Building Your Own Professional "Tool Box"

Cheers, my last post has me thinking more about that pre-semester development "head" me and my mates get into; that would be the one focused on gearing up for the Orientation things we do pre-semester.  Most of us want to make sure we're getting to our colleagues everything we can to help them 1) have a great TA year teaching and, 2) put into play opinions, options, and ways of thinking that have them creating their own means for getting all the professional development they want (Whew!  My one-sentence teaching philosophy?  Arm my charges with everything I can so they can teach themselves.... What's yours?).

My colleagues at MSU and I have recently discussed professional development books for future faculty.  Darley, et al., The Compleat Academic:  A Career Guide (2004, 2nd Ed.  I think there is a new one.) came up last week.  Although not focused specifically on being "The Compleat Graduate Student" (Come on! Kevin Carlsmith, get it done!), the book nonetheless does a good job addressing all the issues no one tells you about concerning what it means to be new faculty; or, at least, no one's telling you about this stuff helpfully.  I have a plethora of guides to faculty success, preparing for faculty success, successfully negotiating faculty success....you get the picture. They are widely focused, considering the interpretive lenses they use and the populations they address.  But I don't think any of them pull together approaches to understanding tacit knowledge about working in the academy as well as The Compleat Academic:... Check out CA.  Not for its depth, but for its breadth and it's unflinching approach to some tough subjects.

If you're interested in a great out of the box approach to teaching development, please check out Carolyn Lieberg's Teaching Your First College Class:... .  Carolyn will be presenting the opening plenary at our upcoming TA Seminar, August 23rd:  http://tap.msu.edu/pdf/2010_TA_Overview.pdf .  We're attempting the first "paperless" seminar and will have a ton of great resources on thumb-drives for participants.  You can get those resources from our home page soon!  Part of our thinking about the flash drive thing?  We hope to create an organic base resource for PhD students to collect, alter, and add to their professional development archives. Maybe MSU Teaching Thoughts will get you started thinking about teaching development basics too!  http://tap.msu.edu/teachingthoughts/docs/TT2010.pdf

Send us some of the resources that have most helped you!

KMJ