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Author: Colin Evan Williams Publisher: ISBN: Category : Languages : en Pages : 164
Book Description
Years of hiring practices have resulted in adjunct professors comprising the majority of college faculty (Gappa, Austin, & Trice, 2007; Schuster & Finkelstein, 2006). Today, adjunct faculty provide almost half of all instruction at the California community colleges (Student Success Initiative, 2018). It is essential to increase adjunct faculty participation in student success activities, such as Student Learning Outcomes (SLO) assessment. A large number of courses may not be taught as effectively if adjunct faculty do not assess SLOs (Danley-Scott & Topsett-Makin, 2013). This study sought to identify how adjunct faculty perceive their department cultures across the state. It also strived to understand what, if any, influence departmental cultures have on adjunct faculty contributing to SLO assessment. This mixed methods sequential explanatory study yielded findings emerged that indicate adjunct faculty at iii both sites primarily experience inclusive and learning cultures. Specific areas for improvement include communication, collaboration, and input in the design of curriculum and learning goals. Emergent findings included the role of the department chair as the progenitor and maintainer of a department's culture. Adjunct faculty were found to be driven primarily by a sense of service to students and refining the curriculum to serve transfer and career goals. Lack of communication and collaboration were found to have adverse effects on these intrinsic motivations. Departments and institutions seeking to transform cultures of compliance around student learning outcomes assessment into cultures of inquiry may do well to begin with communication, collaboration, and other low cost change strategies in order to cultivate inclusive and learning cultures that increase adjunct faculty participation in SLO assessment.
Author: Colin Evan Williams Publisher: ISBN: Category : Languages : en Pages : 164
Book Description
Years of hiring practices have resulted in adjunct professors comprising the majority of college faculty (Gappa, Austin, & Trice, 2007; Schuster & Finkelstein, 2006). Today, adjunct faculty provide almost half of all instruction at the California community colleges (Student Success Initiative, 2018). It is essential to increase adjunct faculty participation in student success activities, such as Student Learning Outcomes (SLO) assessment. A large number of courses may not be taught as effectively if adjunct faculty do not assess SLOs (Danley-Scott & Topsett-Makin, 2013). This study sought to identify how adjunct faculty perceive their department cultures across the state. It also strived to understand what, if any, influence departmental cultures have on adjunct faculty contributing to SLO assessment. This mixed methods sequential explanatory study yielded findings emerged that indicate adjunct faculty at iii both sites primarily experience inclusive and learning cultures. Specific areas for improvement include communication, collaboration, and input in the design of curriculum and learning goals. Emergent findings included the role of the department chair as the progenitor and maintainer of a department's culture. Adjunct faculty were found to be driven primarily by a sense of service to students and refining the curriculum to serve transfer and career goals. Lack of communication and collaboration were found to have adverse effects on these intrinsic motivations. Departments and institutions seeking to transform cultures of compliance around student learning outcomes assessment into cultures of inquiry may do well to begin with communication, collaboration, and other low cost change strategies in order to cultivate inclusive and learning cultures that increase adjunct faculty participation in SLO assessment.
Author: Lindsay Marie Armstrong Vance Publisher: ISBN: Category : Languages : en Pages : 203
Book Description
There is an emerging need to better understand how orientation practices and strategies affect a sense of belonging for new faculty members, especially the growing number of adjunct faculty hired at community colleges throughout the U.S. each year. Establishing an orientation process for newcomers helps to ensure that new members are better able to navigate uncertain occupational conditions, new cultural contexts, and new role expectations. For new adjunct faculty joining community colleges, a robust orientation process and effective self-directed orientation strategies may promote a greater sense of inclusion, role clarity, and alignment with institutional initiatives and practices. This multi-site embedded case study focused on defining specific orientation practices and strategies adopted by educational leaders and adjunct faculty members from English and math departments at two community colleges in Southern California. Through interviews with recently-hired adjunct faculty and educational leaders at the institutional and department level, as well as an analysis of orientation practices and documentation, the study makes explicit the ways that newcomers navigate new faculty roles at a given community college as well as the ways that educational leaders design orientation processes. The resulting case studies describe the organizational socialization process that newcomers at each department and institution undergo, as well as successful practices that span both institutions. Further, the study identifies prosocial activities that new adjunct faculty adopted to increase their personal sense of inclusion and orientation as new faculty members. Some of the most promising practices for educational leaders include establishing both formal and informal orientation activities, developing a communication strategy, and providing resources for new faculty members that promote social connection, leadership activities, and professional growth. Promising practices enacted by individual adjunct faculty members, which were found across sites and departments, included establishing a presence on campus, networking with staff and faculty, and adopting the mindset of established faculty members.
Author: Farrell Hoy Jenab Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield ISBN: 1475859090 Category : Education Languages : en Pages : 155
Book Description
Faculty Development: Creating a Collaborative Culture in Community Colleges addresses how faculty developers work with changes and challenges in teaching within the community college context. Using a multi-case study design based on semi-structured interviews, document analysis, focus groups and surveys, the book examines faculty development within six community college contexts. Three of these case studies, conducted before the Covid-19 pandemic, attended to how the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL) and Faculty Learning Communities (FLCs) were pillars for faculty development. The other three case studies feature the pivot that faculty developers and faculty made at their institutions in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. In these cases, it is seen how faculty development shifts from long-term, sustained initiatives such as SOTL and FLCs to just-in-time (JiT) faculty development, as well as virtual and collaborative faculty development. As teaching models continue to evolve and faculty development takes hold in community colleges, this book features the role of collaboration as an essential component of faculty development, as well as what supports exist within the community college context to provide faculty with continual professional development.
Author: Erin M. Nitschke Publisher: ISBN: 9781303910234 Category : Academic achievement Languages : en Pages : 106
Book Description
This qualitative case study examined the perceived benefits of academic assessment as seen by community college faculty members. This study further aimed to identify what methods of assessment faculty perceive as valuable in evaluating student learning and how faculty utilize assessment results to modify academic programming. Lastly, this study sought strategies that may facilitate the construction of a sustainable culture of evidence and learning by focusing on the benefits of assessment. The researcher selected ten faculty members employed at the organization to participate in the interview process. Participants were limited to full-time faculty members with at least five years teaching experience in adult and higher education. During data analysis, six emergent themes developed as follows: (1) assessment as a multi-level process, (2) alignment beginning at the course level, (3) reciprocal relationship between teaching and learning, (4) assessments of higher order thinking, (5) data usability, and (6) administration-faculty disconnect leading to a culture of compliance. While faculty in this study found assessment to be beneficial to improving teaching and learning, faculty also noted several specific challenges they perceived to be barriers in creating a sustainable culture of assessment at the organization. Strategies for building the organizational culture were outlined and recommendations for future research were made.
Author: Gregory F. Peterson Publisher: ISBN: Category : Languages : en Pages : 570
Book Description
In order to meet the educational and economic demands of the United States in the future, institutions of higher education must increase the number of students who persist to the completion of a certificate or degree program, especially low-income students and students of color (Carnivale and Desrochers, 2004). To increase the persistence and completion rates of these students at community colleges, national initiatives, such as the Achieving the Dream: Community Colleges Count initiative, have emphasized the importance of creating institutional environments in which planning and improvement efforts are data-driven (Achieving the Dream, 2005). This study explored the perceptions of faculty members, administrators, and staff directly involved in establishing this data-driven environment, also known as a "culture of evidence," and the extent to which those perceptions had disseminated through the larger college community. Through the use of a case study and focus groups using Interactive Qualitative Analysis (IQA) methods, the development of a "culture of evidence" at two Texas community colleges was examined as perceived by college constituents involved in its creation and by a group of college constituents indirectly influenced by their efforts. The emerging themes are discussed in their relation to promoting and maintaining a data-driven culture in the future.
Author: Colin Evan Williams
Author: Colin Evan Williams
Author: Lindsay Marie Armstrong Vance
Author: Helene Ikumi Sokugawa
Author: Farrell Hoy Jenab
Author: Erin M. Nitschke
Author: Kemah Eugene Paul Washington
Author: 
Author: Carol L. Moore
Author: Annette Letcher
Author: Gregory F. Peterson