Agile Faculty

Practical Strategies for Managing Research, Service, and Teaching

Rebecca Pope-Ruark

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9780226463292
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Digital tools have long been a transformative part of academia, enhancing the classroom and changing the way we teach. Yet there is a way that academia may be able to benefit more from the digital revolution: by adopting the project management techniques used by software developers.Agile work strategies are a staple of the software development world, developed out of the need to be flexible and responsive to fast-paced change at times when "business as usual" could not work. These techniques call for breaking projects into phases and short-term goals, managing assignments collectively, and tracking progress openly. Agile Faculty is a comprehensive roadmap for scholars who want to incorporate Agile practices into all aspects of their academic careers, be it research, service, or teaching. Rebecca Pope-Ruark covers the basic principles of Scrum, one of the most widely used models, and then through individual chapters shows how to apply that framework to everything from individual research to running faculty committees to overseeing student class work. Practical and forward-thinking, Agile Faculty will help readers not only manage their time and projects but also foster productivity, balance, and personal and professional growth.

1

Reimagining Paths to Faculty Vitality in Higher Education

A new faculty member at a selective liberal arts college looks for ways to balance teaching, research, and service requirements while adjusting to life at a rural land-grant institution after completing his PhD at an urban campus. In another department, a part-time, non-tenure-track faculty member enjoys teaching at two very different universities but continues a frustrating search for a permanent position in the area because his partner has a good, stable job locally.

A pre-tenure faculty member at a large research-extensive university works to manage a large lab, write grants to fund the lab, mentor graduate students, and keep up with her teaching load, which sometimes interferes with her family life. At the same institution, a tenured faculty member strives to juggle her two children and aging parents, while exploring the possibility of starting a new research agenda or moving into administration to fend off mid-career malaise.

A recently tenured computing sciences faculty member from an underrepresented group at a research-intensive college diligently integrates his time teaching two classes per semester with a new Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL) research agenda while fielding frequent requests to serve on diversity and inclusion committees and mentor minority students. At the same time, a faculty member at a community college with a heavy teaching and service load has many ideas for SoTL research in her classes but not enough time to write up the IRB proposal and conduct the studies.

Many things attract individual faculty members to the academic path, and perhaps like the monastic life it was originally patterned after, it appeals to a set of personal and professional values unique to those who choose it. Some are called to generate and contribute new knowledge for the betterment of society through research, others to support the next generation of our citizens through excellent teaching, and others yet to give service for the improvement of social structures and communities, while some to do all three with equal passion. These motivations reflect the ideal in American higher education of the “complete faculty member,” who is the ultimate teacher-scholar, highly productive in all areas of academic work (Fairweather, 2002, p. 28).

Faculty life can be complex, overwhelming, empowering, and dynamic. And faculty life is constantly changing; higher education is regularly transformed by the political, intellectual, and economic climate in which we live and work. As the media and government call for greater productivity, usually in terms of research output and credit hours taught, faculty agency to direct teaching, research, and service activities may seem more limited than autonomy-craving academics might like. As such, each faculty member introduced in the opening vignettes strives for that complete faculty member ideal while facing unique challenges and opportunities based on a number of factors: type of institution, type of appointment, career stage, gender, race, family situation, and personal commitment to teaching, research, and/or service.

Success in each of these environments will look very different as definitions of faculty agency and productivity continue to evolve in these contexts. Author Susan Robison (2013) argues that faculty often function more like entrepreneurs and, as such, make decision after decision every day about how to spend time, achieve goals, and meet self-imposed high standards of performance (pp. 3, 11). These daily micro-decisions can be overwhelming and potentially overshadow higher order professional goals. Higher education researcher Roger Baldwin (1990) found that “vital faculty,” those faculty who maintain engagement and passion over the course of a long career, have clearly articulated and concrete short-term and long-term goals that guide work in all aspects of their careers; they take more risks and actively look for professional growth opportunities, which leads to more fluid, multidimensional careers over time (pp. 172, 174). He and his colleagues also found that a lack of these concrete goals can “lead to a loss of professional momentum or even disengagement,” specifically among mid-career and senior faculty who have already achieved tenure and promotion (Baldwin et al., 2008, p. 52). Similarly Dankowski and colleagues (2009) argue that vitality comes from a strong connection between “satisfaction, productivity, and engagement” that enables faculty members to realize personal and institutional goals (summarized in Palmer et al., 2011, p. 21).

How do faculty achieve this level of professional agency, autonomy, and achievement in the changing landscape of higher education? What frameworks exist for helping faculty to not only clearly articulate goals but also make consistent, measured progress even as contexts shift? Many faculty have priority management systems that work for them individually, and useful popular systems exist for managing time and productivity, ranging from the Getting Things Done method and Pomodoro Technique to the strategy Robison outlines in Peak Performing Faculty. In this book, I argue that a relatively new framework that is taking many industries by storm, Agile, can also be applied alone or in conjunction with other systems to achieve meaningful personal and professional goals.

This book looks at how academic professionals can draw on the values and practices of the Agile movement to become what I call “Agile faculty.” Agile represents a sea change in management philosophy, moving away from Frederick Taylor’s 19th-century ideals of scientific management to a more purpose-based, people-driven, learning-focused approach to achieving clearly articulated goals. Based on a combination of transparent commitment to specific goals and incremental but controlled progress toward them, Agile frameworks, such as Scrum, provide an empirical process to accomplish meaningful work while supporting responsiveness to change (Hartman, 2012, pp. 11.5, 11.7). I have been using Agile practices in all aspects of my faculty activities for more than nine years and teaching these strategies to colleagues and students for eight. While certainly not a cure-all for faculty stress or contextual challenges, I firmly believe these approaches can support faculty members’ journeys of professional vitality and also potentially transform some of the underlying functions of higher education.

In this book, you’ll learn more about the Agile perspective, the Scrum framework, and strategies you can immediately implement in your research, service, and teaching activities to achieve your most significant goals. This introductory chapter explores what I mean when I say “Agile faculty” and the mindset associated with becoming such. First, I review some of the challenges facing faculty like those in the introductory vignettes, exploring just a sampling of the literature on faculty work-life and stress to provide context for why an Agile mindset can be beneficial. I then shift gears to delve into scholarship on faculty vitality and productivity, which can inform one’s quest for sustained professional growth and satisfaction. Finally, I make the clear connections between this research and Agile, explaining its roots and goals and then outlining what an Agile faculty approach might look like, in preparation for the practical strategies offered in the rest of the book.

Understanding Faculty Career Stresses

Faculty today face many contextual challenges that affect how we approach research, service, and teaching responsibilities as well as work-life integration. Since the 1990s, faculty work has been called into question by government representatives and the general public, as the image of the tenured professor in a cushy office doing very little work for too much pay pervades (Johnsrud, 2008; O’Meara, Terosky & Neumann, 2009; Rosenthal et al., 1994). Calls for accountability, productivity, and transparency from these constituencies have led to dramatic changes in higher education and in faculty workloads. Most recently, for example, the Obama administration unveiled the College Scorecard in 2013, sorting US institutions by costs, graduation rate, loan default rate, average amount borrowed, and employment to help families make more economical decisions about the costs of higher education (US Department of Education). Conservative leaders in states like North Carolina push for more career-training programs in their public universities. For-profit universities such as Corinthian Colleges and private institutions like Sweet Briar College made the news in 2015 for unexpected closures, though Sweet Briar did earn a reprieve. Budget cuts at public institutions, endowment concerns at private institutions, and increasing tuition prices are affecting program offerings and enrollment numbers all over the United States.

Research on faculty stress points toward factors such as time constraints; concerns about tenure, promotion, and recognition; home and family concerns; student contact; and unclear professional identity as sources of stress (e.g., Day, 1994; Gmelch, Wilke & Lovrich, 1986; Hendel & Horn, 2008), all of which are “mediated by the institutional context, which may differ by mission, available resources, and collegiality” (Hendel & Horn, 2008, p. 65). These stressors also manifest themselves differently among new and mid-career faculty, women, parents and those responsible for eldercare, faculty of color, contingent faculty, etc. (e.g., Boice, 2000; Lindholm & Szelényi, 2008; Schuster & Finkelstein, 2006; Trower, 2012). And given the tendency for faculty members to set high self-standards, many of these stressors may be exacerbated by “unrealistic perceptions or by their limited ability to set and carry out goals” (Robison, 2013, xiii). Within these contexts, we define what productivity means to us within institutional contexts, and even a very brief review of the literature on stress and vitality has a great deal to say about the conditions under which faculty create these definitions.

New Faculty

Supporting new faculty members in their transitions to both academia and specific institutional contexts has been the focus of extensive research in the past 30 years (see, for example, Austin, 2003; Boice, 1991, 2000; Sorcinelli, 2000). New tenure-track faculty tend to experience stress during the probationary period with respect to balancing time spent on research, service, teaching, and home life, especially when teaching their own classes for perhaps the first time. This stress can be exacerbated by having unclear expectations for promotion and tenure; building relationships in the department and institution-wide; and creating a professional identity in the traditional academic roles and as an advisor, colleague, institutional citizen, and community member (Austin, 2003; Boice, 1991; Eddy & Gaston-Gayles, 2008; Pojuan, Martin Crowley, & Trower, 2011; Sorcinelli, 2000).

Mid-career Faculty

Mid-career faculty are the largest cohort in the academy and face unique challenges when moving out of the protected bubble junior faculty often function within (Baldwin & Chang, 2006, p. 28; Baldwin, Lunceford, & Vanderlinden, 2005, p. 98). Mid-career can be a double-edged sword in terms of stress and vitality (Baldwin, Lunceford, & Vanderlinden, 2005, p. 115). Researchers argue that, unlike new faculty who can aspire to promotion and tenure goals, mid-career faculty have achieved these goals and may enter a period when professional goals are in flux and less defined, which can lead to a loss of professional momentum (Baldwin et al., 2008; Canale, Herdlotz, & Wild, 2013). Yet mid-career faculty often have more opportunities to participate in research and take on greater leadership roles at their institutions (e.g., Baldwin et al., 2008; Canale, Herdlotz, & Wild, 2013; Stange, & Merdinger, 2014). Even with an array of new options for professional growth, mid-career faculty can enter a career plateau that affects their career motivation, engagement, and job satisfaction (Baldwin & Chang, 2006; Baldwin et al., 2008; Canale, Herdlotz, & Wild, 2013).

Women Faculty

Women tend to experience more personal-professional tension when dealing with issues such as pregnancy, childcare, eldercare, and family leave politics, which can be compounded by department/institutional culture, a lack of role models, and individual perceptions of professional capital and expectations (Elliott, 2008; O’Meara, 2015; O’Meara & Campbell, 2011, p. 454). Women faculty report experiencing conflicting roles at work and at home, doing...