Approaches to Staff Development for Part-Time Faculty.

The increased use of part-time faculty in community colleges has left in its wake a large literature on the problems posed by heavy reliance on part-time faculty and on the need to address these problems through staff development programs. Four approaches have been used by community colleges to deal with the staff development needs of their part-time faculty. The first approach is based on a curriculum development model, which is characterized as a set of in-service workshops and courses designed to complement the part-timer's subject expertise with activities to strengthen pedagogical skills and provide information about the community college. The second approach involves the formation of peer support networks through which part-timers share experiences and help each other with problems encountered on the job. The third is a personnel management approach, whereby the college's recruitment, hiring, and evaluation policies are developed with improved instruction in mind. The fourth approach draws upon theories of adult education to involve part-timers in identifying and solving the problems they face on the job. This approach stresses the development of part-timers' awareness of work problems as a means of fostering receptiveness to staff development interventions. All of the approaches seek to instruct part-timers in pedagogical techniques and thus to improve instruction, and aim to integrate part-time faculty into the college community. (RO)

Practitioners. ericd

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