Faculty/Professional Developer Information

What the TFS Faculty Success Center Can Do for You

The goal of the TFS Faculty Success Center is to help you reach your faculty with a comprehensive and wide range set of success resources. We want to provide you and your institution high-impact teaching improvement resources. I only feel successful when TFS resources play an effective role in creating a culture and passion for teaching improvement for your faculty. I'm most pleased when I hear from faculty developers like yourself that TFS has made their hectic, under funded, and difficult job a bit easier.

TFS is especially suited for those faculty with little or no experience teaching in higher education i.e. part-time, adjunct and novice full-time faculty. If you are to choose TFS membership, I know TFS must be affordable, practical, and effective. It must provide teaching improvement ideas, strategies, concepts, and recommendations that make sense and are straightforward for faculty to learn and master.

Why?Would I devote a career to creating and publishing faculty development resources? Well, I have been there and started teaching as an adjunct faculty and subsequently a full-time faculty and department chair. I know how it is to be terribly excited and a bit bewildered by the reality of what teaching entails and demands. As a new hire, my students suffered from my naivety, inexperience and poor judgment. Finally, after a couple of tough years using trial and error development, I started to get the hang of it.

Later on in my career serving as a department chair, I started to wonder if their wasn't a better, faster, more engaging and even fun way to learn the ins and outs of college teaching. This goes double for busy adjuncts and part-timers.

I assert that everything can be improved and teaching is no exception. In fact, with the every more insistent calls for accountability in education, improvement, make that continuous improvement, is a crucial outcome of faculty development that works.

TFS asks, "How can adjuncts and part-time faculty become inspired and empowered to improve their teaching, given their busy and regularly changing schedules and suboptimal levels of support and nurturing?"

From a perspective of more than 30 years of working on a "best" solution to this question, TFS has developed a unique perspective and understanding of what is lacking and how to proceed to facilitate an effective answer.

TFS is working continuously on refining a set of Critical Factors of Teaching Success based on many years of study and practice in the field of training and development, in classroom teaching and through knowledge gained from ASTD and T&D graduate courses at the University of Illinois. A simplified concept of faculty development has come from our work analyzing the duties, tasks, knowledge and skills inherent in successful adjunct and part-time teaching. We also assert that these same components are useful and important for new and inexperienced full-time faculty to master.

The Six Critical Factors of Successful Teaching

Why do faculty need a success program?

• Being a student does not qualify a person to be a teacher.
• Earning a degree is not enough preparation to teach for success.
• Poorly prepared faculty lower retention and student satisfaction.
• Part-time faculty numbers are growing and their influence on the success of their institution is growing every year. See Stanley Fish, "The Last Professor" NY Times.
• As budgets tighten travel costs, speaker costs, and event costs may become prohibitive as a faculty development strategy.
• Reaching faculty with inspiring, motivational, and effective development ideas is a very difficult and time consuming task for administration and staff.
• Many faculty, especially part-time and adjunct faculty feel neglected and not a part of the institution.
• Instructors moving to online courses desperately need mentoring to ensure quality in these courses.

When You Join TFS You Will LIkely:

• Save Valuable Time in developing in-house programs.
• Conserve Your Resources with a more flexible, comprehensive, and effective success program.
• Prevent Dilution of Your Efforts away from crucial teaching improvement goals
• Fire Up Your faculty with the TFS Adventure Win-Win Teaching Concepts.
• Help You Have More Time to deal with special local issues.
• Be Used to Recognize and Appreciate faculty, especially part-time and adjunct faculty for their contribution to the institution's success — provide them with TFS.

TFS Brings Your Faculty Ideas that are:

• Success focused.
• Developed from 15 year of higher education teaching.
• Chosen from experience mentoring substantial numbers of part-time faculty as a department chair.
• Not found in other traditional approaches to helping faculty succeed.

Teaching For Success FSC Believes:

Faculty Can Improve Results when they understand the Critical Success Factors of highly effective teaching and the success mindset characteristics required for increasing performance in the teaching field whether part-time or full-time.

Why is a mention of mindset important? David A. Sousa, How the Brain Learns, identifies the self-concept to play a pivotal role in how people learn. It's a central concept in his brain-research based Information Processing model.

He says, "The self-concept often determines how much attention the learner will give to new information…The self concept regulates the entire learning process."

He likens the effect on learning of the self concept to a set of blinds on a window that can open or close to the receiving, processing, and storing of new information.

This concept is the starting point of the Teaching For Success®, Win-Win Teaching with Impact, faculty development program -- opening the blinds to teaching and learning improvement.

The teaching self-concept is built and maintained by tussling with the Six Critical Success Factors of Highly Effective Teaching, a solid foundation in causal success principles, strategies, and laws and a steady input of practical teaching application ideas from teachers successfully facing and

Teaching For Success® has studied, gathered and organized information on how to build and maintain a positive teaching self-concept from a wide variety of sources over the past 22 years.

Basically, teacher success comes down to knowing the cause and effect relationships that operate in the field of teaching and learning that you are working to obtain outstanding results.

The Six Critical Factors of Teaching Improvement

At the heart of the TFS program is the Journal of Critical Success Factor Teaching Improvement. This bimonthly e-journal. teaches faculty the success factors and skills and the mindset they need to adequately meet the needs of today's learners and reach the desired learning outcomes.

1. Leadership
   
2. Management
3. Instruction (Optimum Sequence) PIE-R3: Preparation, Input, Engagement, Retention, Reconfirmation, Reflection
4. Content and Context Analysis (Tweaking the day-to-day activities to fit your specific students needs.)
5. Communication
6. Evaluation and Testing

What Is Highly Effective Teaching Development Worth?

The Future of Your College or University May Depend Teaching Your Faculty about CSFs and Success Mindset Characteristics of Highly Effective Instructors

TFS Develops Faculty to Reach Outcomes and Solve Problems

The All New Teaching For Success 4.0, Highly Effective Teaching Idea E-Journal

Not Sure What an E-Journal Is?

*An E-Journal is an online magazine, periodical that you can read, study and interact with online or print a paper copy of just the information you need or the entire issue.

It features pop-up notes, hot links to supporting URLs and active fields to enter personal comments and ideas.

Beautiful and practical, the all new Teaching For Success, Critical Success Factor Teaching Improvement E-Journal can save your faculty hours and hours of trial-and-error learning-on-the job and keeping your inexperienced faculty from making many embarrassing beginner mistakes.

TFS is Designed to:

• Boost instructor satisfaction with their teaching experiences.
• Increase retention through better more engaged teaching and learning.
• Positively impact student satisfaction by helping faculty understand the Six Critical Success Roles of win-win teaching.
• Solve instructional problems.
• Reach desired learning outcomes.
• Build a "Success Mindset" that motivates faculty to dig in and work for better results.
• Create a library of improvement ideas for each faculty.
• Invite faculty to relax and learn new teaching approaches.
• Involve and engage all faculty in teaching betterment.
• Recognize that teaching is challenging and provide practical help.
• Include all faculty and make them feel appreciated.

What Do Faculty Say?

TFS helped new teacher David Borges, DC become a successful adjunct instructor at a community college. Here is what he says about TFS with the bonus action section:

"I like TFS best because it has a larger variety of articles and has a much easier format to apply the information. Your efforts have made TFS much easier for adjunct faculty to implement the outstanding teaching strategies you provide.

It is one thing to provide great information; the next level up is making it easy to implement. TFS has accomplished both!"

~David Borges DC, South Lake Tahoe, CA; adjunct faculty, Lake Tahoe Community College, CA

"Thanks for the energy and positivity that your publication [TFS] brings to collegiate teaching."

~Dee Duis, Faculty, Davenport University

The Faculty Participation Problem

One of the most vexing challenges facing most faculty developers is "How to invite, encourage, and just plain get faculty participation?" in a faculty development program.

Teaching For Success has taken a proactive stance to help faculty developers and administrators solve this thorny problem.

Clarification

A couple of points are needed to clarify how unique TFS is when it comes to creating workable solutions.

First, the materials given to faculty in our opinion must be aesthetically pleasing and inviting, the documents should be well organized and written to attract faculty. Most faculty in our experience do not want lengthy hard-to-read and difficult-to-understand research-style prose.

Second, faculty, particularly adjunct and part-time faculty, thrive on practical information about teaching and teaching improvement. They need the big picture and the fine details explained.

And faculty need very much to be engaged while reading. This need is fulfilled very well by the TFS E-Journal development approach unique to Teaching For Success, by a free additional document provided with each issue.

The best solution to date is the "TFS Issue Content Summary" free document.

Do you remember how as a kid you may have scanned the Reader's Digest front page for interesting topics? This simple cover addition that made article so accessible and intriguing helped Reader's Digest to become hugely popular in its day.

Following this principle, Teaching For Success creates a special Issue Content Summary teaser document so that college and university members can use this summary to e-mail to faculty. With this information, a faculty member could tell within several seconds which ideas are of interest.

The free Issue Content Summary can be used to internally market the value of Teaching For Success to faculty. This is a free service provided only by TFS. Members are licensed to copy and paste or deconstruct this list and use the in formation as needed.

Is it effective?

Scan the summary below as if you were a faculty member and see if any of the topics grab your attention enough for you to want to read more about it in the full issue. If one or more topics does this, then you can see that it would be an effective way to capture faculty interest.

• The unique TFS Unlimited Use Site License that accompanies each subscription makes it easy to distribute, house, copy, and print your TFS issues as needed from your own computer system.
• No need for your faculty to remember complicated logins to access their issues.
• You can distribute TFS with no access codes, URLs or login procedures needed.

As an institutional member your faculty will receive six electronic success issues per year of an idea rich, easy to read packed with insider's tips to becoming a highly effective instructional pro.

Generous Use Rights Included

Pentronics Publishing makes it very easy to distribute TFS electronic issues to your faculty. Our Unlimited Site License provides the rights to make unlimited copies, unlimited distribution, unlimited file duplications and even the right to export articles for use in your own publications.

The knowledge you gain from TFS will help you in the hiring process. Your faculty will be better able to answer important and often asked questions about fundamental teaching approaches. They will know what to do and not to do in their traditional or online classes.

What Developers and Administrators Say

There are some very good pieces in this issue. The student evaluation / test construction stuff is particularly valuable to our adjunct faculty. Many of them teach at the college level and evaluate the students at a high school level…not intentionally, but there is more to good student evaluation than those new to teaching expect."

"So nice to hear from you again!  Yes, Baker College would like to subscribe to receive Teaching for Success once again.  We will need the multi campus subscription.  The look of the publication is great!"

"Teaching for Success is especially helpful to our adjunct faculty. Most are employed at full-time day jobs and have difficulty attending our scheduled training. They can pick up TFS when they check their mail. I've heard from many of them saying how helpful TFS has been."

"I surveyed our faculty about whether we should continue subscribing. The response was so positive that we have continued our subscription. Our faculty indicate that they really appreciate the information from TFS as they can immediately put it to work in their classrooms."

"TFS Spectrum is full of practical ideas and strategies that instructors can implement immediately."

Supporting Relationships

TFS and Jack H. Shrawder, publisher are members of:

• The American Association of Community Colleges
• The POD Network, Professional and Organizational Development Network in Higher Education
• NCSPOD, The North American Council for Staff, Program and Organizational Development
• ASTD, American Society of Training and Development

Credentials

Jack H. Shrawder, publisher

• Fourteen years full-time, two- and four-year college and university teaching experience
• transitioned from industry to education and started teaching as an adjunct faculty
• M. Ed Vocational Education, University Illinois
• Two years doctorate level study in Training and Development
• Twenty years of publishing, writing, study, and mentoring experience in teaching improvement
• Founded Pentronics Publishing in 1988 with the mission to help faculty learn how to improve their teaching and achieve learning outcomes more rapidly and easily.
• California Community College, Instructor and Supervisor Credential

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TFS Partner Authors pen easy to understand tips and recommendations that can help your faculty improve their classroom teaching and make the transition to online teaching smoother and easier

• Dr. Andrei Aleinikov, Defense Language Institute Foreign Language Center and International Academy of Genius, Monterey, California
• Mr. Dave Bequette, Adjunct Faculty, Butte College, California
• Ms. Vicki Brooks, Adjunct Faculty, Columbia College, Missouri
• Dr. Francine Armenth-Brothers, Heartland Community College, Normal, Illinois
• Ms. Lynette G. Esposito, Adjunct Professor, Burlington County College, New Jersey
• Ms. Judy Grigg Hansen, College of Southern Idaho, Idaho
• Ms. Angela Payne, Assistant Professor of Office Administration, Southwest Community College, Memphis, Tennessee
• Mr. Ted Rachofsky, Austin Community College, Austin, Texas
• Ms. Kay Rooff-Steffen, department coordinator of humanities at Eastern Iowa Community College District, Muscatine campus, Iowa
• Dr. Howard Rosenthal, Saint Louis Community College, Missouri
• Dr. Brian R. Shmaefsky, Lone Star College – Kingwood, Texas
• Ms. Barbara J. Weiner, M.S., MT(ASCP, FL BCLP), CLS(NCA) TFS Partner Editor, DL and Web Design, Florida
• Mr. Stuart Tichenor, Oklahoma State University-Okmulgee, Oklahoma
• Mr. John Reich, Genesee Community College, New York

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The Top Six General FAQs

1. Aren't journals old fashioned and a relic of the preinternet boom?

No, not by a long shot. There are thousands of niche publications in various e-periodical formats similar to TFS that serve professionals with need-to-know information cheaply and effectively. Let's face it, with the speed of change today, unless we are constantly learning and applying new growth-enhancing information, we are slipping backward and becoming obsolete.

The need to set and reach desirable personal and professional goals is with us now more than ever. The news is so negative today from every point on the media compass that reading a positive success building resources like TFS is like taking a cool, calming deep breath of fresh air in the midst the choking, superheated, polluted air of a summer heat wave.

Top professionals use e-journals and other media materials as a way to keep up and keep growing. Why not see what TFS can do for your part-time and adjunct faculty who are hungry for success guidance.

2. What about teaching online classes? What can TFS do for these instructors?

We dedicate approximately 1/3 of each issues space to ideas and tips for online instructors. We recognize that more and more adjuncts are being trained or asked to teach online. TFS can help keep the innovative online teaching improvement process going full speed at your college.

Since many instructors need skills in teaching both traditional and online courses TFS provides an outstanding mix of information. And while the teaching context changes with online delivery the principles and processes by which students learn does not change. So many teaching improvement ideas found in TFS apply to many teaching venues.

3. OK I'm interested in providing my faculty with your terrific e-journal; how do I get it?

Teaching For Success (e-journal) is only available with an Annual Institutional Membership. You can join and download available issues right now if you like. In addition to subscribing to TFS, members receive an Unlimited Use license to copy, distribute, and print TFS issues as needed within their institution.

4. Are there membership levels for different institutions?

No. There is only one membership fee for all institutions—$595 until June 30, 2010. Regular Membership Price: $995.

This includes a full site license for unlimited duplication, distribution and printing of any of the issues in the volume year. The volume year begins on January 1. A Two-year Membership option has just been added. See "Membership"

5. Do you offer additional teaching improvement resources with membership?

Yes, over a whole library of resources see the membership information page for more details on what exactly is included with your institutional membership.

6. I'm looking for resources for my California community college's FLEX Professional Development program; would TFS work in this context?

You bet it would! Providing TFS for your faculty would allow them to create a FLEX program where they will use TFS issues ideas to improve their teaching, keep a journal of their experimentation and share what they found to work best with other faculty.

This a practical, meaningful and outcome oriented FLEX activity that pays big dividends to the college or university who becomes a TFS member.