Facilitating Mid-career Faculty Programs: A Guide for Supporting Purposeful Career Development

This resource-rich guidebook supports faculty developers through the process of planning, facilitating, and assessing programs for mid-career faculty.

Framing chapters draw from existing scholarship, national surveys, and the authors’ pilot program to prepare faculty developers to launch their own initiatives. The heart of the book details program modules, including their focus (e.g., identifying values, envisioning a meaningful career, claiming agency, advocating for oneself, planning to thrive), instructions for preparing and facilitating a workshop and a faculty learning community, and facilitator reflection questions. Resisting the message that faculty developers should do more, this book eases their workload by providing evidence-based resources that allow for flexibility and creativity.

This guidance, supplemented by ready-to-use online materials, equips facilitators to lead their mid-career faculty participants through critical self-reflection, meaningful conversations, and practical activities to plan for their own version of thriving.

Diane E. Boyd is the Executive Director and Associate Dean of Faculty Development at Furman University, USA. She researches Threshold Concepts in the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning, course design for educational equity, and increasing agency and vitality via values-infused mid-career programming.

Nancy L. Chick is Director of Faculty Development at Rollins College, USA. After becoming Full Professor of English in Wisconsin, she shifted her focus to the scholarship of teaching and learning (SoTL) and has authored and edited many publications on the results of SoTL projects and on the field of SoTL itself.

With Contributions From:

Linda M. Boland is a Professor of Biology and formerly served as Associate Provost for Faculty at the University of Richmond where she was also the founding director of a faculty development center for teaching and scholarship. Her research, with undergraduate student mentees, focuses on neural excitability.

Eriberto “Fuji” Lozada is Senior Associate Dean of the Faculty and Professor of Anthropology at Davidson College in Davidson, NC. He brings his disciplinary training as an anthropologist to bear on his extensive faculty development and teaching and learning.

Katherine A. Troyer is the Director of The Collaborative for Learning and Teaching at Trinity University in San Antonio, Texas. Her bookshelves (which place SoTL books next to horror scholarship) reveal her interest in how spoken and unspoken fears―whether in a horror film or in the classroom―shape thoughts and ideas.