打牌 庄家:教职申请注意事项

Planning for Tenure

What does a tenure plan do?

A tenure plan sets up your goals in teaching and research, as well as service. There are key questions that underlie such a plan:

• Do you view yourself as a teacher-scholar or scholar-teacher?
• In what ways does your research make a contribution to your field? To regional and national conversations?
• How are you going to create a sustained, continually developing research agenda?
• What goals do you have as a researcher/scholar? As a teacher?
• How do your teaching and research inform one another?
• How do you plan to demonstrate your teaching effectiveness?

Initial steps to create your tenure plan

1. In the fall, we will provide you with a tenure timeline document. If you lose this document or need clarification, May Matsumoto in the Faculty Federation Office can help you. 

2. Each tenure-track faculty member should access a copy of his/her department's standards document. By now, every department should have a "standards" document for tenure and promotion. This document outlines the expectations for each pre-tenure faculty member. 

3. After reviewing your department's standards document, map out a plan for how you think you might achieve the expectations listed there for research and creative activity.

Suggestions for developing your research agenda

• Set publication deadlines and goals. Sounds like common sense doesn't it? However, we don't all do it, and you all know how busy we can get with teaching, advising, committee work, and our family lives. Set yourself up a goal for each academic year. For example, maybe you want to send out 2 articles per year for review.

• Present your work at 2 conferences per year. Focus on national conferences, as well as established regional conferences. International conferences are useful as well. Use these two conferences to develop the two articles you want to send out for the year.  

• Note: Remember that conferences are great places to network, as are the professional associations to which you belong. Keep in mind that you will need 3-4 external review letters for your tenure file. It's smart to network and get an idea of who is out there you can use for a reviewer. Also, remember that your external reviewers shouldn't be your dissertation director or a former professor. Your external reviewers should be active in their fields and able to assess your scholarly work and contributions. They could be someone you have served with on a conference panel or someone you have worked with a few times. 

• Don't depend solely on a book project. Developing and sending out articles for review is good practice and keeps you active in the larger conversations in your field. 

• Write each week. Really. Plan time for writing. Writing and research only happen if we specifically set time aside for it. Don't give this time up; develop a rhythm and stick with it. 

• Do not develop your research agenda around semesters or summer breaks. Instead, think about the most effective times for gathering data and getting the writing done. Gear your projects around key conferences you are presenting at. Even when you are too busy to write, you could be reading the literature for an article, gathering or analyzing data, and generally laying the ground work so that when time frees up, you are ready to begin writing immediately. 

• Develop an editing group or a colleague who will review your work. We work best when we have constructive feedback about our work. Feedback also helps us complete projects more efficiently. 

• Make sure you always have something under review. As we all know, the review process at journals is getting longer and longer, especially as there are fewer journals to submit work to. If you have a few articles written, you can keep them out under review and something will finally be a "go."

• Connect your teaching to your research. For example, teach a course in an area that you are researching and writing about for your own work. Or, bring in a book that will work for your class that you need to cover for a project. Engage students in the research questions you have. Some of our best ideas can develop from the interactions we have with our students in the classroom.

• Get on listservs that announce conferences and publication opportunities. Keep an eye out for topics that fit with your research agenda, especially the calls for articles for book chapters or special journal issues. These projects tend to be reviewed more quickly and also go to press faster.

• Establish boundaries for teaching. It's easy to get caught up in teaching projects and developing your classes. Make sure that your teaching doesn't keep you from steady writing and research time. You should be writing and reading for your research development each week.

• Save copies of everything! It's a good idea to get a binder and the plastic sheet covers. Each time you present at a conference, put a copy in your binder. When an article is published, photocopy the published print version and put it in your binder. When it comes time to put your dossier together, much of your work will be done.

• When you publish an article, write a short paragraph in a document about how the article represents your work and how it contributes to the conversations taking place in your field. This paragraph can become part of the tenure narrative that you will have to write. 

• Pursue grant opportunities. Locate grants in your field that will help you engage in your research agenda. Plan ahead for these grants. For example, if you know a grant application is due 6 months from now, write the grant, get feedback from colleagues, revise the grant application, and then have it ready to send out. Don't forget that any grant needs to be approved by your chair and the college dean, which means you need to have the grant to them at least 4 weeks before the grant deadline. 
  
• Seek peer review. Ask tenured members of your department to visit your classes. These visits shouldn't always be planned in advance. Reviews are more objective when someone drops by your class unannounced. You want reviewers to know that you don't have to specially plan for review and that your class is always prepared, organized, and active.  
• Develop and solicit various forms of review. For example:
  • Have a tenured colleague evaluate your syllabus. Such a review can demonstrate your focus on clear learning objectives for the course, a sense of how the course fits into the larger departmental curricula goals, and how well you organize and know your course material. 
  • Have a tenured colleague evaluate your formative and summative feedback on student papers. Save copies of graded student work, block out the names, and have the work and your comments reviewed. 
  • Have a tenured colleague evaluate your course Web site if you use one for your face-to-face classes. Your goal is for the review to demonstrate how technology enhances your classroom and helps you achieve the course learning objectives.
  • Have a colleague in your field from off campus evaluate your syllabus. This type of review could focus on how your course is current in its subject matter and addresses key learning objectives for your field.
• Hold onto copies of student work. How do you do this? First, you need to request permission from your students if you can use their work as examples in your file. It's best to get this permission in writing (a simple permission form will suffice). Then, you can include representative examples of student work that demonstrate, for example, how your assignments help students achieve the learning objectives of your course. Or you could write a reflective piece for your dossier in the teaching section about how you saw student work develop over a full semester. This reflective statement could analyze how your teaching practices contributed to student learning. 
• Write a brief paragraph at the end of the semester about each course you taught. What worked? What didn't work? What might you do differently in the future and why? What assignments will you hold onto and why? This brief paragraph can help develop the teaching section of your dossier. It may also become the substance of your tenure narrative in the future. The key is to reflect upon each course when it's still fresh in your mind.
• Actively engage in ideas about teaching in your field. Read articles about teaching. Use these articles not just to develop your teaching practices, but to create reflective writing pieces about how your teaching practices fit into the teaching practices that are most respected in your field. Demonstrating your reflective practices is central to being a thoughtful, continually developing teacher. Here are some useful articles and web links for you to start with:  
  • "The Scholarship of Teaching" by Eileen Bender and Donald Gray. This brief article defines the scholarship of teaching and its significance for us.
  • "What is Reflective Practice?" an article by Joy Amulya at MIT's Center for Reflective Community Practice
  • "Approaching the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning" an article by Pat Hutchings that examines what the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning is and the questions scholar-teachers ask. 
  • The Gallery of Teaching and Learning from the Carnegie Foundation. A great site that lets you see what other teachers are doing in their classrooms with innovative teaching practices. 
  • Visible Knowledge Project from the work of Randy Bass and Georgetown University. This site examines technology and learning and the ways in which we can use technology to enhance learning.
• Develop a teaching portfolio. These portfolios offer a substantive look at your teaching practices and effectiveness. As Ken Bain points out, teaching portfolios are a "scholarly case—evidence and conclusions that answers questions" about your practices (168).  Teaching portfolios, according to Bain, help you address the following questions, among others: "What have you tried to help and encourage students to learn? Why are those learning objectives worth achieving for the course you are teaching? What strategies did you use? Were those strategies effective in helping students learn? Why or why not?" (168). Most importantly, answering these questions requires more than simply gathering material and giving it to someone else to review. You take an active role in considering your pedagogy—in other words, you become a reflective teacher. 
• Explain to students that the end-of-the-semester evaluation is important and why. Not all students know that these evaluations have to do with contract renewals and tenure. Also, ask for constructive feedback in the comment areas of your evaluations. What do students think you can do differently and why? Students often have great ideas about how to improve our teaching practices.
• Don't just count numbers in your student evaluations. Read your student evaluations closely to identify common threads. Do students routinely comment on your availability? The ways in which you foster student learning? The achievement of course objectives? The development of their critical thinking and writing?
• Save unsolicited emails from your students that provide insight into their learning or what they are doing after they graduate. 
• Pursue grant opportunities for teaching projects. Locate grants in your field that will help you engage in the scholarship of teaching. Just as you do with a research grant, plan ahead. Don't forget that you need both your chair's and dean's approvals. 
• Finally, remember that assessment is central to your courses. Here's a great link to a site at Southern Illinois University that offers numerous assessment ideas for your classes: