When Your Department Has Problems

In previous posts I described the general process of reviewing a department and issues to consider when you believe your department is in good shape. But in many cases, you are requesting consulting services because you know that your department has problems.

Consultants are frequently asked to help with personnel problems. One example of this is that the department may have difficulty conducting its business due to a lack of civility among the faculty. In some cases, there may be conflict between different factions of the faculty (such as between junior and senior faculty or among individuals in different program areas). Consultants have been asked to help referee situations in which one or more faculty members has been identified as poor performing, misbehaving, or simply not contributing to the department.

Another area of concern revolves around resources. A department may request consulting services to confirm a perceived need for program funding, faculty lines, or space for labs, classrooms, and offices.

Departments may want advice about academic programs. The department may need help in identifying program goals, aligning curricula with standards, or developing assessment programs.

DCS consultants are prepared to help with any of these concerns (or combinations of them!). As usual, I would like to offer a few suggestions that I think will help your department through the process.

• Try to do an honest appraisal of the problem areas your department is experiencing. Be very clear about what you perceive as problems, both when requesting recommendations for consultants and when arranging consulting services with a particular person. If we know what your concerns are, we can do a better job of finding consultants who have experience and expertise in those areas. Your consultant can better help you when you have identified the problems in advance and provided supporting documentation.
  
• It is not realistic to expect a consultant to solve your problems. Often the best thing a consultant can do is to help your department prioritize problem areas and chart a strategy toward improvement. If the problem is serious enough to warrant consulting services, it is probably not going to be resolved overnight.
  
• Think about whether it's a good idea to hire a consultant to do your dirty work. If you have evidence that a faculty member has engaged in misconduct, there are surely formal procedures at your institution for addressing that. Consultants know when they are being asked to do something that a department should be handling through institutional procedures. This may signify an even deeper problem with your department.
  
• Be prepared for a different point of view. For example, you may think that your department is not doing enough on assessment, but the consultant might point out that you are actually doing more than most departments. You may believe that a particular faculty member or faction is the problem, but the consultant may not see it that way. You might be hoping for the consultant to support your department's request for additional faculty lines, only to find that the consultant believes you should trim back your program offerings instead. Of course, your consultant may or may not be right. But there is little point in your going to the time and expense of requesting an outside point of view if you are not willing to consider it.
  

In a future post, I will comment on requesting a consultant to help you identify problems that you don't know you have.

New OTRP Resource: Using the Drawing and Animation Tools in PowerPoint® to Build Your Own Visual Perception Demonstrations (2010)

Kenith V. Sobel of the University of Central Arkansas has provided detailed instructions for using the drawing and animation tools in Microsoft PowerPoint® to create three perception demonstrations: simultaneous contrast, the Kanizsa triangle, and structure from motion. He explains the rationale for this resource in his abstract:


 

Although innumerable computer-based visual demonstrations are available to enhance the teaching of perceptual concepts, quite often a demonstration that worked flawlessly on an office computer will break down when ported to the classroom. In contrast, Microsoft's presentation graphics program PowerPoint® is a familiar and reliable tool for creating and presenting one's own color images and animated text and graphics. Here I describe the drawing and animation tools in PowerPoint that may be unfamiliar even to the experienced user and how to use them to make three well-known perceptual demonstrations. All three can profitably be used with introductory as well as advanced students and even to illustrate general principles of how we see the world. Creating the demonstrations described here can form the basis for making your own collection.


 

In addition to the step-by-step instructions, Sobel included screen shots and drawn figures that illustrate intermediate products of the process. You can access the resource under the "sensation and perception" tab at http://teachpsych.org/otrp/resources/resources.php?category=Sensation

New OTRP Resource: A Template Paper with Comments for Illustrating the 6th Edition of APA Style

If you've followed the PsychTeacher list, you know that many instructors tried to use the first printing of the 6^th edition of the APA Publication Manual (American Psychological Association, 2009) and encountered mismatches between what the guide prescribed and what the sample papers illustrated. Although APA has posted corrections on their website and made available a new printing that corrects the mistakes, I think you will find a new OTRP resource will be quite helpful both in teaching students about APA style and in using it in your own writing. That new resource is A Template Paper with Comments for Illustrating the 6th Edition of APA Style (2010) by Jordan Buess and Rick Froman of John Brown University. You can find it under the "research and teaching" tab, at


http://teachpsych.org/otrp/resources/resources.php?category=Research and Teaching


 

Jordan Buess wrote a research paper using the 5^th edition guidelines for a class with Rick Froman and gave permission for him both to modify the paper to be consistent with the 6^th edition and to attach comments in the margin. Buess's paper is nearly the same length as the Publication Manual's sample one-experiment paper, but Froman has included many more comments, both in the main body of the paper and especially in the reference section. By not overlapping the pages as the Publication Manual does, Buess and Froman enable students to make sense of the paper's content, not just its style. I think this will be especially helpful for students learning to write about research because the paper is written at their level of sophistication. Even when instructors assign published journal articles that are relatively simple for students to understand, such articles do not show what a manuscript looks like prepublication. An added bonus is that the topic should appeal to many student readers: "Factors Correlated With a Tendency Toward Eating Disorders in a Nonclinical Setting."


 

As Froman wrote in the introductory material, this sample paper is an example "worthy of emulation." He (and I) suggest that you share it with your students. As a reminder, OTRP's copyright policy is as follows: "You may reproduce multiple copies of this material for your own personal use, including use in your classes and/or sharing with individual colleagues as long as the author’s name and institution and the Office of Teaching Resources in Psychology heading or other identifying information appear on the copied document. No other permission is implied or granted to print, copy, reproduce, or distribute additional copies of this material. Anyone who wishes to produce copies for purposes other than those specified above must obtain the permission of the author."