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.