Faculty Meetings Research Articles

More Than a Summer Job

More Than a Summer Job

School Mindfulness and Faculty Trust: Necessary Conditions for Each Other?

Background: The paradox of relying on routines and standard practices, which protect institutional functioning from the vagaries of personality, often comes at the cost of thoughtful adaptability. Purpose: The objectives are to conceptualize and apply the construct of mindfulness to schools and to explore trust as a school condition that fosters mindful actions. Setting: A diverse sample of 75 middle schools was selected for study. Participants: Twenty-six hundred teachers responded to survey instruments in 75 schools. Research Design: An ex post facto test of a theoretical set of hypotheses was performed. Data Collection and Analysis: Data were collected by researchers in regular faculty meetings and assessed using correlational, regression, and factor analyses. Findings: Faculty trust and school mindfulness seemed necessary conditions for each other. Conclusions: Mindfulness is a concept every school administrator should understand and practice, and a culture of trust seems necessary to achieve both the ends of understanding and practice. Principals need to lead in mindful ways. By encouraging faculty to play with ideas, to create novelty in their classrooms, to feel safe to take reasonable risks, to experiment, and to be resilient, the principal can have profound effects on school mindfulness.

American Studies in Romania

American Studies at the University of Bucharest The idea of teaching American Studies and founding a program in American Studies was first voiced in the long meetings of faculty and students held at the University of Bucharest soon after the collapse of the communist regime. The proposal was one of many that reflected the spirit of reform and hope for radical changes at the outset of Romania’s transition to democracy. The absence of institutional structures other than English departments and ...

The roles of collective efficacy of teachers and fiscal efficiency in student achievement

PurposePublic schools in the USA face increased pressures for more accountability and improved performance. The objective of this study was to wed two previously separated theoretical strands of educational research – economic theory and organizational theory – by using variables from each theory base to develop, compare, and test a series of explanatory models of student achievement.Design/methodology/approachA diverse set of schools was provided by 146 elementary schools in Ohio. Teachers in sample schools provided data on the collective efficacy of their schools and the Ohio Department of Education supplied demographic and achievement data. An ex post facto design was used to test a theoretical set of hypotheses and several structural models. Data were collected from the teachers in each school during regularly scheduled faculty meetings and analyzed using correlation analysis and structural equation modeling.FindingsCollective efficacy of teachers in these elementary schools had a positive direct effect on student reading and mathematics achievement, even when controlling for SES and prior achievement; however, school efficiency was unrelated to both collective efficacy of teachers and student achievement.Originality/valueThis study weds two previously separated theoretical strands of educational research – economic theory and organizational theory – by using variables from each theory base to develop, compare, and test a series of explanatory models of student achievement.

Developing a Sustainable Faculty Mentoring Program

Objectives. To develop a sustainable formal faculty mentoring program to support professional development of new faculty members at the Massachusetts College of Pharmacy and Health Sciences. Methods. Program components included a mentorship subcommittee, faculty mentoring guidelines, protege/mentor pairs, an orientation, seminars/workshops, and meetings between mentor/proteges pairs. Preparticipation and postparticipation questionnaires about the faculty mentoring program were used to assess changes in perceived level of abilities of proteges and mentors in areas of teaching, service, and scholarship. Results. After 5 years, 93 proteges and 73 mentors have participated in the faculty mentoring program. Program evaluations were largely positive. Self-perceived abilities of proteges increased in all areas addressed, program self-study, faculty recruitment, grant application preparation, program development, and promotion process. Perceived abilities of mentors also showed some increases following the facult...

The Burden of Teaching Teachers: Memoirs of Race Discourse in Teacher Education

This paper presents the views and educational experiences of two African American female scholars, from a critical race and black feminist theorist perspective, teaching in the area of social justice to predominantly white female pre-service teachers. These testimonies reveal the struggles encountered by these scholars when engaging students in a historical and contemporary examination of race, privilege, and systemic inequalities. The objectives of this paper are to expand on the literary dialogue of such resistance and attempt to bring awareness into the arenas that need the most exposure, i.e. departmental, faculty, and tenure review meetings. It is commonly written and verbalized that institutions are interested in attracting and retaining faculty of color. We argue that the ways we are supported must shift. This problem of student resistance, who they resist and why, should become open for discussion on college campuses across the nation.

Electronic Governance: Locals and Cosmopolitans “In and As” a Virtual Academic Community

This investigation revisits Robert Merton’s concepts of “locals” and “cosmopolitans” with respect to academic organizations. It explores the normative structure of electronic governance by analyzing the discourse of a virtual bulletin board. Data from a sample of faculty at a large state university are analyzed to conduct a semi-ethnographic exploratory analysis of the professional role structure and organizational consequences of a virtual academic community. A traditional organizational model used for understanding the public administration of higher education is one of bifurcated governance. In the context of this model, faculty and administration may have separate and conflicting interests. To negotiate and articulate competing interests, members of each constituency organize a formal forum of civil dialogue to initiate and resolve disputes (e.g., faculty meetings; unionized groups such as the American Association of University Professors). Two diverse professional role orientations emerge for airing concerns—locals and cosmopolitans. Formal interactions seem to be a mainstay and vehicle for cosmopolitan interests; locals, who rely more typically on informal discourse, have not found ample outlets for communication. The advent of e-bulletin boards has made possible a virtual community distinguished by norms for both formal and informal discourse, allowing for the clear identification of local and cosmopolitan interests and their competing agenda. The virtual context of discourse was expected to blur the distinctions between locals and cosmopolitans; because of the medium, institutional and local goals become aligned and apparent as opposed to discrepant and inaccessible. But in fact, electronic governance that seems to encourage coalition in the approach to solving tasks makes the demarcation more pronounced, whereupon conflict ensues and the localism and cosmopolitanism professional role structure persists.

The nature of revolution

O n February 26, 1968 Louis Hartz made a presemation on "The Nature of Revolution'" to the Senate Foreign Relations Commit tee chaired by William Fulbright. When N. Gordon Levin brought the existence of this document to my attention, it immediately stirred vague memories; I can recall Hartz talking a bit about his Washington, D.C. appearance, and it even seems to me that I can remember an expression of distaste on Hartz's face as he described something of what he felt about his encounter with Senator Karl Murldt, a right-wing member of the committee. I regret to say that nobody I knew at Harvard, at least in the Government Department, would have been much impressed one way or the other by Hartz's testifying before Fulbright's committee. In those days it seemed an unspoken matter that Hartz was one of our outstandingly brilliant faculty members; although it had at the time been somewhat surprising when Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. left the History Department to join President Kennedy's administration, by 1968 so many Harvard faculty melnbers had regularly taken part in high public matters that a Senate committee hearing was bound to seem like small potatoes. For McGeorge Bundy to have gone to be a White Ilouse assistant was a noteworthy political event; later Henry Kissinger would also depart from the Harvard Government Department for high public position; neither of these actions could possibly be compared to the significance of Hartz's going before Fulbright's committee. And yet, as one thinks back over it now, the fact of Harlz's testimony was in its own way extraordinary. I can think of no other example of a prominent political theorist being asked by Senators for his or her viewpoint: Hannah Arendt's own On Revolution had appeared in 1963, but it was a sign of Hartz's standing by 1968 that it was he who was to appear. The originality of his presentation, a characteristic part of Hartz's general thinking, held the attention of the Senators who participated in the session. The series of statements Fulbright solicited on The Nature of Revolution, from someone like Crane Brinton as well as Hartz, must also have been an aspect of the apparent political futility of Fulbright's position. By then the Vietnam War seemed to some of us a hopeless morass, although nobody I knew ever anticipated the extent of the widening of the conflict in Southeast Asia that eventually took place, or how many years it would be before the American military presence was formally withdrawn. Less than a month before Hartz's appearance the Tct Offensive had broken out on January 30, 1968. Almost simultaneously with his testimony Generals Westmoreland and Wheeler were pressing for President Johnson to agree to send another 206,000 men to Vietnam. Immediately afterwards the Senate Foreign Relations Committee moved into high gear, and many answers were demanded from Secretary of State Dean Rusk. The New Hampshire Democratic primary took place on March 12, 1968; and on March 31 Lyndon Johnson withdrew his name from the presidential race. These were times of high political drama, and Hartz's talk has to be put in its context. I do not know much about Hartz's practical politics; I talked with him in the midst of the Cuban missile crisis, but normally I would not have thought of exchanging comments with him about the Vietnam War. That was an exceptionally painful period, and another member of the Department had stopped speaking with me essentially because of our differences over the war. I do not think I ever thought Hartz could be "in favor" of it, and he never spoke at any of the later critical faculty meetings; I do remember him being eloquent in behalf of conciliation, or at least non-exacerbation of tensions, in the midst of a departmental discussion of a confrontation with students, Hartz was, however, as much a part of the establishment as Fulbright himself, and I would not have expected any irreverence fiom him about public officialdom. For several years I, like others, had simply assumed that an entirely different course of action than Johnson had been pursuing was completely within the practical powers of the Presidency, and that our job was a problem of rational persuasion; the level of frustration among those of us who were relatively conservative opponents of the war could be terrible.

Quality improvement: A truly interdisciplinary approach

Patient satisfaction surveys are distributed monthly in the Blood and Marrow Transplantation Clinic at our center. The results of these surveys led the clinic management team to identify the following problems: clinic wait times, missed appointments, unanswered telephones, and unanswered voice mail messages. Process improvement teams had been identified to work through the problem list using the “plan, do, check, act” methodology. Progress was discussed at the weekly operations meeting attended by managers and updates were provided at faculty meetings.

Meetings with Costly Participation: An Empirical Analysis

We analyse a firm’s decision to participate in public meetings which determine regulation. Using data from the Mid-Atlantic surf clam and ocean quahog fishery, we find that firms with a preference for extreme policies are much more likely to participate in public meetings than firms with a preference for moderate policies. We also find that participation rates are higher for larger, closer, and more influential firms. These results are of interest for several reasons. Voluntary meetings with costly participation are ubiquitous as an institution for resource allocation. Examples include: faculty meetings, parent teacher association meetings, and condominium association meetings. Moreover, the requirement that regulators allow and encourage public participation is an almost universal feature of the U.S. regulatory process. 1 Yet, despite their importance, meetings with costly participation are little studied, and basic questions about them are unanswered: Who goes? Does participation vary with observable characteristics? Do meeting participants represent the interested population? Our analysis of the Mid-Atlantic clam fishery answers these questions: large, nearby extremists participate in meetings with costly participation. It is clear that these findings improve our understanding of voluntary participation in costly meetings, and hence of most regulatory decisions taken in the U.S. However, they also suggest 1. The Administrative Procedure Act requires that all U.S. federal regulatory agencies “shall give interested persons an opportunity to participate in the rule making through submission of written data, views, or arguments with or without the opportunity for oral presentation” (Title 5 U.S. Code Section 553(c), 1988 edition). In Corrosion Proof Fittings v. Environmental Protection Agency (1991) the Supreme Court showed its willingness to require that public opinion be adequately consulted. (In this case, the court vacated proposed regulation because the Environmental Protection Agency prematurely ended public hearings and deprived the public of sufficient opportunity to “comment [on], analyse, and influence the [regulatory] proceedings”. In this case public participation is mandated by the Toxic Substances Control Act rather than the Administrative Procedure Act.)

Clifford V. Heer

Clifford V. Heer

Remembering Laurence Veysey (1933-2004)

Larry Veysey was my colleague and friend at the University of California at Santa Cruz (UCSC) for almost twenty years. We shared a common fascination with Utopias past and present; we talked often; and we taught several graduate seminars together. Though Larry never aspired to be anyone's mentor, I learned much from him about intellectual history. He was a complex individual—a difficult and at times infuriating colleague but also a loyal and generous friend and a person of extraordinary intelligence and at times alarming bluntness. In faculty meetings he never failed to speak his mind, and he could rarely resist baiting and provoking colleagues with whom he disagreed. But he also remained a tireless, fair-minded, and thoroughly conscientious participant in search committees, for which he compiled detailed, carefully nuanced evaluations of the leading candidates, often with grades attached. He also graded sunsets arid dinners. He appeared to be intransigent and set in his ways, but he believed in change and relished risk-taking. He loved to walk near the edge of the cliff, pushing and testing himself.

Conflict as interactional accomplishment in Japanese: Arguments in university faculty meetings

Through an analysis of arguments in two different sets of university faculty meetings, this article attempts to demonstrate that episodes of conflict in Japanese can be treated as accomplishments at a local, interactional level. The analysis focuses on turn-taking organizations used by faculty member participants in two meetings to show how talk in one set of meetings was designed to facilitate the onset of arguments, while talk in the other set was constructed to discourage participants from exchanging statements of opposition; and that the organization of talk in the meetings, precisely because it either enabled or constrained the occurrence of arguments, was essential to the institutional work being accomplished by participants. Discussion of the analysis focuses on the tendency in research on Japanese discourse to treat conflict as an inherently disruptive phenomenon that needs to be accounted for in terms preestablished concepts such as harmony and social hierarchy.I want to express my appreciation to two anonymous reviewers for detailed comments and criticisms that were of tremendous help in revising this article. I also would like to thank Jack Bilmes, Dina R. Yoshimi, Jane Hill, and Yumiko Ohara for their valuable suggestions. In addition, I want to acknowledge the assistance of Takehiro Goto, Masaaki Hattori, Dai Kamimaru, and Toshiki Sato in gathering and transcribing the data. I alone am responsible for any errors which may remain.

Faculty Meeting

Faculty Meeting

Building a Global Health Program at the University of Pittsburgh Graduate School of Public Health

This is a report of our experience over the past year in developing our program in global health at the University of Pittsburgh Graduate School of Public Health. Key steps have included an analysis of our needs and strengths, recruitment of interested faculty from existing departments, strategic meetings of faculty, formation of a vision for a Center for Global Health, design of an introductory cross-disciplinary course taught by faculty from departments in Public Health and other programs at the University of Pittsburgh, and recruitment of a recognized leader in global health to direct the program. Although we have had some successes, the process is still at an early stage. Because of this, our case may be instructive to other schools beginning similar programs.

University of Nebraska College of Medicine.

University of Nebraska College of Medicine.

To be different from or to be different than in present-day American English?

The present paper discusses the use of the prepositions after different in present-day spoken American English, using the Corpus of Spoken Professional American-English [sic] (CSPAE), which includes transcriptions of conversations recorded between 1994 and 1998. As the corpus consists of four different professional settings (i.e. press conferences held at the White House and other locations, faculty meetings of the University of North Carolina, national meetings on mathematics tests, and national meetings on reading tests), it provides useful data for stylistic analyses. It is also useful for gender analyses of English, since it provides some personal data for most speakers and indicates whether they are male or female.

Professional organisation profile: The Australasian Faculty of Travel Medicine

A review of the recent foundation by The Australasian College of Tropical Medicine of the Australasian Faculty of Travel Medicine is presented. Information is given on aims, professional grades of membership, and the various activities of the Faculty, including publications and scientific meetings.

A Model for Assessment-Driven Professional Development

The standards movement has created a sense of urgency in school districts, Mr. Kelleher states, and this has made effective professional development more important than ever. He offers readers a six-stage model of a professional development cycle that can help clarify the connections between learning and student learning. WITH THE increasing expectations for students, manifested through statewide standardized tests in nearly every state and the development of curriculum frameworks throughout the country, a heightened interest in both spending for professional development and the effect of learning on student learning has emerged. In addition to these shifts in focus, current research is redefining our notion of professional development. Traditional professional development activities, such as teacher workshops and faculty meetings with guest speakers, have been criticized as adult pull-out programs.1 These activities, which may or may not be connected to a particular school or district goal and often have no follow-up, tend to amount to a series of disjointed experiences that do not necessarily have any observable effect on education. Often there is little connection between the diverse workshops and speakers that are made available to teachers throughout a school year. To make matters worse, teachers have insufficient time and skills to be able to develop new teaching strategies based solely on what they have learned from conference sessions or other sources. Dynamic speakers and interesting workshops may have some value, but schools and school districts must help educators translate their learning into instructional practices and student learning. Professional development is not just about what teachers want to know. Consider, for example, a teacher who might want to expand her knowledge of cooperative learning techniques. While her goal is valid, it becomes relevant only when it is seen in a larger context, one that is focused on student learning, driven by data, and nested within school-level and districtwide goals. In this context, there is an explicit connection between this teacher's learning and the results for students. Current research on professional development, which has shown that professional development must be embedded in teachers' daily work to improve student learning, has led school boards and administrators across the country to evaluate the results of their investment in learning. The standards movement, along with the push to increase the use of data in educational decision making, has intensified the pressure on school administrators to prove that professional development is showing positive results. How do we measure our investment in professional development? It is no longer sufficient to ask teachers what they thought of a particular workshop session or guest speaker. The issue is not the educators' happiness quotient -- how satisfied teachers are with a particular workshop -- but rather what effect professional development will have on student learning.2 And there is no easy way to measure what programs or pursuits will lead to changes in student learning. Once in a while a fascinating speaker or a stimulating conference, like a good documentary, is a good thing. Consider, for example, the Teachers As Scholars (TAS) programs that have emerged at universities across the country. These programs are designed to feed teachers' intellectual souls through seminars offered as professional development days at universities. The TAS programs are not always directly tied to student learning, yet the initial research has shown that teachers feel renewed after the experience and have been able to incorporate new ideas into their instructional practices.3 The TAS programs are helpful and interesting, yet they are add-ons rather than the primary thrust of professional development in those districts that have access to them. This example raises an important point. …

Middle School Climate Examined and Altered by Teacher-Directed Intervention Assessed through Qualitative and Quantitative Methodologies

A program of research designed to assess the climate of academically-excelling middle schools is described. Two approaches not previously used in such research have shown promise, namely, 1) the application of mixed (qualitative and quantitative) analytic methods and 2) the involvement of the middle school teachers as co-researchers.Many identical dimensions of school climate were identified by the quantitative and qualitative approaches applied separately. However, important aspects of school climate emerged from interviews and faculty meetings (qualitative data) that were not identified in quantitative questionnaires. Similarly, climate issues that were not highlighted in the qualitative data emerged from questionnaires. The integrated data yielded a picture of the climate in each school that was more complex than that which would have emerged from the application of only one of the analytic methods. This finding strongly indicates that unique dimensions of a school’s climate may be missed and the level of its complexity may be underestimated if qualitative and quantitative methods are applied separately.A set of climate-related issues was assembled for each school and utilized by teacher co-researchers to design interventions that were targeted at climate issues particularly salient to their middle school and that could be directed solely by them.We conclude that the complexity of middle school climate is best examined via a mixed methodology combining qualitative and quantitative approaches and that the development of potentially climate-enriching interventions would have been less responsive to teachers’ concerns and would have less teacher acceptance, if the teacher co-researchers had been provided with only quantitative or only qualitative data.