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Pre-conference Workshops

1. Conflict Management: Mending the Cracks in the Ivory Tower, presented by Walter Gmelch; Monday, February 9
2. The Academic Portfolio: A Successful New Way to Document Teaching, Research, and Service, presented by Peter Seldin; Monday, February 9
3. Department Chair Strategies in Promoting a Collegial Department, presented by Robert Cipriano; Tuesday, February 10
4. Department Chair Leadership in Good Times and Bad, presented by Donald Chu; Tuesday, February 10
5. Standing on the Precipice: Strategies for Chair Success and Survival, presented by Al Seagren, Ed Kinley, Linda Wysong Becker, and Daniel Wheeler; Tuesday, February 10

Monday, February 9

1. Conflict Management: Mending the Cracks in the Ivory Tower

Walter Gmelch

1. Recognize the nature and causes of conflict in your department
2. Identify key interpersonal conflict skills and explore effective response options
3. Practice the art of strategic conflict resolution.

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2. The Academic Portfolio: A Successful, New Way to Document Teaching, Research, and Service

Peter Seldin

An important change is taking place in higher education. Faculty are being held accountable – as never before – for how well they do their jobs. The traditional approach to evaluating and developing their performance has been to focus on the “what,” but not on the “why.” Thoughtful reflection, significance, and context were not built into the system.

But these failings limit the understanding of the full range of a professor's work in teaching, research/scholarship, and service. Evaluators and faculty developers might understand a professor's teaching philosophy and methodology if they did a teaching portfolio. But they wouldn't easily understand the nature of the professor's research, the significance of selected publications, the context of their work, their most noteworthy accomplishments and goals.

And they likely wouldn't know how a professor's teaching, research, and service are integrated to form a cohesive whole or how they fit with the institutional or department mission.

The best way to get at the individuality and complexity of faculty work is the academic portfolio. It may prove to be the most innovative and promising faculty evaluation and development technique in years.

What is it? The portfolio is a 16-18 page gathering of documents and materials highlighting a professor's performance and suggesting its scope and quality. It's based on deep reflection and provides context and significance. The portfolio template used is the result of extensive research by the presenter. More than 200 faculty members and department chairs from across disciplines and institutions provided specific suggestions and recommendations. The result is a comprehensive template that can easily be adapted to individual faculty and department needs.

The academic portfolio concept has gone well beyond the point of theoretical possibility. Today, it is being adopted or pilot-tested by an increasing number of institutions. Significantly, they are institutions of every size, shape, and mission.

This highly interactive session will describe the what, why, and how to develop an academic portfolio. It will discuss the critical role played by department chairs as they assist individual faculty to develop their portfolios. It will provide proven advice for getting started, discuss red-flag dangers, and benchmarks for success.

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Tuesday, February 10

3. Department Chair Strategies in Promoting a Collegial Department

Robert Cipriano

The first part of the morning workshop will focus on the chair's role in fostering a desired collegial environment in their department. Strategies will be explored that can be used to hire and tenure competent – and collegial – faculty. The afternoon session will investigate ways in which the department chair's role as a leader can be used to facilitate a civil and collegial department. Chairs have the responsibility of assessing their colleagues' skills in myriad areas, including some subjective benchmarks – “works well with colleagues” and “demonstrates good academic citizenship” come to mind. Department chairs should be one of a variety of constituencies in the academy that work collaboratively to rein in a toxic, uncivil person. Strategies will be articulated to aid the chair in enlisting faculty members, deans and provosts, members of the Collective Bargaining Unit (if appropriate) and members of the Faculty Senate in harnessing the venom of a curmudgeon. Approaches will be examined that facilitate departments that invite free expression, exploration and inquiry, and are enthusiastic, collaborative, and exciting. Objective differences will be probed between good departments and the more difficult departments (i.e., deadening, depressing, toxic, and isolated). In this interactive workshop, the attendees will actively participate in problem-solving activities regarding the topic of collegiality within a department. The following questions will be explored using experiential and hands-on case studies/scenarios: How do we operationally define collegiality? Can we develop guidelines to foster collegiality without discouraging productive dissent? Are there proven methods to assess collegial behavior in the interviewing and selection of new faculty members as well as in the faculty evaluation process? What have the United States courts ruled concerning the role of collegiality in tenure, promotion, and termination decisions? What exactly is the chair's role in fostering civility/collegiality in the department? Can “lack of civility/collegiality” be used as a basis to terminate a full-time faculty member? What are the academic policy implications of what the courts have ruled regarding collegiality – in terms of selecting, hiring, training, and evaluating faculty?

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4. Department Chair Leadership in Good Times and Bad

Donald Chu

We don't hear chairs say very often “I have too much!” More often it's the opposite: “I don't have what I need!” The reality of higher education is that there will be times of scarcity as well as plenty. During bountiful economic periods, when the greatest problems involve the distribution of resources, how do we determine the best places to invest in positions and operations? When times are tight, as they are in most parts of American higher education today, how do we stay true to our mission while paying the bills? In this workshop, participants will learn to identify the assets they have to help them get through times when resources are scarce on campus. They will develop the tools to negotiate the environment that challenges them. Who are the key players? What can chairs do to help key decision makers do as much as they can to help their departments? During the tough days, what can chairs do to position their departments to weather storms and prepare for sunnier days ahead? In this interactive workshop, participants will be provided conceptual frameworks to help them appreciate their department's position on campus. What are the sources of influence that affect what chairs can do? They will then be guided through exercises to help them understand their campus organizations, resources, expenditures, personnel, course schedules, and other factors critical in times of financial change. Through this workshop, chairs will learn the tools necessary to help them navigate their way through the difficult financial currents buffeting departments today.

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5. Standing on the Precipice: Strategies for Chair Success and Survival

Al Seagren, Ed Kinley, Linda Wysong Becker, and Daniel Wheeler

This interactive workshop will be focused on The Second Edition of the Academic Chair's Handbook, published by Jossey-Bass, (Anker Resources for Department Chairs) in 2008. The book is written in the voice of 238 chairs on 94 campuses and reflects over 100 strategies used to deal with the issues of Vision and Direction, Developing a Positive Culture, Accountability, Resources, and Faculty.

The research based on interviews with practicing chairs “confirmed that, for example, the day to day challenges associated with chairing academic departments have not changed so much as intensified. The chair's challenge is of providing effective leadership for their department during a time of enormous change in higher education. What we discovered through our interviews is both how aware department chairs are of the major forces that are at play in their environment and how resourceful they are in devising practical strategies for dealing with the changing conditions within which faculty work and students learn.”

The workshop will open with an overview of the Four Dimensions of the book:

1. Be sensitive to the developmental growth of people and the organization
2. Understand the departmental, institution, and disciplinary context in which this growth occurs
3. Acknowledge that building is a process
4. Recognize that chairs make a difference

After the initial overview, chairs will use a checklist from the book to provide a framework to review departmental issues. Strategies, both immediate and long-term, related to seven main aspects will be examined and discussed. Those issues are:

• Institutional/Departmental Context and Leadership Role of Chairs
• Building as a Process
• Create a Positive Interpersonal Work Environment
• Developing a Collective Vision and Dealing with Change
• Adapt to Funding and Resource Challenges
• Help New Faculty Become Oriented
• Improving Faculty Teaching

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