Changing Faculty Workload Without New Resources:
The Creative Use of Curricular Planning
Jill Reich, Pam Baker and Elizabeth Tobin
In January 2004 at the annual AAC&U meeting, we presented our experiences of introducing a new, and lower, instructional workload for Bates faculty, and using that change to encourage faculty to develop three-year workload plans. After having gathered data on our faculty’s workload, we proposed to faculty in the fall of 2001 a change from an instructional workload of five and two-thirds courses (five courses yearly and two out of three short term units) to five courses per year. Departments and programs which could meet a set of criteria (for example, an excellent major, continued contributions to general education and the first-year seminar program, sufficient seats in our short term to meet demand) and which could show how they would meet those criteria over the next three years could move to the new standard.
Faculty at Bates must teach well, conduct and publish research, participate in faculty governance, and most spend much time working with students individually, especially through our senior thesis program. The move to a five-course workload explicitly sought to provide faculty more time for these many responsibilities. Bates, however, did not have the funds to hire new faculty to replace the courses. We relied instead on departments and programs reorganizing their curricula, while explicitly maintaining an excellent set of offerings.
Faculty responded very creatively. In some cases, they eliminated courses with very low enrollments; others designed new courses which could replace several others, and some included interdisciplinary courses as possible electives for satisfying requirements. Usually, changing workload meant departments met to consider the entire curriculum. Some departments which had previously been uninterested in long-range planning saw its uses. Elected divisional chairs, working with Dean Reich, considered how each workload plan met the criteria, often asking questions, seeking more detail and asking for closer adherence to the criteria.
Department and program chairs now include with their annual reports a new workload plan, so that the Dean of the Faculty always has access to three years of plans. We include here a) the handout from our AAC&U talk indicating the challenges we faced in implementing this change, b) the criteria each department and program must meet with their workload plans, and c) the worksheet chairs fill out yearly adding a new year’s workload planning. If you have questions, feel free to email Pam Baker (pbaker@bates.edu).
- - Call for Instructional Workload Reorganization Plans Scheduled to Begin in Fall 2002 (December 13, 2001
- - Changing Faculty Workload without New Resources: The Creative Use of Curricular Planning, AAC&U Meeting (January 24, 2004)
- - Sample Workload Planning Form (PDF format)
- - Workload Planning Form (PDF format)
