Developing Adjunct Faculty

by Richard Lyons AS AN INSTRUCTIONAL leader reading this first Adjunct Advocate column on managing adjunct faculty, your decision-making probably long ago outgrew the cost-savings consideration often cited as the sole advantage of using part-time instructors. You realize as well that part-time instructors also have the potential to:

• Leverage their rich backgrounds to teach highly specialized courses for which there is a growing demand from student/clients;
• Energize your curricula with their passion for their chosen fields - often exceeding that of full-time faculty - fostering in students' minds richer, more current linkages to the world outside;
• Enable scheduling of additional course sections, at times and places not considered desirable by many full-timers, thus increasing your total enrollment;
• Provide you flexibility and risk reduction in decision making;
• Provide linkages to a wide array of community resources that might otherwise be impossible to cultivate;
• Enable you to audition potential full-time faculty, under more favorable conditions than traditional hiring procedures permit.

  As any valuable resource, your adjunct instructors sometimes have limitations that must be managed to enable you to achieve maximum benefit from their employment. While typically well-grounded in their fields - often more broadly than some full-timers - adjunct instructors are sometimes ill-prepared to address the full range of students' learning needs. New instructors - full- as well as part-time - are often initially surprised by the differences between today's students and those with whom they attended college, sometimes decades before. The natural tendency to "teach as we have been taught" contributes to their "covering the material" through lecturing and ineffectively focused classroom discussions. Studies indicate, however, that while they receive less training and access to support resources than full-time faculty, adjunct instructors demonstrate no significant difference in their instructional effectiveness vis-à-vis that of their full-time colleagues. How can that be? Most adjunct instructors are motivated by the intrinsic rewards of teaching, and their perceived investment in self-esteem and professional prestige is high. Many have developed significant instructional skills in their career and/or community lives. Even a modest investment in the further development of their teaching and classroom-management skills will usually pay significant returns, not only in increased achievement by their students, but in the attainment of broader institutional goals as well. These include reduction in the bifurcation between themselves and full-time faculty, of which Judith Gappa and David Leslie wrote so profoundly in The Invisible Faculty (Jossey-Bass, 1993), as well as improved student retention and program completion rates, which have become the goal of increasingly accountability-minded trustees and state legislatures. As a new instructional dean in 1996, I installed a comprehensive, yet modestly funded program at my home institution that grew out of my doctoral research. Its components include a structured orientation, and a teaching-methods course required of all new faculty, both part- and full-time. Continually improved since its inception, that course has prepared nearly two hundred instructors. The remaining components include a mentoring initiative, a resource center that is about to go on-line, and planned social activities that specifically recognize the contributions of the part-time faculty. Besides achieving the significant goals above, the program has also reduced "firefighting" by instructional leaders, decreased the isolation part-timers typically perceive, and reduced their turnover. While our program arrived with a new dean, and was therefore perceived as somewhat revolutionary by the faculty it impacted, other institutions have pursued a more measured, incremental approach to the development of their adjunct faculty. As the director of Staff and Organizational Development at Johnson County (Kansas) Community College, Helen Burnstad has focused on continually improving her institution's entire human-resource foundation. Over a number of years, specialized programming has been installed for the increasingly critical part-time component of the faculty. The JCCC plan integrates teaching and classroom-management skills development into each aspect of the human-resource function - from hiring and orientation, through regular training-needs assessment and program design, to performance evaluation. Details of her program were recently published in Managing Adjunct and Part-Time Faculty for the New Millennium, edited by Donald Greive and Catherine Worden (Info-Tech, 2000). Less than two years into the establishment of the Excellence in Teaching Program (The University of Nevada, Reno's "teaching and learning center") its director, Meggin McIntosh, became increasingly attuned to the needs of the university part-time faculty. After researching and verifying her findings, McIntosh approached her top administrators about offering a specialized workshop to meet those needs. Her leaders supported her approach, and budgeted sufficient funds. The program was promoted using a grassroots approach, and within a few weeks all of the available training slots were filled. The ETP's initial eight-hour workshop - scheduled on a Friday evening and Saturday morning - was a huge success, fostering a synergistic community of instructors - both full- and part-time - across disparate disciplines. With their rich potential for contributing a wide variety of quality enhancements while achieving greater efficiency of operations, our adjunct instructors are a resource we can ill afford to ineffectively utilize. As any resource does, the adjunct faculty requires planned, continuous development for its value to achieve its full potential. But a more effective adjunct faculty yields many benefits as our institutions enter an increasingly challenging and competitive future. The key milepost is getting started.