Robert L. Wolke Office of Faculty Development Universitv of Pinsburgh
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Faculty Development Explained
Almost every chemistry textbook begins with a section entitled, "What is Chemistry?" In the area of faculty development, however, the task of an entire hook may be to define the field (1,2).Even the faculty development practitioner, not to mention his clients, may he hard put to characterize the ohjectives and methods in any succinct way. The reasons for this state of affairs are (a) that faculty develooment is a new movement, only some 5-8 years old and still evolving, and (h) that it is practiced in an almost infinite varietv of forms (3).Add to that the fact that education is the most jargon-infested of human rnterprises and that " d e w wment" is in any event one of the fuzziest and most overused &rds in the English language, and we have a prize-winning recipe for confusion. The first semantic distinction that must he made, then, is that the word "faculty" in "faculty development" is being used primarily in the individual, rather than in the collective sense. Colleges and universities have long been concerned with the building of a distinguished faculty through judicious recruitment, appointment, and tenuring policies; this continuing activitv has often been referred to as faculty development. This paper, however, will deal with the development(whatever that means) of individual faculty members. With that distinction in mind, I will first describe the circumstances that created the need for such a field. Then I will survey the broad spectrum of programs that have heen designed to meet that need. Finally,, with particular reference to-the natural sciences, I will summarize a few of my observations of the past two or three years, since I left the research laboratory (hut not the classroom) and became a faculty development consultant. The Needs
Reciting the rircumstances from which the faculty development nw\.ement arose amuunts to a litany that we have all come t o know by heart. First, the expanding univcme uf uni\,ersitiesand rollrgt~shasstopped expanding. Or to use n terrestrial metaphor, the aradem~cwurld suddenly finds Itself uhuur to tripover what had bc.en until now anerer-recedinp; harizon. The population of traditiunnl rdlege-age students in the United S u t r s ten years from nos" is expertpd to he dcgwn IS'; from what it was in 1975. That is three mill~unfewer potential tuirion-paying t.ustorners. 'l'he srrnmble is on for d d e r and darker replarrmmts, but the intlux of auch nun-traditimal students is nor experred to mnke up the detkit. 1telnu.d to this isa shrinking base of public support for h i ~ h e educar tion, leading to severely tightened budgets and consequent retrenchment. This, in turn, has been reflected in more restrained hiring practices for faculty and more prolonged agonizing over tenure decisions. In the eood old davs. onlv five or ten vears ago, . a professor . who was not deliriousl; happy with his department or college could ~ r o b a b. l vconiure . an offer from another one. Budgets were g;owing, and new slots were constantly opening up. Back then. the develovment of a faculty member's career meant t there are few new littlemore than series of jobs. ~ " now slots, and the old mobility is gone. It had always been true that colleges were stuck with their tenured professors. But now, the professors are also stuck with their colleges, for better or for worse in both cases. The problem, then, is how to make the marriage work, now
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that promiscuity and divorce are much more difficult to achieve than they had heen in the past. "Making the marriage work," of course, has two sides to it: the professor's ability to shape a rewarding career entirely from within one college's walls, and the college getting the most effective service from that professor. Most of this symposium will be concerned with the benefits that can accrue to the faculty member who feels locked into-or even trapped in-a career rut, and who feels a need for revitalization. But for a moment, let us look a t how the institution might hope to benefit from a faculty development program. "Efficiencv" is a dirtv word in academia. But the facts of life are that a college or university has a certain number of faculty members (often mostly tenured), a certain number of courses to he taught, and only a certain number of dollars to pay the former to do the latter. Some sort of accommodation must he worked out so that this job can he done effectively, hut without infringing on the faculty memher's traditional and highly valued freedom to engage in a self-directed career of scholarship and research. At the same time, the message must he avoided that "development," with its implication that somebody needs to he improved, is being imposed by a crass administration on the sensitive and already well-developed egos of its faculty members. One way to avoid the appearance of coercion is to spread the blame. This tactic is otherwise known as the consortium model. in which a regional arour, . of similar colleaes forms a coope;ative faculty development venture. (This d s o relieves small institutions of the need to devote a large amount of staff time to the effort.) On the other hand, howe;er, an institution might have its own, in-house faculty development program. It might he managed by a faculty committee, by a hybrid faculty-administration committee, or by an appointed director. The director, and indeed the whole operation, may he a product either of the school of education or of the arts and siiences division of the university. The programs may he supported by institutional funds, by grants from government or foundations, or by some mixture of sources. All comhinations of these models exist in various colleges and universities. Types ol Programs
The next question is, "What do they actually do?" And the answer is that there is no general answer. What is appropriate for the faculty of a research university is not appropriate for a liberal arts colleee " or a two-vear college. - What can be accomplished in an independent faculty is very different from what can he done in a unionized one. And, of course, the problems of a generally young faculty are different from those of an older. mostlv-tenured one. Faculty development programs, therefore, have to be tailor-made to individual institutional and faculty needs. The battle cry of faculty development is, "whatever works!" What seems to work best, however, is that the faculty he offered a three-component mixture of incentives, opportunities, and services: for example, incentives to teach the paying customers more effectively, opportunities for personal and professional growth, and services to facilitate the accom~lishmentof both of these ohiectives. 1; general, the variegated actiiities that go on under the
umbrella of facultv development will fall into three categories ( 4 ) :organizational d e v ~ l ~ ~ r n ewhich n r , is the promutlon of adaptive changes in the institution as a whole; inctruclionol deu~lopment,~whichis the promotion of more effective teaching; and personal and professional development of the individual faculty member and his career. Any given faculty development effort may encompass in its mission one, two, or all three of these kinds of programs, with varying degrees of emphasis. Let me first d a c e organizational development outside the inrrrests of thi;sympo~iumand say nom& ahout it, except tag point out that noneof the other act~vities1 will enumerate can have any lasting value unless it is institutionalized: incorporated into the life style of the college or university by some kind of administrative modification. instructional Development
Inctrucriunol der~alopmenl,or teaching development, is sometimes called teaching improvement. Its relationship to today's changes in higher education is simple but hard ro provr quantitatiwly: that better teaching ran heexpected tu attract and hold mure of that declining species, the undergraduate student. "Hetter teaching," oi course, transcends the acrivitiesof the classroom; it is enmrihed wirh such variables as curricular design, class size, hiring and pn)motion criteria, and uthpr rharacteristics of the instirution as a whole. In practire, h(,wever, insrrwtional development most often reduces 11, encuurazinr and helpinr . .faculty member.; t o d o the best possible jobof teaching. Some faculty development centers that emphasize the instructional develonment aonroach mav be direct outzrowths of the old nudiovis~lalswvice rentrrs m the campus, and are hnsed on the lielief that nirvana in teachine- will t.uniu throuzh the use of electrically-powered devices. These centers might go by the name of "teaching-learning centers," "instructional resource centers," "media centers" or something similar. Other instructional development centers mav concentrate on the design of courses and curricula. They have people known as curriculum specialists, who work on course development with the faculty member who, in turn, is cast in thesymbiotic role of "content specialist." Still other instructional development operations attempt to supply the entire arsenal of aids that faculty members might need in pursuit of excellence in the comnlex art of teachine. Either included in, or deliberately separated from, these teaching improuement functions may be the teaching eualuation function: helping faculty members to see their teaching as others see it and letting them know how they are doing. This may be done for the purpose of enlightened self-improvement efforts, in which case the process is known as formatiue evaluation, or for use in administrative decisions on tenure, promotion, or salary improvement, in which case the process is called summatiue eualuation. This evaluation function is most often seen in the form of those questionnaires that the students fill out during the last week of class, telling the instructor how much they love or hate him. (Very few people, however, will claim that student opinion surveys provide anything but a fragmentary measure of an instructor's overall teaching effectiveness.) In my own university, we have seen fit to separate the teaching improvement function, which is a major effort of my Office of Faculty Development, from the teaching evaluation function, which is administered confidentially by a separate unit. That allows my office to offer teaching services to the faculty on a strictly collegial basis, without any threat of judgment or criticism. Before I leave instructional development and set the stage for personal and professional development, which is the main theme of the rest of the presentations in this symposium, I will just ewmerate a few of the kinds of instructional development programs that might be found by scratching a faculty development office a t random. We should bear in mind that their sole uhifying purpose is to improve the college's or univenity's
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teaching function, and that they all succeed or fail to different degrees in different academic settings. Programs may include: Seminars and workshops on teaching topics Courses in college teaching Newsletters and articles on teaching, distributed to the faculty A faculty reading room devoted to teaching problems Training programs for teaching assistants Publishing a teaching assistants' handhook Videotaping of classes, followed by a critical analysis of the tapes Private consultations with "master teacher" colleagues Small eranta to facultv for teaching needs ~ellowihipsfor undergraduate stuients to work with faculty members on course development Publishing a manual of campus teaching services for faculty Meetings with deans and departmental administrators on the role of teaching Awards to outstanding teachers Aid in keeping one's knowledge of the field up to date Visitation in the classroom by colleagues Sabbatical leaves for teaching development With the exreptiun uf awards for outstanding teachers, all but the last rhrre are v n w a m s of the University of Pittsburgh's Office of ~ a c u k ~evelopment. y National experience has shown that -giving awards for excellence does not improve an institution's teaching; faculty members do not strive to compete for awards in that arena. Moreover, award programs have the following drawbacks: (a) they are readily assailable as popularity contests (especially if student evaluations are relied upon heavily), (b) they arouse resentment in the many fine teachers who do not win, (c) they are inevitahly subject to corruntion bv.nolitics. or a t least bv extraneous considerations, and (d) giving an award to one person is a signal to the rest of the facultv that his stvle is most hiehlv valued and to he emulated, whireas teach& is in realitia highly personal art with as manv different stvles as there are teachers and kinds of courses: More valuable by far than giving teaching awards, though much more difficult to do, especially in research universities, is to make teaching accomplishment a genuine and important factor in the institution's reward structure: in theadministrative judgments that determine paychecks and promotions.
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Personal and Professional Development Let me now turn to the kind of faculty development activity that the rest of the papers in this svmnosium will focus Upon: the personal and professional d&efopment of the faculty member. Not only are the needs and expectations of colleges changing with respect to their faculties as dictated by our changing society, but the needs and expectations of each individual faculty member may change also as his life and career march on. T h e world view of a 30-vear-old assistant nrofessor is certainly different from thatbf a 50-year-old fuil professor. And we all know how the achievement of tenure can change the habits of faculty members in different ways, giving some a welcomed freedom to embark on loneer-ranee or higher-risk research projects, hut allowing others relaxiheir efTorts and coast into a comfortable mediocrity. Personal and career problems can also develop years after tenure has been awarded, even for that facultv member who was determined to use it to accomplish bigger and better things. A tenured faculty member today is a human being who is growing older in the same job. He often finds himself teaching the same courses and doing the same kind of research decade after decade. The crumbling, yellowed lecture notes of the middle-aged professor are infamous in college folklore, but how many colleagues do we also know whose latest research pnper is virtually indistinguishable from the one he wrote fen or twenty years ago? (\Iayhe the cwnpoundp are different, hut the methods and techniques are identical.^ This kind of ossificatim is actually encouraged by our academic Volume 57, Number 12, December 1980 / 839
society's reward of specialization,which can at times he a mere euphemism for an unimaginative sameness. (I have heard a bright and versatile colleague, who enjoys working on a wide variety of imaginative research projects, disparaged by his department chairman for "scattering his shots.") No wonder, then, that faculty members are vulnerable to intellectual stagnation, accompanied as it often is by boredom and self-doubt. This is simply the academic version of the so-called mid-career or mid-life crisis. It happens when a person for the first time confronts his mortality head-on and realizes not only that he is never going to travel to Stockholm to accept a medal from the King but also that he may well already have accomplished about all of value that he ever will. The academician's career can lose its vitality at a time other than in middle age, however. The "burnout syndrome," as it is called, can happen a t any time to a person in an intense occupation. For a variety of reasons, the person may find that his work no longer excites him the way it used to; the luster is gone. Some kind of change is needed, to re-light the spark of intellectual vigor that brought the person into the academic world in the first place. There are also faculty memhers who have not yet run aground, but who would like to re-chart the courses of their careers, not because of middle-age crisis or burnout, hut simply to redirect their still-healthy intellectual vigor into more challenging directions, or even just for the excitement of trying something new. Such changes, which may be desirable for any of these reasons, are not easy to accomplish. Because the faculty member needs help in accomplishing them, and because the college or university would itself benefit from the revitalization or redirection of its locked-in faculty members, many faculty development offices offer programs in personal and professional development. As in teaching development programs, the institution must offer its faculty a mixture of incentives, opportunities, and services. The revitalization process has been called everything from renewal to retraining and retreading, and even simonizing the faculty member. These colloquialisms are misleading, however, because they incorrectly imply that the institution is doing something to the faculty member, rather than helping him to accomplish his own goals which, admittedly, the institution may have helped him to perceive. One attractive avenue for the revitalization of academic careers is interdisciplinarity: encouraging faculty members to join forces on projects that span two or more of the traditional disciplines. Many of society's current problems are rooted in more than one academic discipline. Energy and pollution are two that have strong chemical components, hut that also involve economics, sociology, psychology and political science. By crossing the traditional academic boundaries with interdisciplinary courses and research projects, faculty memhers can gain new stimulation from colleagues with whom they would otherwise never interact. This might result in a redirection or broadening of their own scholarly interests, and at the same time make the institution's teaching and research more responsive to society's changing needs. Even more radical career changes might he nurtured by a professional development program. Opportunities might be provided, for example, for faculty members to get a taste of administration, or of something entirely non-academic, such as by spending a period of time in industry. Here are some of the kinds of personal and professional development programs that are in existence: Orientation programs for new faculty Interdisciplinary studies programs Sabbatical leaves for learning a new field
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Internshipsor leaves to work in industry or government Exchange ~ , fa~ulty f between in
