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.