Ball State’s newly hired tenure-track faculty will be required to attend training to develop their teaching skills beginning in fall 2015.
Each new tenure-track faculty member will participate for the first semester in workshops about twice a week.
“Ball State has had a tradition of a strong teaching faculty,” said Michael O'Hara, associate dean of the College of Fine Arts. “The faculty here are all scholars but also excellent teachers, and to balance those activities there needs to be a strong support system so that people can feel empowered to be excellent scholars and excellent teachers.”
The tenured faculty will only be allowed to teach two classes for the semester in order to focus on their instructing. After the first semester, they will be given the opportunity teach more than two, depending on the area of discipline.
About 15 years ago, Ball State started the First Year Faculty program that was a voluntary training resource for new faculty. It lasted for about five years before a change in leadership decided there was no longer a need for the program.
Tenured English professor Patrick Collier has taught English composition at Ball State since 2000.
“I had experience teaching English composition, but I had almost no experience teaching literature," Collier said. "I think I really would have benefited from a program like this."
He said when he began at Ball State, he did not feel prepared and would have liked something more for his job discipline.
“Not knowing all the details and a lot about how this program is going to work, I will say that people come into their first job as professors with a wide variety of levels of experience of training in the classroom,” Collier said. “It’s not uncommon to become assistant professor with little or no training having to teach.”
Marilyn Buck, associate provost and dean to Ball State, said this new opportunity will be beneficial to not only the faculty, but students as well.
“They’ll be taught, so to speak, in a way that we hope they teach their own students,” Buck said.
Being in an interactive learning setting will guide new tenure faculty to learn how to plan their own classroom setting accordingly. Regardless of discipline, all new tenured faculty will engage in activities together in hopes of learning from not just people in their department, but others around Ball State as well.
The Faculty Academy has stemmed from institutions such as Harvard and Northwestern University who have implemented similar programs. However, Harvard requires an orientation of the newly hired for an entire academic year without teaching, and Northwestern requires just the first semester orientation without teaching on their behalf.
Ball State has created a task force with faculty from each college on campus. They have since outlined a plan and incorporated what should be taught to the newly hired tenure.
Some of these representatives will continue along in the process of the Faculty Academy, while others will not. Those a part of the team will direct each session with a lesson of their own as the program takes off. Buck said new tenures will also be required to do homework of their own based upon the lessons each week.
“I look at this piece and go ‘students, we obviously are serious about making sure you get the best possible instruction, and we are going to take some people out of the classroom to make sure that we help them to be the very best teachers they possibly can be and give them the extra support,'” Buck said.
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