and institutional vitality. (From the Publisher)

Motivation is not something one "does to" someone else--good motivational practice requires that we engage others in a common quest. (From the Publisher)

Peter Elbow's widely acclaimed and original theories on the writing process, set forth in Writing Without Teachers and Writing With Power, have earned him a reputation as a leading educational innovator. Now Elbow has drawn together twelve of his essays on the nature of learning and teaching to suggest a comprehensive philosophy of education. At once theoretical and down-to-earth, this collection will appeal not only to teachers, adminitrators and students, but to anyone with a love of learning. Elbow explores the "contraries" in the educational process, in particular his theory that clear thinking can be enhanced by inviting indecision, incoherence, and paradoxical thinking. The essays, written over a period of twenty-five years, are engaged in a single enterprise: to arrive at insights or conclusions about learning and teaching while still doing justice to the "rich messiness" of intellectual inquiry. Drawing his conclusions from his own perplexities as a student and as a teacher, Elbow discusses the value of interdisciplinary teaching, his theory of "cooking" (an interaction of conflicting ideas), the authority relationship in teaching and the value of specifying learning objectives. A full section is devoted to evaluation and feedback, both of students and faculty. Finally, Elbow focuses on the need to move beyond the skepticism of critical thinking to what he calls "methodological belief" -- an ability to embrace more than one point of view. (From the Publisher)