All too often in higher education, individuals move into a supervisory role without the necessary tools and skills to be successful. Particularly in today’s challenging environments, effective supervision is key to building an equally effective culture where each individual can contribute to team success.
American higher education includes over 4000 institutions of varying size, structure, and focus, with each serving an increasingly diverse and dwindling number of traditionally college-aged students. But there are still some commonalities in how institutions are governed, financed, organized, and assessed—not to mention the fact that institutions face similar enrollment and retention challenges across the board. This course is designed to give you a broad overview of the American higher education landscape. Our expert instructor, Dr. Kelly Wesener Michael, will walk you through the different types of institutions that exist, how these institutions are typically funded, who is involved in governing both public and private universities, and how institutions set and assess the effectiveness of their mission and goals. Accompanying the course is a workbook designed to help you gain familiarity with the processes and mission of your own institution—how governance works for you, what the demographics of your student body are, where your funding comes from, and how your institution does strategic planning. This course will be highly beneficial to anyone who is new to higher education, either in a first professional role or who is transitioning to higher education from another industry. Additionally, faculty or staff whose experience […]
In Academic Impressions’ 2021 survey of higher ed faculty, staff, and administrators to understand the state of professional development, 80% of respondents reported that more professional development would help them stay in their current role, and 51% of respondents reported experiencing clinical levels of burnout. So what’s the solution? What we found is that providing leadership support for professional development and fostering a culture of learning and growth can lead to greater job satisfaction and greater employee retention. Using the ACORN acronym, our expert instructor, Cié Gee, will walk you through a five-step model for supervision to help you learn to: Acknowledge Build Confidence Generate One on one connections Show Respect, and Meet your staff’s Needs
The success of higher education institutions depends on a successful and productive faculty body, the majority of whom are outside of the tenure track. Yet, most professional development for faculty targets traditional tenure-track faculty. Alternative academic (or “alt-ac”) faculty, like their tenured and tenure-track peers, are also seeking broader career development topics relevant to their career paths—and as the administrative body of higher ed institutions expands, so too do the options for career advancement for alternative academic faculty. This video course provides this necessary professional development for alt-ac faculty by helping them to assess and identify their strengths, clarify their values, and develop a plan for their career aspirations. This course is ideal for alt-ac faculty who are new to their role, considering a change, or interested in leadership opportunities. This course will also be useful to department chairs, associate deans, and faculty affairs leaders who create opportunities for alt-ac faculty and want to contribute to their success and well-being.
With the apprentice model of mentoring, a mentee is assigned one mentor, usually someone senior in the organization, to provide guidance in all aspects of their career. Although this is a powerful model that typically serves mentees well, this approach to mentoring does require intensive commitments of time and energy from both individuals. And mentors may not always have all of the expertise a mentee needs. As an alternative, however, the consultative approach to mentoring can be used to replace or supplement the more traditional apprentice model of mentoring. The consultative approach encourages mentees to identify those discrete skills and focused areas of support in which they need mentorship, and to then identify multiple mentors to specifically meet those needs. In addition to being flexible enough to support individuals throughout their careers, the consultative approach can help departments promote greater equity and inclusion by empowering everyone to share their expertise with one another. In this course, you’ll be introduced to the consultative approach to mentoring, you’ll be able to build your network of potential mentors, and you’ll gain valuable tools to help manage sticking points in mentorship relationships. This course is appropriate for all higher ed professionals, both at the […]
Mentoring relationships are key to helping you navigate and develop throughout your career. But maintaining those relationships, both as a mentor and as a mentee, can be a lot of work and can also present special challenges. Mentoring relationships suffer when mentors and mentees do not have a clear sense of expectations or goals (for instance, of when the relationship has run its course). This course will help you understand the purpose of a mentoring relationship, as well as how mentoring differs from other key relationships like those with advisors and sponsors. Additionally, you will learn how to impactfully set up and manage a mentoring relationship, from both the mentor and mentee perspectives, and how to handle roadblocks that arise through those relationships. The course is accompanied by a mentoring journal to help you plan your mentoring philosophy, goals and expectations and set boundaries with your mentor or mentee partner. This course is appropriate for mentors and mentees at all levels.
All too often in higher education, individuals move into a supervisory role without the necessary tools and skills to be successful. Particularly in today’s challenging environment, effective and proactive supervision is key to building a high-performing culture where each individual contributes to team success. This video course—specifically designed for higher ed supervisors who are new to their roles or looking to deepen their skills—is designed to provide a foundational understanding of the most critical aspects of supervision, including: Creating a vision framework for your team Performance management strategies How to navigate conflict in a productive way Effective coaching techniques to help you develop your direct reports After watching the course, you will leave with greater confidence about what effective supervision entails, along with a host of practical tools you can apply right away to better support individual, team, and organizational goals.
Despite engaging in regular self-care rituals like bubble baths, yoga retreats, and having drinks with friends, many of us feel constantly tired, stressed, and on the brink of burnout. It begs the question: are the self-care rituals we’re currently observing helping us or hurting us? Are we engaging in surface-level “socially acceptable” self-care practices, or are we truly thinking about what self-care means to us and how to integrate it intentionally into our everyday lives? Designed for higher ed professionals at all levels, this video course is designed to help you to reflect on and upgrade your current self-care practices. Through an examination of six pillars of self-care—nutrition, exercise, sleep, mindfulness, healthy relationships, and mental health—you will assess your current practice and identify ways to improve and integrate it more seamlessly into your everyday life.
There remains a common misconception in our society that resilience is the ability to keep going at all costs. We lead busy lives and push ourselves to the brink of exhaustion in service of “resilience.” But in actuality, true resilience is created when we are able to pause, recharge, and generate the optimism and belief in our abilities that we need to sustain long-term and lead happier, more fulfilling lives. This video course will teach you how to use self-advocacy and intentional reflection to enhance resiliency across key aspects of your personal and professional life. Higher-ed professionals at all levels who would like to improve the quality of their relationships with themselves, others, and the various projects and day-to-day tasks in their lives will benefit from this course.
Managing the more immediate demands of teaching and service while also staying on track with research and writing is a challenge for most faculty. But for many women STEM faculty, these challenges are often compounded by academic cultures of individualism and competition that result in sexism, academic bullying, and isolation in academic units that are insensitive to their unique needs and ways of working. In this course designed for early-career, women-identifying faculty in STEM fields at research universities, you will learn ways to better organize your academic life in order to foster focus and stay on track with your professional goals. This video course highlights a vision-driven approach for negotiating the challenges and pitfalls that often derail women STEM faculty during their early career. In this course, you will learn: How to craft and use a professional vision statement to set priorities and align your decision-making with your career goals; Strategies for identifying limiting beliefs, setting boundaries, and saying no; and How to build a support system in order to keep your professional goals front and center in your daily academic life. If you feel like you spend most of your time dealing with others’ “urgent” tasks to the detriment […]
