Colleges Step Up Professional Development for Adjuncts

During her 30 years as a college teacher, Diane Carter-Zubko has taught English to thousands of students for whom it is not their native language. She has instructed at night, when those students are able to study after their workday. And she has maintained a day job as a campus representative at a nearby unemployment office to pay her bills, as the classes she teaches don’t earn her enough to make a living.

But for all her hard work, she had never felt fully supported by her college’s faculty-development programs. Like most contingent faculty members across the nation — adjunct professors and lecturers off the tenure track — she had come to expect little help in improving her teaching and ability to engage students.

So a few years ago, Carter-Zubko was “shocked,” she says, when an email from Harper College, the two-year institution in Palatine, Ill., where she teaches, offered her two new options for evaluating her performance in the classroom. Adjuncts were given the opportunity to observe other faculty, including those on the tenure track, as they taught their classes. Then, they’d be expected to follow up by writing a report on what techniques they could apply to their own teaching.

The other new possibility involved creating a project geared toward enhancing student engagement.

“Bingo! That one had my name all over it,” Carter-Zubko says. “That option gave me the impetus to sit down and analyze my methods to see what’s working and what’s not.”

Since then, Carter-Zubko has taken on a new project every two years in search of new and better ways to reach students. She has studied and employed metacognition techniques designed to show students where they need to fill holes in their learning.

Guided with help from Harper’s Academy for Teaching Excellence, she is using electronic polling and quizzes to monitor her students’ progress on a class-by-class basis. Students answers questions via cellphone.

“This creates opportunities to discuss the topics further, to review information they may be confused about, or even to assess prior knowledge before we begin a unit,” Carter-Zubko says. “It’s another way to engage the students in the learning.”

A secondary benefit has been the way it makes her feel about her job. “I feel stimulated by the experience and have fallen in love again with what and why I teach,” she says. “My students love it, and I learn something new.”

Other colleges too have begun to see the value in providing more support for adjuncts. Some of that has to do with the sheer numbers of contingent faculty members that American colleges and universities have hired in recent years, especially since the 2008 recession. Seven in 10 of all teachers in higher education in the United States are not on the tenure track, according to the National Center on Educational Statistics.

Several higher-education groups say it’s time for colleges to recognize the realities of the adjunct-dominated campus. The Coalition on the Academic Workforce, for example, has noted that non-tenure-track faculty members teach 40 percent of introductory humanities courses. The coalition recommends that colleges should do more to improve the quality of that education by including adjuncts in faculty-development plans.

Some institutions are getting the message. American University and the University of Colorado at Denver have recently started paying adjuncts to take professional-development courses. In the past few years, colleges have opened offices geared toward the needs of adjuncts and have included programs that offer professional support. Others have negotiated contracts for non-tenure-track educators, often at the behest of labor unions that represent them, that require career-development opportunities.

“After the recession, many college leaders thought higher education would go back to its old ways and hire more full-time professors instead of adjuncts,” says Adrianna Kezar, a professor of higher education at the University of Southern California’s Rossier School of Education. “But that didn’t happen. During the last three to four years, it’s become harder to hide from this. It’s irresponsible for colleges not to support the improvement of all their teachers.”

Still, while some human-resources departments have begun to come around, too few college leaders have taken the idea seriously, says Kezar, whose research focuses on the needs of contingent faculty. Students in courses taught by adjuncts achieve lesser levels of success than those taught by permanent, full-time professors, she says.

Several dozen studies by major economists show that students who take more courses with adjuncts have lower graduation rates, are less likely to stay in college after their freshman year, and take longer to declare a major. Offering adjuncts more development opportunities, she says, is one way to narrow the gap.

A Menu of Training Options

Conversations about adjunct teaching have begun to crop up during meetings held by national groups, including the Professional and Organizational Development Network, or POD. This year’s conference included a workshop on developing programs to support adjunct faculty.

“Eight years ago, we’d have meetings with a handful of people who would talk about part-time faculty,” says Ann Coburn-Collins, director of adjunct faculty and academic support programs at Saginaw Valley State University. “Now, we have our own interest group within POD.”

She has a theory as to why momentum has picked up recently, if slowly.

“I’d be willing to bet that provosts are paying attention to the fact,” she says, that adjuncts teach a lot of students in developmental courses. “They know they have to do all they can to retain those students.”

Colleges that have taken the plunge admit they are searching for best practices to guide them. Making sure adjuncts even know about existing opportunities is sometimes a challenge.

“We’ve had programs for several years, but when we began offering a professional-development grant, no one applied,” says William LeoGrande, associate vice provost for academic affairs at American University. But as word spread, adjuncts began lining up for the benefits, which include a pot of money totaling $30,000 to help them pay for courses or other training.

Several colleges have taken to creating more holistic programs on their own.

The Center for Teaching and Learning at Boise State University has put together several online workshops that focus on teaching — assessments, grading, and lesson planning.

“The idea is to make information available at any time so people can fit it into their schedules,” says Teresa Focarile, coordinator for adjuncts, concurrent enrollment, and online faculty at Boise State. “Adjuncts don’t teach the same kinds of hours as people on the tenure track.”

Universities have also taken to creating communities of practice or learning communities that put the spotlight on adjuncts. At Boise State, adjuncts meet monthly to discuss teaching methods and other topics. The university will also perform midterm assessments of their classes to get student feedback, and then follow up with instructors to offer teaching resources. Monthly newsletters and an annual conference geared toward professors not on the tenure track also allow educators to share tips and highlight campus resources.

To help their adjuncts rise in stature, some colleges in California have begun to consider ways to convert contingent faculty members into tenure-trackers. If they’re successful, they’ll succeed in breaking down barriers that separate educators who teach on the same campus.

“It’s very clear that there’s this wall between adjuncts and tenured people,” says Pamela Robinson, who has lectured in the graduate education division of California State University-Dominguez Hills for 25 years. “I’ve seen job descriptions that specifically exclude lecturers from consideration for tenure-track positions that they are qualified for.”

Others say that the need to increase the power and voices of adjuncts should extend into professional-development efforts that focus on them. Contingent faculty members who have taken advantage of development opportunities say they are more effective when adjuncts help devise them. Otherwise, they can too often fall prey to tepid efforts that overly rely on technology or fads.

Maria Maisto, president of the New Faculty Majority, a group that promotes better treatment of and pay for adjunct professors, says she took a development course that relied on computer-based learning modules. “It wasn’t very helpful or engaging,” she says. “It was pedantic.”

Harper College’s approach at least allows adjuncts to select one of three options for their evaluations, which occur every two years for experienced teachers. A public two-year institution in suburban Chicago with 23,000 students, Harper hires adjuncts to teach half its courses. The college has nearly three times as many adjuncts as tenure-track educators.

“We have a very diverse set of adjuncts,” says Michael Bates, Harper’s dean of teaching, learning, and distance education. “We wanted to empower them to decide what would make them do better in the classroom. We’ve learned that they appreciate the flexibility of choice, the ability to take ownership.”

Before 2014 adjuncts’ only “choice” was to be evaluated by an administrator who sat in on lectures. That administrator was not always one from their discipline. In the years since, when they were given more options, three out of four contingent professors chose something besides the traditional classroom evaluation. Nearly 100 percent of those who opted for one of the newer assessment options in 2014 have done it again in the years since.

“Many people were using those methods because they saw they could help their teaching,” Bates says. “We designed this for them to try new things in the classroom.” Nine in 10 Harper adjuncts who followed through on newer options reported introducing fresh elements into their classroom teaching, compared with around 60 percent of those traditionally assessed.

Bruce Johnson, an adjunct in Harper College’s law-enforcement and justice-administration program for the past 25 years, chose the reverse-peer-observation option. Adjuncts can sign up to watch another teacher in the classroom for an hour, and then write a report on what they saw and how they might apply it to their classroom methods. A meeting with an administrator follows and often includes recommendations for improvement.

Johnson decided to observe Brad Grossman, a tenure-track professor in his department.

“I was amazed at how quickly he got students engaged in answering questions, marched them to the blackboard, and rewarded them with granola bars after they got through the exercise,” Johnson says. “I don’t vary my instruction all that much. But after watching that, I encourage every adjunct at Harper to go watch him. He’s that good.”

Besides encouraging him to change up his methods, the exercise made Johnson feel better about where he teaches.

“In the past three years or so, Harper has become very interested in what we adjuncts think,” he says. " I feel like we’re getting extra support, like they’re trying to help build me up as a teacher.”