Department Chairs as Change Agents: A Virtual Cross-Institutional Professional Development Model for Chairs
Date
2024-06-14
Authors
Peterson, Stephanie
Johnson, Carrie Ann
Bilen-Green, Canan
Koretsky, Carla
Minerick, Adrienne
Kremer, Gul Okudan
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Springer
Abstract
Department chairs are crucial in impacting departmental climate, conveying expectations, and providing merit assessments. Therefore, they have the most influence in retaining highly qualified faculty. Most department chairs come from the faculty ranks and lack formal training in key management, communication, and administrative skills, including performance reviews, resource allocation and budgeting, legal and compliance issues, promotion and tenure determinations, conflict resolution, and the inclusive management of people with diverse identities. Recognizing the critical role of department chairs and the evident gap in their training, we developed a series of chair workshops to provide ongoing professional development for department chairs across multiple semesters. These workshops were designed as part of a multi-university collaboration funded by the National Science Foundation to create more inclusive environments in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) units. However, the offerings were expanded to include all units on all campuses. This paper outlines our approach to developing these professional development workshops and describes the workshop designs and how we incorporated participant feedback. Additionally, we offer suggestions for others designing and implementing chair professional development workshops together with areas for future advancements in chair professional development.
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Comments
This article is published as Cervato, C., Peterson, S., Johnson, C.A. et al. Department Chairs as Change Agents: A Virtual Cross-Institutional Professional Development Model for Chairs. Innov High Educ (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10755-024-09714-8. Copyright 2024 The Authors.
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This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/ licenses/by/4.0/.