On average, it takes three submissions before a faculty member will get their proposal for funding accepted by a grant agency. To complicate matters, the reviews that accompany the rejection are often complex and contradictory, so it can be difficult to know how to move forward – especially when many faculty get little help interpreting reviews. As such, many faculty members, especially junior faculty, simply give up on the proposal too soon and do not put effort into revising and resubmitting it. When this happens, important research may be left undone, the institution cannot meet its strategic goal of growing research, and faculty find it difficult to publish in top journals and stay on track for promotion and tenure. Join our expert instructor to learn how to review and analyze your declined grant proposals with a fresh perspective – one that will give you confidence in how to best move forward with your declined proposal, as well as all future proposals. Our expert will guide you through the process that will teach you how to: Objectively assess your individual reviews Identify patterns and uncover the most critical feedback Anticipate hidden weaknesses Identify both the root causes and underlying conditions preventing an award Develop a plan for resubmission If you’re looking to better understand the proposal review process and put yourself in reviewers’ shoes, this webcast is for you!
As a result of COVID-19, almost all the interactions you have with your students, alumni, colleagues, and donors are now through webcam in virtual meetings. Environmental factors such as poor lighting and background movement can become distractions and have implications on the level of engagement and potential for relationship building. Your body language and eye contact play an important role too as they can either facilitate meaningful communication or hinder it. Join us online for an interactive training where you will learn best practices for creating a professional and engaging persona during a video call. Our expert instructor will demonstrate simple tips and strategies for improving the quality of your physical surroundings and your presentation style during video calls. We will discuss how to: Place your laptop in the right position to maximize your lighting and appropriately frame yourself on screen Choose a background that does not offend or disturb others Reduce unnecessary movement to minimize distractions Maintain appropriate eye contact and body language that resonates with others online We have deliberately designed this training to go beyond the stock tips and strategies you’ll find online. You will have the opportunity to turn on your camera so that you can […]
Clarybel has over 20 years in higher education administration. She is an expert in setting strategy, leadership development, and implementation and administration of diversity and inclusion initiatives. She has designed and delivered trainings related to inclusion, unconscious bias, cultural competence, and microaggressions and has extensive experience in organizational culture and change management. In her current position at Duke University, Clarybel is responsible for volunteer engagement of over 16,000 alumni which includes creating and developing processes and procedures with the goal of improving efficiency and the overall experience. She focuses on recruitment and retention efforts that include coordinating strategy, identifying trends, and data analytics. She is responsible for curriculum development and integrating leadership development by facilitating onboarding initiatives, trainings, and opportunities for understanding organizational culture and history. She serves as the primary staff contact for our Board of Directors and is responsible for the development of the onboarding/offboarding experience. She also serves on the Awards and Recognition Committee and the Committee on Diversity and Inclusion and coordinates all high-level logistics for the three board meetings annually. Clarybel earned a Bachelor of Arts in Sociology from the Maxwell School of Citizenship at Syracuse University and also holds a Masters in Higher Education […]
Mike is an executive coach and higher education leader with a focus in group dynamics, interpersonal communication, leadership, and second career development. Three questions inspire Mike’s work as a coach: What brings you joy? What are you good at? What does the world need you to be? Mike’s professional career has taken him in many different directions, but always with the same focus, on helping others to grow, change, and become better. As a faith community leader, spiritual director, learning coach, academic counselor, and now as an Assistant Dean for Faculty and Student Success at the MGH IHP in Boston, Mike has developed and honed deep listening skills, asking questions that both challenge and inspire, and he knows how to accompany a client on their unique journey without imposing his own agenda or needs. He is especially skilled in dealing with grief, change of career, LGBTQ+ leaders, and crisis leadership. His own work as a faculty member enables him to understand the unique challenges of faculty who may be torn between the demands of scholarship, teaching, and service, while struggling to meet home and personal concerns. Mike’s educational background includes an MDiv with coursework in counseling, philosophy, and psychology, a […]
READ THE WHOLE SERIES:Developing a High-Performing and Productive Advising Department In the first two installments in the series, “Developing a High-Performing and Productive Advising Department,” I’ve discussed strategies for identifying, assessing, and meeting student, staff, and advisors’ needs. In this installment, I will discuss best practices to successfully implement some of the key strategies identified in this series by maximizing the use of technology through creative use of student information systems (ERPs). Understand Your Student Information System / ERP I encourage advising administrators to learn, in as much detail as possible, their student database system. While we commonly rely on experts in our IT departments or super users within our departments to provide us the data we need, advising administrators are the only ones who can effectively articulate the needs of their constituents to the programmers who are to retrieve data. When there is a gap between the end user (academic advising department) and the programmers (who may be experts in the use of software but know little about the needs of the advising department), data is often inaccurate and unusable. Understanding how to “speak the language” of the ERP system the institution uses allows advising administrator to creatively solve […]
Moving at-risk students out of academic probation quickly is a worthy challenge—and at Western Michigan University, two recent retention efforts at the Haworth College of Business (HCoB) have seen positive outcomes in this regard. Students who complete HCoB’s Phoenix Success Course as well as mandatory study hours in the University’s new award-winning Bronco Study Zone are retained at a rate of approximately 73%. Compared to students who do not participate in these two efforts, this rate represents a 32% increase in retention. HCoB is one of nine Colleges at Western Michigan University with an enrollment of approximately 3800 undergraduate students and 400 graduate students, and its success in these new initatives provides valuable clues for other institutions. Let’s take a closer look. 1. The Phoenix Student Success Program Launched in 2013, The Phoenix Program is a holistic student success and engagement program implemented to intercept a high dismissal rate for undergraduate students on academic probation, whereby approximately 59% of students on academic probation in HCoB were being dismissed at the end of their first probation semester. The program includes initiatives across several touchpoints throughout students’ academic careers. These initiatives include: One main component of the Phoenix Student Success Program is […]
Department chairs are busy people, and hiring and onboarding adjunct faculty is just one of many tasks on their plate (sometimes right before the start of a new semester). To make it easier, here is a checklist of essential information that chairs should share with new adjunct faculty when hiring them, including course syllabi, textbooks, learning outcomes, encouraged pedagogical approaches, grading philosophy, and where adjunct faculty can go on campus for other resources. by Teresa Focarile, Boise State University As a department chair you have a lot of responsibilities, and hiring and onboarding adjunct faculty is just one of them. Introducing these new instructors to their courses, as well as to department and university culture and resources, can be a big task, particularly if your institution does not have a robust new adjunct faculty orientation program. Adding to the challenge is the fact that adjunct faculty don’t all have the same level of experience in the classroom, or the same history with your institution, so it’s not always possible to have a one-size-fits-all process for getting them ready to teach. That said, there are a few key points that are important to cover in an orientation session that will be […]
Testing your campus’s crisis response plans frequently and rigorously is key to ensuring that you can protect campus resources and recover speedily following a crisis, and as of July 1, 2010, annual testing is mandated under the updated Clery Act. Nonetheless, annual testing represents a significant shift in practice for many institutions. Nearly a quarter of higher education administrators polled in an Academic Impressions survey in January 2010 reported their institutions had not tested their campus crisis response plan in over five years. Another 13% said their plans had not been tested within the past two years. “This finding indicates that a sizable subset of colleges and universities may be unaware of their crisis response plan’s actual ability to effectively address a modern campus emergency — a salient gamble in the wake of a series of high-profile campus crises.”Marla Whipple, Academic Impressions To help institutions that are preparing for annual testing of their emergency response plans, we turned to Hamilton College’s director of campus safety, Francis Manfredo, who shared with us lessons learned from his college’s recent drill. We also want to share strategies from Steve Charvat with the University of Washington, Cindy Lawson with the University of North Carolina Wilmington, and Eugene […]
At Winthrop, we had never undertaken true, multi-year athletic department strategic planning. Here’s what we learned when we transitioned from annual work plans to defining annual objectives. by Ken Halpin and L. Jeffrey Perez, Winthrop University Those of us in higher education are sick and tired of hearing we face an unprecedented set of challenges: fiscal restraints, demography, technology, and heightened competition, to name a few. Constantly confronted by these daunting circumstances we may be tempted to just get by – to manage for the next department review or board meeting. But institutions that don’t plan strategically over a number of years and instead adopt a hand-to-mouth approach to planning will face failure in its harshest terms. This is true not only for institutions as a whole but for divisions within the college or university — not the least of which are athletics departments, which face the same set of imperatives as the instiution itself. Athletic departments must maintain academic standards and provide life preparation to the student athletes, who are recruited as aggressively as any other prospects. They must provide for efficient and cost-effective operations, which are often dependent on fundraising and other sources of revenue. Athletic departments must maintain […]
Why, you might ask, should academic deans add this concern about students’ career preparation to their already unmanageably long list of responsibilities? As leaders of the faculty, deans need to serve as the programmatic agents of implementing a holistic undergraduate education. And deans provide the essential perspective of someone who observes the connections on a daily basis between how the university works and how students learn. Students best engage in their learning when they know how that learning fits into their lives. I do not mean to imply that students are selfish or myopic. Quite the opposite. Students implicitly, although naively, understand higher education as important to their whole lives. Our role as deans is to cross the bureaucratic barriers between academic and student services in order to teach students and how to apply these to growing personally and professionally. This has been a major focus of my work over the past 25 years as a department chair and academic dean: to connect academic learning with career development. Here are four practical strategies I have learned: four opportunities for academic deans to partner with career services: 1. Attend national career services and academic organizations with a cross-division team. Offer to attend local, regional or […]
