The purpose of an academic advisory board is to provide feedback and recommendations to college representatives for an identified academic program or grouping of programs. It is a mechanism through which academic program representatives, typically faculty and program coordinators and/or department chairs, maintain consistent connection with…

The author, department chair over Communication, Humanities, and Reading at a large Northeast Ohio community college, shares her school's experience with adopting Open Education Resources (OER), which are openly licensed and free resources. This endeavor took a strong team effort and the curriculum has been reviewed to be stronger than ever. The…

For organisations to thrive, their employees need to be trained and developed. The training must be specific and targeted to the benefit of both the individual employee and the organisation they serve. The training and development can be for the development of the individual which will directly benefit the organisation. In reverse, whole…

In this chapter, we extend the conventional expectations of midlevel academic leadership to include emotional labor. To do so, we draw on examples salient to academic department chairs, who are the ultimate example of midlevel leaders: sitting between senior-level leaders and a cadre of disciplinary- and departmentally-based peers. After defining…

In this paper, I highlight several facets of personnel issues that can arise during one's time as a mathematics department chair and recommend communication strategies to address them. The strategies involve situations with individual faculty members, general communication with faculty, and communication with the administration.

This article takes the author's personal experience of being a Head of Department (HOD) in an English University, and frames this experience as a transition narrative. The format draws on the work of Sandra Acker, who framed her own experience as a Head of Department in Canada, in three areas. Utilising literature both on Higher Education…

This chapter reviews discourses about "senior" and retired faculty. These discourses suggest a deficit or burden-based view that shapes the values and practices of faculty and department chairs. Yet retired faculty can be valuable resources and help with teaching, service, and research. A process for changing departmental views to create…

Both of us were drawn into the writing assessment field initially through our lived experiences as schoolteachers. We worked in radically different contexts -- Martin was head of a languages department and teacher of French and German in the late 1990s in the UK, and David was a Grade 12 teacher of Academic English in Alberta, Canada, at the turn…

We present an outline for a year-long training session for potential departmental leaders. This outline is based on training led by the author over one academic year. The training consists of nine sessions with an emphasis on active learning among the participants.

Sociology faculty are accountable to multiple stakeholders to demonstrate that our academic programs are effective and that students are learning. Despite the ubiquity of mandated program review practices, which often include the assessment of student learning, research is lacking on the extent to which these efforts lead to improvements in…

Many colleges and universities recently piloted and adopted the co-requisite model of delivery of developmental mathematics while offering more options for students to fulfill their mathematics requirement. We discuss our process for piloting and ultimately implementing the co-requisite model at our university, provide preliminary data on student…

In this article, we contribute to dialogue about the capstone for most doctoral programs: the dissertation. More specifically, we explore the mentorship between doctoral student and chair and assert that using a nontraditional dissertation format affords more fulfilling relationships for the mentee and mentor. Having recently completed…

The evolution from new faculty to department chair, through tenure and promotion, has been widely studied, yielding ideas for success. The move from department chair back to faculty status is less studied, with fewer insights in the literature. This article offers a brief review of literature related to becoming and stepping down from the role of…

After serving multiple terms as department chair at a small, liberal arts college, we have had the opportunity to develop some insights in a variety of circumstances. Through these experiences, we have formulated some advice for current and future unit leaders. We have included some general transition advice and a "top ten list" of…

The authors report on substantial evidence documenting what matters in literacy teacher preparation and invite deans, department heads, program directors, literacy teacher educators, and literacy leaders to design programs that are supported by credible evidence of impact.