[vc_row content_placement=”top”][vc_column width=”2/3″]
Blog Posts
Both Sides, Now: Creating a Culture of UDL
In a 1969 song, Joni Mitchell tells us of how she’s looked at life from “Both Sides, Now.” That is sage advice for considering how Universal Design for Learning (UDL) can benefit students when faculty and administration examine their hopes (and fears) for creating a new learning experience. At two recent...
Coaching: Developing Your Faculty One Conversation at a Time
Coaching is a relationship frequently leveraged in the business sector but is not a well-established paradigm in higher education. Academics, however, can benefit just as much from a coaching approach, and the field is beginning to gain traction for training academic leaders (Robison & Gray, 2017). This article defines coaching,...
One Change That Increases Student Persistence, Retention, and Satisfaction
The president and the provost were talking about their biggest challenge: retention. Between students’ freshman and sophomore years, the college was losing almost 40 percent of its students. For many students, the causes were well documented: time and money. The college’s “average student” was no longer an eighteen-year-old white male...
How to Lead Successful Strategic Initiatives
In late 2015 I sent my provost a short email (one evening after a couple glasses of wine, to be honest) expressing frustration with our byzantine general education program and asking why we couldn’t have a radically simpler, more streamlined, comprehensible design. A few short months later I found myself...
Recruiting Subject Matter Experts for Curriculum and Course Design: Three Nonmonetary Strategies
For many institutions, attracting quality subject matter experts (SMEs) for curriculum and course design is challenging under the best circumstances. Budgetary constraints often compel institutions to pursue nonmonetary recruitment strategies. Furthermore, money is not always the deciding factor in an SME’s choice of opportunities. Successful, passionate practitioners have many options...
Lessons for Engaging and Retaining BIPOC Students
How do we attract historically underrepresented groups of students to our institutions—that is, first-generation college students; Black, Indigenous, and other students of color; and students from low-income backgrounds? How do we best serve them at our institutions? How do we retain them and support them to persist and graduate? Academia,...
Providing Leadership and Support to Professionally Develop Adjunct Faculty
Adjunct faculty may be the most overused and under-resourced groups of individuals in higher education. Many departments and courses would not function, or at least not function well, without adjunct faculty. Yet despite being in many cases essential members of a department, adjuncts receive modest pay, typically by the course...
Seven Key Questions for Improving Communication with Your Dean
Being a department head is one of the hardest jobs on campus. Representing both the unit and the administration can be a real balancing act, and your most vital partner in this complex role is likely to be your dean. New department heads may never have worked closely with the...
