Fast Forward Your Faculty Group's Scholar-Readiness For Promotion & Tenure

Heinrich, Kathleen T.

Monday, 18 November 2013: 3:35 PM

Kathleen T. Heinrich, PhD, RN
Scholarly Development Specialist, K T H Consulting, Guilford, CT

Learning Objective 1: Implement the Scholarly Readiness Profile to assess scholarly learning needs.

Learning Objective 2: Negotiate Partnership Agreements that keep scholarly collaborations productive and pleasurable.

Problem Statement: Did you know that scholar-ready faculty are getting harder to find? As colleges and universities raise the scholarly bar, senior faculty scholars are retiring. The faculty hired to replace them are oftentimes less than ready to meet scholarly requirements for retention, promotion, and tenure.

Did you know that many Deans, Directors, and Chairpersons say scholar-readying faculty is a top priority and an overwhelming challenge? Today’s faculty groups are a dizzying mix of master’s prepared clinicians and recent graduates from PhD and DNP programs. Yet very few faculty development programs are responsive to their diverse and divergent scholarly learning needs.

Did you know that we cannot mentor our way out of this scholar shortage? With too few scholar-mentors to go around, Clark et.al. (2010) challenge educational leaders to explore new ways to ease faculty's transition into the scholarly role.

Methods: This presentation overviews a 3 year, faculty development intervention that prepared colleagues to peer mentor each other’s scholarly development. As a consultant, I partnered with a Dean and an Associate Dean to assess their faculty group’s scholarly learning needs and design programming that addressed the full spectrum of their scholarly learning needs.

Results: A 5 year follow-up assessment confirmed that peer mentoring partnerships are “exploding” this faculty group’s scholarly productivity; enhancing retention and recruitment; and fostering civility (Heinrich & Oberleitner, 2012). Two, evidence-based strategies are grounding subsequent faculty development interventions: a Profile that allows for the assessment of scholarly learning needs and a 4 step process for negotiating Partnership Agreements.

Conclusion: The greatest legacy an academic leader can leave a school of nursing is a scholar-ready faculty group. Given that peer mentoring partnerships allow faculty colleagues to meet each other’s diverse, scholarly learning needs, this presentation introduces participants to 2 evidence-based strategies proven effective in scholar-readying faculty groups.

See more of: Faculty Leadership in Nursing Education
See more of: Oral Paper & Poster: Leadership Sessions