|
|
|
|
"HELPING NEW ENGINEERING FACULTY MEMBERS
GET THEIR CAREERS OFF TO A GOOD START"
Rebecca Brent
President, Education Designs, Inc.
Cary, North Carolina
Richard M. Felder
Hoechst Celanese Professor Emeritus of Chemical
Engineering
North Carolina State University
|
|
|
Brain surgeons,
electricians, accountants, chemical engineers, and members of all
other skilled professions, have one thing in common: they all
received training before they were allowed to practice
professionally.
All but one
skilled profession, that is—being a college faculty member. Graduate
school prepares future faculty members to work on research projects
someone else defined; however, it generally does not prepare most of
them to plan research independently, get it funded, recruit good
graduate students in competition with more experienced colleagues,
set up a lab, build a research team, publish in top journals, plan
courses, design and deliver effective instruction, make up good
assignments and tests, and deal with dozens of research, teaching, and
time management crises that routinely occur in the lives of all
faculty members.
People are not
born knowing all those things, and trial-and-error is not an
efficient way to learn them. The work of Robert Boice has shown that
most new faculty members take four to five years to become as
productive in research and effective in teaching as they need to be
to meet their institutions’ standards. About 5%, however (“quick
starters”) do it in one to two years. Boice has also shown that the
95% make mistakes that limit their productivity and effectiveness and
that the mistakes are avoidable. With the proper guidance, new
faculty members can be turned into quick starters.
This webinar
briefly outlines measures that engineering deans, department heads,
and senior faculty members can take to help new engineering faculty
members reach quick-starter status, and points to on-line resources
that provide details on the design and implementation of the
measures.
|
|
|
Dr. Richard Mark
Felder is Hoechst Celanese
Professor Emeritus of Chemical Engineering at North Carolina State
University, Raleigh, North Carolina. He is a coauthor of Elementary
Principles of Chemical Processes (4th edition, Wiley, 2015), which since 1978 has been
used as the introductory chemical engineering text by roughly 90% of
American universities and a number of universities elsewhere, and he
has authored or coauthored four book chapters, over 150 education-related
papers and over 100 “Random
Thoughts” columns, and
numerous papers on chemical process engineering. Together with his
wife and colleague, Dr.
Rebecca Brent, he
coauthored Teaching
and Learning STEM: A Practical Guide (Jossey-Bass, 2016), presented over 600 teaching
and faculty development workshops and seminars throughout the United States and abroad,
and regularly contributes to their blog.
Dr. Rebecca
Brent is President of
Education Designs, Inc., a consulting firm in Cary, North Carolina.
Her areas of expertise are faculty development in engineering and the
sciences, evaluation of educational programs at both precollege and
college levels, and classroom uses of instructional technology. Dr.
Brent has published a book,
book chapters and articles on effective teaching and faculty development in
higher education, mentoring and supporting new faculty members,
classroom applications of technology in K-12 and college, peer review
of teaching, and a variety of topics in teacher education, and she
has been a program evaluator for numerous large-scale education-related
projects.
|
|
|
|
|
