Resources for Chairs

Professional Development and Support for Chairs

National Center for Faculty Development and Diversity

UM has an institutional membership for the National Center for Faculty Development and Diversity, a nationally-recognized, independent organization that provides online career development and mentoring resources for faculty, post-docs, and graduate students. Create your account and use this resource today!

NCFDD Blog article featuring advice for department chairs

LinkedIn Learning Paths

Created by UM's Office of Organizational Learning and Development for you to complete online at your own pace. Log into LinkedIn Learning to access these resources.

Making Meetings Meaningful: For Busy People

Meetings are a valuable tool for collaborating with others, solving problems, and generating new ideas. At least they should be...but how often do we find ourselves going from meeting to meeting without any clear sense of progress or sometimes even purpose? Together we can create a meeting revolution on campus, saving us valuable time and helping us collaborate more effectively by ensuring that meetings have a clear purpose, are designed effectively to achieve that purpose, make space for all voices, remain focused, and end with clear next steps.

Communicating with Your Team

This series of videos is a condensed version of one of the topics in the Practical Leadership Skills for Managers program featured below. Developed for busy administrators, it features advice on practicing transparency to build trust and goodwill, the importance of the 1:1 meeting, and developing psychological safety to make honest feedback possible.

Practical Leadership Skills for Managers program

The day-to-day experiences of our employees are profoundly impacted by their interactions with direct supervisors. Even the most experienced leaders appreciate the importance of continual self-reflection and learning, especially in the vital and challenging work of managing people. Each unit in the Practical Leadership Skills for Managers program has been developed based on the experiences and needs of UM employees and is focused on high impact leadership and management skills. The program is designed to be flexible enough to fit into our managers' busy schedules, and emphasizes practical applications of the learning.

OOLD professional development offerings, spring 2023

Faculty Writing Retreat

Tuesday, January 10, 9:00 a.m.- 3:00 p.m., Journalism 301

This one-day writing retreat focuses on challenges specific to faculty writers (adjunct, lecturer, tenure track) and is coupled with independent writing times that allow you to apply new strategies and tips as well as make tangible progress on your writing. The faculty retreat allows you to:

Gain momentum and make tangible progress in your writing
Experience a supportive environment for intense, focused writing time
Develop effective writing habits and long-term strategies for productive writing

Department Chair Essentials

Thursday, February 2, 2-3:30 p.m., location TBD

More information forthcoming.

Finding Open Educational Resources (OER): A Hands-On Workshop

Wednesday, February 1, 3-4 p.m., location TBD

Tuesday, March 7, 3-4 p.m., location TBD

Open Educational Resources (OER) provide students with free and equitable access to course textbooks and materials. OER provide faculty with the freedom to modify content to meet specific learning goals and to make content more accessible, more inclusive, and tailored to students’ needs. In this session, join Associate Professor Wendy Walker, Mansfield Library and Associate Professor Hilary Martens, Geosciences, for an interactive workshop that will help faculty identify OER repositories and find OER for their courses.

Faculty Mentor Development Program and NIH-sponsored study

If you are a faculty member formally or informally mentoring another faculty member, you are eligible to participate in this program, run by the University of New Mexico, which can help you become a more skillful mentor. Mentors will take part in a training program over 8 weeks. They will be randomized to either online asynchronous coursework alone (1.5 self-paced hours for each of 8 sessions) or online coursework combined with video synchronous workshops (additional one hour each session). Both mentors and mentees will earn Amazon gift cards for completing surveys to assess outcomes.

Questions can be directed to:

Akshay Sood, Associate Director, Mentoring Unit of the Professional Development Core, Mountain West Clinical and Translational Research Infrastructure Network (MW CTR-IN)
Amy Kinch, Director, Office of Organizational Learning and Development
Curtis Noonan, Professor, Public and Community Health Sciences