Consultations

  1. Center for Faculty Development
  2. Consultations

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Consultation Services

The Center for Faculty Development offers confidential, one-on-one or group consultations on learning and teaching, professional development, and research practice.

Consultations are typically most effective face-to-face (either in-person or via Zoom), though we can also do them over the phone if necessary. Our aim is to help you—as SU faculty—find solutions or alternatives that you are comfortable with, since the same approach will not work for all faculty needs.

Below are examples of the kinds of consultation inquiries we receive in the three areas of our purview.

Further down the page you'll also find details on the voluntary, formative, and confidential nature of our work with faculty.

Learning and Teaching

Example consultation topics:

  • Revising program learning outcomes
  • Developing program classroom norms
  • Curriculum mapping to highlight transferrable career skills development in a program
  • Creating positive learning environments
  • Creating shared grading criteria

Example consultation topics:

  • Revising the syllabus
  • Changing or redesigning assignments
  • Developing in-class activities
  • Dealing with classroom incivilities
  • Creating grading criteria
  • Encouraging group discussion
  • Enhancing student motivation
  • Making the most of classroom diversity
  • Working with non-native English speakers
  • Providing helpful feedback
  • Finding evidence in the literature to inform the work you are doing

Research Practice

Example consultation topics:

  • Setting up discipline-based writing groups
  • Collaborative research processes

Example consultation topics:

  • Developing and maintaining a writing habit
  • Time management for completing research
  • Targeting journals and publishers
  • Working with editors and responding to reviewers’ comments
  • Developing a research agenda
  • Conveying your research agenda to people outside your field

Professional Development

Example consultation topics:

  • Developing departmental norms for productive meetings and balanced workloads
  • Developing faculty governance structures

Example consultation topics:

  • Mentoring faculty
  • Career planning
  • Life-work balance
  • The art of worthwhile meetings
  • Enhancing faculty inclusion in decision-making
  • Working with difficult colleagues
  • Developing faculty governance structures

Ethical practice

Following national standards, the Center for Faculty Development's consultations with faculty are:

Faculty come to the Center because they want to, not because they are under duress. If a colleague “strongly suggests” that you consult with the Center for Faculty Development, you are under no obligation to do so. As all our consultations are confidential, colleagues will not be able to find out from us whether you have talked with us.

 

The Center takes a collaborative approach to consultations, supporting you in thinking about your teaching and your students’ learning based on the goals you have set for yourself. We offer suggestions and ideas. The Center is completely separate from any summative (judgment-based) evaluation, and is never involved in Rank and Tenure (R&T) or hiring/re-hiring decisions. We do not write letters of recommendation for R&T files or for Chairs.

Our conversations – and even the fact that we have met – remain confidential within the Center. Occasionally Center staff discuss these consultations among themselves to be able to track trends in teaching-related issues or to brainstorm good advice or resources to offer you. One exception to our policy: By law, we are required to report any sexual harassment or threat of physical harm to oneself or others.