Developing Adjunct Faculty Part 2

by Richard Lyons

AS DISCUSSED IN my last column, employing adjunct instructors
provides our institutions many benefits beyond reducing overall
instructional costs. These include enriching our curricula
with real-world perspectives, offering highly specialized
courses for increasingly demanding students, cultivating linkages
to community resources, and providing staffing flexibility.
As any critical resource does, however, adjunct faculty requires
ongoing development for its value to appreciate. When sufficiently
developed, your adjunct faculty can be leveraged powerfully
to aid you in addressing the array of issues impacting institutional
effectiveness.

In recent years, our paradigm of institutional effectiveness
has evolved significantly. While success was once indicated
primarily by achieving growth goals in enrollment, standards
in additional areas have been increasingly mandated by state
legislatures, boards of trustees, accrediting associations,
and other largely external stakeholders. In this age of increased
accountability, institutional effectiveness is not only a
function of improved student recruitment, but also of their
retention within each course section, their completion of
their program or degree, and their success on professional
licensing or certification examinations and other indicators
of quality. Added to this is the impact of U.S. News and World
Report’s and other popular ranking systems’ emphasis on such
customer-service and satisfaction standards as academic reputation,
percentages of classes with less than 20 students, and value
received from coursework completed.

In each of these perspectives, institutional effectiveness
is increasingly a function not of such inputs as number of
volumes in the library, but of what happens in our classrooms
to enhance the value of stakeholder investment. And adjunct
instructors are managing an increasing number of those classrooms.
The stakes have risen to the extent that it defies logic not
to upgrade our adjunct faculty development efforts significantly.

Becoming more sensitized to this array of issues, some institutions
have initially focused their efforts on increasing their hiring
standards for new adjunct instructors. While we can impact
institutional success somewhat in this way, we are likely
limited in this strategy by the size of our hiring pool in
meeting our staffing needs. Qualified potential part-timers
have an array of activities in which they can invest their
discretionary time, and for many, teaching is a tough sell.
In most cases, therefore, to increase our success, we must
focus on the improved productivity of those who have already
stepped forward to indicate an interest in staffing our classrooms.

The Pareto Rule, a popular tool of statisticians, proposes
that 80 percent of the problems in a given situation are caused
by 20 percent of the contributing factors. Providing meaningful
orientation and training for your adjunct faculty on the key
20 percent of factors impacting student retention and program
completion is both critical and cost effective. Simply implementing
an orientation process that includes use of a checklist like
the one that appears in The Adjunct Professor’s Guide to Success
(Allyn and Bacon, 1999) would help significantly, and costs
practically nothing.

As indicated by the “freeway flyer” syndrome, adjunct instructors
are rather mobile individuals. The very best are in great
demand and usually have an easy time attaining their desired
teaching load. Research indicates that among today’s young
professionals, opportunity for training is a significant factor
in the selection of one possible employer over another. Having
an active, effective faculty-development initiative in place
will likely enable your institution to recruit and retain
the most desirable adjunct instructors.

Richard France, dean of Evening/Weekend Programs on the Western
Campus of Cuyahoga Community College in the greater Cleveland
area, has long been a leader of cost-effective programming
for adjunct faculty members. The cornerstone of his initiative
has been hosting all new adjunct instructors to dinner on
campus prior to their initial teaching assignment. Following
the meal, an hour-long orientation is conducted, during which
an adjunct faculty handbook is provided, and an array of professional
development workshops is highlighted. This academic year’s
workshops range from high-touch topics such as Reclaiming
Civility in the Classroom to high-tech ones like Connecting
with Students at a Distance, each delivered in a three-and-a-half
to four hour format. Part-time faculty members who complete
four workshops receive $200, as well as CEU credits.

The Part-time Faculty Professional Development program at
Cuyahoga Community College establishes a solid knowledge base
and fosters the development of collegial relationships that
lead to synergistic opportunities for participants. Registration
in subsequent-year workshops has been extensive, fostering
a learning community that includes both full- and part-time
faculty. Dean France reports that the initiative has created
a recruiting and retention advantage for part-time faculty
within the highly competitive Cleveland marketplace and has
contributed significantly to the achievement of institutional
effectiveness goals.

In the future, having an effective faculty development program
in place to address an increasing array of external and internal
pressures will be a must for all successful institutions.
Those who depend upon adjunct instructors to deliver a significant
component of their offerings will increasingly provide programming
to meet their specific needs. Being among the early leaders
in this arena will enable your institution to more effectively
meet accountability goals, achieve higher levels of student
satisfaction, and achieve an advantage in instructor recruitment
and retention against competing institutions in your area.