Back See this section in context: Criterion 3 Core Component 3B

3B.2: Professional Development Improves Teaching and Learning

Sauk encourages and supports faculty development in several ways that allow individual faculty members to improve their knowledge and expertise in their own disciplines, expand their range of teaching methods, improve their assessment tools, and increase their flexibility in teaching and learning styles:

• Faculty Development Committee: Faculty may submit requests for professional development funds for conferences, seminars, and workshops to the Faculty Development Committee. Each approved participant in professional development is required to file an activity report summarizing what was learned. According to the fall 2009 survey, 70% of faculty have attended conferences or workshops related to their profession every year or nearly every year.
• Budget support: Sauk provides a faculty development budget of $20,000 annually (approximately $465 per full time faculty member). In the five years beginning summer 2007 to summer 2011, an average of 40% of the travel budget was used each year ( 4A.2).
• Promotion incentives: The college encourages professional development by providing faculty with contractually-agreed-upon promotion credit for attending non-credit seminars, symposiums, and workshops at the ratio of one credit for each fifteen hours of actual contact experience. This is in addition to the promotional incentive provided for taking graduate-level courses), which makes graduate-level hours one of the primary components of promotional eligibility (2B.8).
• Assessment-related projects: The Assessment Core Team annually recommends professional development topics related to teaching and learning as it relates to the general education competency cycle. Money for an outside presenter is not readily available, so the Team uses in-house presenters to the extent possible. For example, in 2006, the Core Team sponsored a voluntary brown-bag session on student listening skills; in 2007, they recruited a retired colleague to provide a presentation on reading in the classroom to kick off a reading assessment project. In January 2009, the college provided funds for an e-workshop on “Teaching the Millennial Student,” and in 2010 the Instructional Technology staff presented a workshop on how students use technology to cheat and plagiarize.