Resources

Nyasha Junior, Ph.D. Assistant Professor of Hebrew Bible Howard University School of Divinity Visit her website: www.nyashajunior.com I am organized. I have to-do lists, stop-doing lists, someday lists, and checklists galore. When it’s time to prep for the semester, I pull up my teaching Excel spreadsheet and get to work. Order books. Revise syllabus. Set up BlackBoard. And request to be assigned to my favorite sunny classroom. I had my lecture ready for the first day of my Introduction to Old Testament/Hebrew Bible class. It is a combination of welcome, syllabus review, and class overview while channeling Lou Gossett, Jr....

Eric Barreto (Ph.D., Emory University) Associate Professor of New Testament Luther Seminary I first discovered that I loved to teach when I was 19 years old at the front of a classroom of 70 adolescents in the city of Urumqi, a huge city in northwest China. Supposedly, I was teaching...

Roger Nam (Ph.D., UCLA) Visiting Professor, Sogang University, Graduate School of Theology (Seoul, Korea) Associate Professor of Biblical Studies, George Fox Evangelical Seminary (on sabbatical) I will always remember my first time in the front of a class back in 2006. It was a small classroom, seminar style. The magical...

New deans come into the office of Chief Academic Officer in varied ways. Some aspire to the work, others are called, some are pressed into service, and some poor souls are voted in during a missed Faculty meeting. While larger...

Management is easy, leadership is hard. Most theological school deans can get up to speed on educational program management in relatively short order. It takes about three to four years to learn the finer aspects of the job, but, given...

Smaller theological schools face distinct challenges. One of those challenges is how to provide coverage for a comprehensive theological curriculum while maintaining a reasonable teaching load for elected faculty members while also providing for student needs. Another is finding qualified...

The formative assessment of academic programs is one of the fundamental tasks of deans. Deans must focus on the "big picture," working with program-level metrics often out of the scope (and interest) of others in the institution. Big picture program...

At this time of the year, semester's end, while Faculty wistfully anticipate taking advantage of the three best things about teaching (June, July, and August), many deans are turning their attention to wrapping up the academic year. End-of-term activities take...

I have a couple of friends who are really into "Talk Like a Pirate Day" (September 19 in case you're wondering). One dresses up like a pirate for the day (in Johnny Depp "Pirates of the Caribbean" style) and plays...

Jeanne P. McLean's seminal work on the role of the academic dean as an act of "leading from the center" is apt and resonates with those of us who have experienced the job. But in the whirlwind of the experience...