A Faculty Wellness Workshop Series: Leveraging On Campus Expertise

Abstract

Centers for Teaching and Learning (CTL) that suffer from funding and staffing issues must rely on outside resources to enhance their effectiveness. Even if funds and staff are adequate, most CTL can improve their reach and effectiveness by the partnerships they establish across their campuses. In this article, we describe a faculty wellness workshop series that illustrates the strategic leveraging we have been able to accomplish on our campus. The series included free standing faculty workshops devoted to stress management (partnering with Counseling Services), work life balance and workplace civility (with members of our faculty learning communities), voice coaching (with our Communication Studies Department), healthy eating and physical activity (with our campus’s Director of Health Promotion), and health coaching (with our Campus Recreation department). Members of each of the partnering entities presented workshops in collaboration with our center staff. We summarize the individual workshops, report data from the faculty participants’ evaluations of the program, and provide lessons learned for other institutions that might be interested in creating a similar program.

Keywords: collaboration, faculty development, personal development

Introduction: Holistic Faculty Development Programs

The emergence of multifaceted, holistic faculty development (FD) programs has been documented by recent reviewers (Lockhart, 2013; Sorcinelli, Gray, & Birch, 2011). Holistic FD includes a wide range of programs devoted to activities such as effective teaching, new faculty orientation, mentoring, coaching, and faculty learning communities. In addition, in a review of the history of FD, Ouellett (2010) noted that a major area of interest is the personal development of faculty members, which includes facets such as personal growth, self awareness, mastery, vitality, and self reflection. Several of these facets include elements that are directly or indirectly related to faculty wellness, including stress management, work life balance, and healthy eating and improved physical activity.

Some FD programs emphasize the development of faculty identity. For example, Cochrane’s (2013) Courage Study Circles program emphasizes exploration and reflection of one’s identity as a teacher, what she calls the “heart” of teaching in higher education. There is another kind of heart that might also be considered in a holistic FD program—one’s physical heart or, more broadly, the health and wellness of faculty members. In support of the personal development of faculty members, holistic FD programs might consider including wellness components that complement and support teaching, research, and service activities.

There is limited research literature on the provision of faculty wellness services by Centers for Teaching and Learning (CTL) (e.g., Haines et al., 2007). Hubbard, Atkins, and Brinko (1998) described a holistic institutional model that includes FD, employee assistance, health promotion, and institutional development. Corporate employers (e.g., Baicker, Cutler, & Song, 2010; Parks & Steelman, 2008), K 12 schools (e.g., Grunbaum, Rutman, & Sathrum, 2001; Heidorn & Centeio, 2012), and medical schools (e.g., Gautam, 2009) have implemented workplace health promotion programs for many years. Although there are higher education programs that address aspects of faculty wellness (e.g., Hubbard & Atkins, 1995; Viggiano & Strobel, 2009), these programs are often developed and implemented outside of CTL, such as through a campus’s Health, Recreation, or Human Resources division.

Surprisingly, there has been little attention to the ways in which CTL provides “counseling” or “coaching” services for our faculty, even though faculty developers and instructional design specialists are likely to encounter faculty issues that fall into these areas. Coaching involves creating a partnership that helps people accomplish their professional goals (Bloom, Castagna, Moir, & Warren, 2005). There has been some interest in coaching to improve teaching. For example, Dana, Havens, Hochanadel, and Phillips (2010) describe a coaching program for online teachers. However, there are other kinds of faculty issues that may be amenable to coaching. Examples here include workplace civility issues, departmental politics, individual differences in the ability to cope with stress, and personality variables related to adaptive or maladaptive behavior. A counseling/coaching framework has the potential to be a productive addition to a center’s services and program offerings (e.g., Hill, 2004).

While the value of holistic programs is clear, the ability of CTL to develop and implement these kinds of programs is less clear. As the range and extent of possible FD programs increase, the demands on CTL also increase. Budgetary and staffing challenges may limit the opportunities for CTL to move toward increasingly holistic programs. An effective way to counter these challenges is to leverage one’s local campus community, drawing on their expertise to coach colleagues in targeted areas.

In this article, we describe the development of a Faculty Wellness Workshop Series that leverages our partnerships with several campus entities and focuses on both physical and psychological aspects of wellness. Although our institution is large (over 1,000 faculty members and 25,000 students), our CTL is small. We have three full time technology and design specialists, along with two half time directors of FD and teaching excellence (who are faculty members). Thus, it has been essential that we cultivate our campus’s services and expertise in ways that can supplement our CTL’s offerings.

The series we developed included free standing faculty workshops devoted to stress management (partnering with Counseling Services), work–life balance and workplace civility (with members of our faculty learning communities), voice coaching (with our Communication Studies Department), healthy eating and physical activity (with our campus’s Director of Health Promotion), and health coaching (with our Campus Recreation department). We chose these topics primarily based on current or previous faculty learning communities and through faculty and staff expertise that had been identified through other CTL programs and events. Members of each of the partnering entities presented workshops in collaboration with our CTL staff. In describing the series, we summarize the individual workshops and report data from the participants’ evaluations of the program.

The Faculty Wellness Workshop Series

Our CTL’s mission statement includes faculty support for teaching, research, and service, with a focus on professional development and balance. One of our university’s Academic Master Plan strategic directions is to promote a safe campus and healthy lifestyle for students, faculty members, and staff. Thus, the workshop series aligned with our campus’s interest in supporting the wellness of our faculty. We added it to our existing workshop offerings that focus on FD and teaching issues. Our CTL has the strong support of our Provost and an excellent reputation across campus. These facts allow us to develop innovative workshops, such as the wellness series, with minimal concern about “mission creep” or other possible negative effects, such as threatening or diluting the services offered by other campus entities.

Three years prior to the workshop series, our CTL conducted a faculty needs assessment. The wellness series was consistent with the feedback we received from the faculty respondents. Balancing teaching, research, and service and preventing burnout were two of the three most frequently mentioned possible workshop topics by faculty. Based on the results of the needs assessment, we customarily offer our workshops midweek and in the mid afternoon. On occasion, we will repeat workshops in the same week. However, we did not repeat any of the wellness series workshops.

There is clear value to developing intrainstitutional liaisons and partnerships (Zahorski, 2002). Several faculty resources at our institution (e.g., distance learning, the graduate college, faculty teaching and research grants, faculty exercise programs) existed before the creation of our CTL. Thus, we have to work within the boundaries of this organizational structure as we have expanded our FD and teaching excellence services. One particularly fruitful mechanism is our CTL’s annual fall Faculty Fair, a day long open house and information sharing event with representation from over two dozen campus offices or services. The initial idea for the wellness series emerged from discussions with some of these campus representatives. We recruited two workshop presenters directly from the Faculty Fair.

In the creation of the wellness series, we were careful to not duplicate or dilute the services provided by other campus entities. Rather, we attempted to complement the activities of other areas in ways that would relate to wellness themed FD. This theme is not traditionally the focus of these other intrainstitutional partners. We found our colleagues from other campus centers to be very receptive to working with us. There were no concerns about negative effects resulting from their partnership with our CTL. One major goal of the workshop series was to capitalize on some of these existing services or to recruit help from areas that did not traditionally offer faculty services. Another goal was to establish new, or strengthen existing, connections with other campus entities that did or could offer faculty support.

There are multiple components of faculty and staff wellness (e.g., Kitko, 2001; Madsen, 2003), including physical, social, emotional, occupational, and spiritual facets. Our program directly or indirectly emphasized all of these facets except the spiritual one. The series consisted of five workshops, offered over a period of one academic year. The choice of topics was dictated by our familiarity with campus services, connections with other units across campus, and local faculty and staff expertise. Although we described the program as a faculty wellness series, we also invited campus staff to attend all the workshops. As with all of our CTL’s workshops, we announced the upcoming wellness series events 1 week prior to their occurrence, listed them on our CTL’s online calendar, and sent out reminders 1–2 days prior to the event. In all of these announcements, faculty and staff could register for the workshop, although this was not a requirement for their participation. Upon arrival at the workshops, attendees provided their names and departmental affiliations on a sign up sheet.

Our CTL staff were not qualified to lead most of the wellness workshops, and this was another reason why we reached out to other campus entities. In addition, our CTL’s Director of Faculty Development is a Professor of Psychology who conducts research on sport and exercise psychology. His knowledge of this research area as well as his campus connections (e.g., with the Campus Recreation and Counseling Services Centers and collaborations with faculty from other health related disciplines) was a benefit in developing the series.

CTL staff met with all of the presenters prior to their workshops in order to ensure that the presentations adequately addressed the concerns and experiences of faculty members. During these meetings, we highlighted the importance that presenters not only provide relevant information but also encourage attendees to reflect upon the issues and apply those to their practice. Staff members who attended the workshops also asked questions that kept the conversation focused on faculty practice and applications. All workshops occurred once on a weekday mid afternoon (Tuesday or Thursday, ranging between 2:00 and 4:00 p.m.) in our CTL space during the fall and spring semesters of a single academic year. Because of faculty and staff scheduling limitations, we varied the days of the week and times during which the workshops were offered.

We video recorded all of the presentations and added these to the workshop video archive on our CTL website. This archive makes workshops publicly available approximately 48 hours following the original presentation. Viewers have both web and mobile options to play the recordings. The presenters also made their presentations and any supplementary materials available to participants, and those who could not attend, upon request.

Workshop Evaluations and Results

Because the 45 faculty and staff attendees completed the evaluations anonymously, we did not collect demographic information about them. However, based on workshop preregistrations and sign ins, we estimated that 26 women and 19 men participated in these events, with representation across all the university’s colleges. Workshop attendees completed a standard 8 item evaluation form (used for all our CTL’s workshops) immediately following the presentation. Using a 5 point Likert scale (1 = strongly disagree, 5 = strongly agree), they rated the workshop with respect to their satisfaction with it (i.e., level of disappointment, workshop not meeting expectations, overall satisfaction), aspects of the presentation (i.e., presentation not well organized, presenter communicated effectively), and whether they learned something useful from it (i.e., increased knowledge/skills, plan to use some of the ideas from it, information will be useful). Five of the items were positively worded, and three items were negatively worded. The complete wording of the items can be found in Table 1.

Respondents also had the option to answer three open ended questions—the specific ways they intend to use what they learned in the workshop, what they liked about the workshop, and what they disliked about it. Attendees deposited their evaluation forms in a box as they exited the CTL following the workshop.

Table 1 presents the evaluation results from the combined workshops of the wellness series. We compared the evaluation ratings against the response scale midpoint, which is a simple indication of the extent to which participants tended to disagree or agree with the items. Ratings that are significantly different from the midpoint indicate a tendency toward more frequent disagreement than agreement (or vice versa). As the table indicates, participants were highly favorable about all evaluated aspects of the workshops. In particular, they were satisfied with the organization and presentation of the topics and found the information provided to be both personally and professionally useful. As noted earlier, we also collected open ended responses for each of the workshops. These responses, along with summary ratings of the individual workshops, are reviewed in the following sections. To simplify the presentation of the individual workshop summary ratings, we report the statistics for the categories used in our CTL’s postworkshop evaluation report that is provided to the presenters. These categories include overall workshop satisfaction (items 1–3), presenter characteristics (items 4–5), learning (item 6), and potential application of workshop concepts (items 7–8). For these statistics, items are scored so that higher scores reflect more positive ratings on the items.

Discussion

The wellness series was a success in terms of faculty participation and evaluations as well as our ability to leverage campus resources and expertise. Our general approach was to provide “consciousness raising” opportunities for faculty with respect to several wellness domains and to present information that was not generally available to faculty but that was likely to be of interest to them.

For reasons described earlier, we wanted to complement existing campus resources and services that were available to faculty and staff. For example, as with most institutions, psychological services are offered to faculty and staff through an Employee Assistance Program. However, the expertise of our Counseling Services staff proved to be beneficial for our faculty. Although our campus health center cannot provide services to faculty or staff, the health center staff were willing to provide support for our CTL’s faculty wellness goals. We also had a wide range of faculty and staff expertise that could be tapped for workshops of this nature. In our institution’s case, a history of successful faculty learning communities was beneficial when designing this series and identifying its potential presenters.

The number of workshop attendees was lower than we had hoped, although these numbers are similar to the average number of attendees for other, nonwellness workshops during the fall (M = 16) and spring (M = 11) semesters of that year. While we record and archive most of our workshops, we do not have the ability to accurately monitor the number of views of individual events. Individuals from other institutions (including high school teachers) have communicated with our CTL that they have found the recorded workshops informative and helpful.

Based on the number of attendees and workshop domains offered, some insight can be drawn about the kinds of concerns that are most salient for faculty members. In particular, the largest groups attended the stress management, workplace civility, and work/nonwork balance sessions. From these numbers, it is evident that aspects of the job and one’s professional responsibilities are particularly challenging for faculty members. The stress management and balance workshop attendance numbers reflected high levels of interest from the faculty needs assessment conducted 3 years ago. Lower attendance at the healthy eating workshop might have been due to faculty members having other opportunities to learn about this topic. For example, our university has a history of faculty staff healthy eating and physical activity programs administered through the Campus Recreation Center. Low attendance at the voice coaching workshop may have indicated that voice related problems are infrequent for most faculty. Compared to the other workshops, both of these sessions addressed more specific issues, which might have also reduced overall faculty interest. It is also possible that these two topics were perceived by faculty as falling less within the domain of a CTL compared to the other topics.

We have several recommendations for CTLs that might be interested in developing a similar kind of program. First, we recommend that a faculty wellness series be developed in conjunction with and in order to complement existing campus wellness and health promotion services and programs. When appropriate, our workshop presenters discussed additional campus options available to faculty and staff related to the workshop topics. As we have noted, the series comprised partnerships with campus entities that did not typically provide services to faculty as well as areas that did regularly work with faculty. There are other aspects of holistic FD that we did not include in the series. For example, because we are a state, public institution of higher education, we do not have formal entities that foster or address religious or spiritual aspects of wellness. However, if there was sufficient faculty interest in a workshop devoted to these aspects, we are confident that we could follow the template developed for the series and find faculty or staff (e.g., from our Religious Studies program) who would be willing to partner with our CTL.

A second recommendation is that CTL rely on the connections and collaborations of their staff to leverage campus resources. The success of the wellness program can be attributed to our ability to recruit presenters from outside our CTL. For the most part, our CTL staff do not possess the expertise required to provide high quality presentations on faculty wellness topics. All of our presenters expressed a willingness to repeat their workshops if requested. Most of the presenters also attend our annual faculty resource fair. If a CTL has something similar to the Faculty Fair, this can be an excellent means for identifying potential collaborators and presenters. Of course, looking within one’s own campus is not the only way to develop a wellness series. CTL might also utilize the resources and expertise from other CTLs. Although we have not actively pursued partnerships with other CTLs for our wellness series, there is potential to do so. This collaborative route could allow us to offer an expanded range of topics or to learn from the activities and experiences of other CTLs when modifying our series.

A third recommendation is to offer a variety of wellness topics. Variety increases the chances that faculty members will find something in the series that pertains to their situation or captures their interest. We found that there were few faculty members who were interested in most or all of the topics we offered. A potentially fruitful partner for future workshops of this kind is the Office of Human Resources. We are currently planning to meet with our campus’s office to see if there are avenues for partnership that will benefit both of our units. Fourth, offering specific wellness topics, such as workplace civility and work/nonwork balance, may be of particular interest to faculty members. These topics can also be developed into more formal programs, such as faculty learning communities.

With the civility and balance workshops, we had both faculty and staff attendees. It is likely that faculty and staff have different issues and experiences with respect to these topics. In fact, some of the discussion at the civility workshop noted these differences (e.g., dealing with a work supervisor or administrator may be dissimilar to the issues that faculty members have with their departmental colleagues or chairs; faculty members may treat their administrative staff in a disrespectful manner). Additionally, we were unable to address balance or civility issues that might arise due to factors such as gender, sexual orientation, age, and academic rank. Failing to address these issues may leave attendees frustrated, confused, or dissatisfied. CTLs might consider offering faculty learning communities to address topics of balance and civility. Our FLCs on these topics were well received by participants and productive in their final outcomes.

Campuses such as the University of California, Riverside, (http://wellness.ucr.edu/wellness_programs.html) and Penn State University (http://ohr.psu.edu/health matters) have model wellness programs for their faculty and staff, although these are not associated with their CTLs. Such programs reflect a healthy workplace culture that offers comprehensive, university wide, health and wellness programs and services. Creating programs on par with these campuses undoubtedly requires buy in throughout an institution. Major partners for such comprehensive programs include human resources, campus health, and campus recreation divisions. Also, these programs likely require full time staff, commitment from various academic departments (e.g., nutrition, nursing, psychology, health), and, of course, related funding. It is probably safe to say that the staff of most CTLs do not have the time, interests, skills, or resources to develop and manage programs of this caliber. It is certainly the case in our institution, which is not positioned to create these kinds of programs.

Incorporating faculty wellness programs can be challenging for CTLs. Rather than ignoring faculty wellness issues, we decided to address them in ways that leveraged the time, interests, and skills of members of our campus community. The workshop series reported here was a good compromise that did not create an undue burden on our limited staff and did not threaten, duplicate, or dilute the efforts of our partners. Through the program, we were able to offer holistic FD topics that were not dependent upon the experiences or expertise of our CTL’s staff members.

If they offer wellness themed workshops, CTLs might consider encouraging attendees to develop an action plan using the content of those workshops. CTL could ask their presenters to address the institutional and physical infrastructure possibilities related to their topics. For example, instructional technology staff or people responsible for room design could be consulted for or invited to the voice coaching workshop. Or campus recreation, health, or human resources staff could brainstorm about ways in which stress management techniques described in a workshop might be implemented in office, meeting, or classroom settings.

We are considering the development of a Faculty Wellness Certificate Program. Such a program would partner with Campus Recreation and other campus offices to permit faculty members to develop an individualized wellness plan to enhance their health and wellness through our partnerships, programs, and resources. We could also offer opportunities for faculty members to collaborate or partner with colleagues who have similar wellness goals. Faculty participants could be encouraged to attend specific workshops in order to receive the wellness certificate. Because we recorded the wellness series workshop presentations, a much larger number of faculty can “attend” those sessions in the future and complete the certificate program on their own time and schedule.

There are other possible points of emphasis or extensions for CTLs that are considering the implementation of a wellness series. For example, it might be interesting to conduct case studies of faculty members who have systematically engaged in wellness practices. This could be accomplished in conjunction with the certificate program mentioned previously. Another kind of case study could involve the recruitment of a group of faculty who use the workshop lessons to form a wellness themed support group. This would provide a more holistic experience for faculty compared to the wellness programs offered by our Campus Recreation center that are individual in nature and do not collaborate with our CTL.

In conclusion, the creation of faculty wellness programs in CTLs ensures that those programs are familiar with and sensitive to the unique needs and challenges of college faculty members. Specifically, CTLs can address how programming might tie wellness to the major faculty responsibilities of teaching, research, and service. This wellness emphasis aligns with the increased interest in holistic FD provided by CTLs. We found that a wellness series can supplement the other aspects of our holistic FD efforts. We learned that the creation and implementation of the series was a manageable task because we leveraged several sources of campus expertise. The planning and organization for the series did not create especially large time or effort demands on our CTL. Our reliance on connections with other campus services and academic departments sets our model apart from other holistic approaches and shows how a small group of faculty developers can have a broader impact on the campus community. We encourage other CTLs to consider developing a wellness series by following our model.

Acknowledgments

The authors presented versions of this paper at the 2014 POD Network annual conference in Dallas, TX, as well as the 2015 annual meeting of the Southern Regional Faculty and Instructional Development Consortium in Chattanooga, TN. We thank attendees at these meetings for their valuable suggestions and questions. We also thank Barbara Draude for her comments on an earlier draft of this paper.

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