Bringing BYTE to Future Faculty
“Branding is everything, and holy crap — you can brand your teaching too! This framework helped create a holistic view of my career, beyond just teaching excellence, to research and market my other skills as well.”
Branding Your Teaching Excellence - the faculty development initiative I designed with my colleague Miranda Rodak - is not just for current faculty targeting their next award application, annual review, or promotion.
This summer, we brought BYTE to the POD Network’s Graduate Student, Professional Student, and Postdoctoral Scholar Development Special Interest Group. We just wrapped our week-long, three-part workshop series attended by future faculty and educational developers from the United States and abroad.
scenes from Wednesday’s workshop on leveraging career documents as strategic planning tools
I’m all in on designing faculty development programs that empower educators to take charge of their careers and make evidence of their teaching excellence visible. It’s meaningful to bring this work to a national audience of future faculty who are proactively planning their next steps and transitioning into teaching-focused roles. After all, coming from a humanities PhD background, I know that there is often limited departmental support for graduate students preparing for an intentional, life-long career on the teaching track. My instructional consultant colleague Sarah Pedzinski and I wrote about this for Xchanges last year. Mentorship in teaching can be spotty, and it can be intimidating to tell your committee that you are embracing a career pivot away from disciplinary research and towards building your expertise in teaching and learning. I now have the immense privilege of designing and facilitating the types of teaching development meets career management programming I wish I had when I started my teaching career.
In Their Own Words
Unsurprisingly, we collect data from our participants to help us assess the efficacy of our framework and develop future scholarship programming. Below are just a few quotes from our POD participants that I think capture what makes BYTE unique.
“I learned a lot of very applicable next steps for gathering evidence of my teaching excellence. I work very hard to ensure I apply my values in the classroom, and I now feel like I am able to get evidence and use it to advocate for myself. Although I love that my students get to experience it in my classroom, knowing that those outside (my administrators/colleagues) will know of the things I'm working on will feel great and maybe even spread what I do into other classrooms.”
“This workshop was wonderful! It was so well organized: from the theoretical perspective to the delivery and the tools we used were all very relevant and pertinent to this journey. We were provided with a useful framework to explore, guided by amazing graphic organizers. During this workshop series, we were constantly looking at different facets of the same piece: us within our teaching practices and vision of career path.”
“Even after having taken a practicum class, teaching excellence still was a foggy concept to me. I've been trained in and apply active learning, prioritize students as humans first, emphazise that it's okay if they don't know something, they're here to learn, if they already knew it they wouldn't be in my class. But this workshop really make the connection for me for how to market myself and really show off all the work I've done. Incredible job designing this workshop, thank you!!”
Want to Learn More?
Are you interested in learning more about the BYTE framework or how to bring BYTE to your institution? We offer workshops, retreats, and keynotes that can be tailored to your unique context. Visit us at www.brandingyourteachingexcellence.com.
You can also click here to read my other BYTE-related blog posts.
As always, thanks for reading. If you have questions about any of my content or have ideas for collaboration, please contact me at gabrielle@gabriellestecher.com.
