Additionally, it seemed, one should note that this was a philosophy in progress. Every statement we saw included that point, and, after all, some in the workshop were teaching their first courses even as we attempted to define our practice. I’m quite certain, though, that I didn’t fully appreciate what that continuing development entailed.

Regardless, my essay mimicked the form competently enough, and over the last couple of years, with some significant revisions, it has been part of a handful of successful applications.

This summer, however, as I prepare to re-enter the job market, I’m planning to throw my previous statements out and start from scratch. What’s more, instead of dreading the document and its complicated dance with an imaginary search committee, I now find myself legitimately excited about organizing my thoughts on teaching.

To put it simply: For the first time I believe I have a pedagogical philosophy to state.

Last week’s graduation marked the end of my sixth year of teaching. During that time I have worked at five universities (two where I was pursuing graduate degrees, one as an adjunct, and now another pair where I’ve held post-degree teaching fellowships). Surely some of my growth as a teacher has been a function of my personal maturation (I taught my first undergraduate course as the instructor of record when I was 24).

That said, my recent growth feels more like punctuated equilibrium—the evolutionary-biology theory that, much simplified, describes moments of abrupt change after long periods of stasis—than the steady drive of experience. I think the crucial factor has been my participation this past year in a weekly interdisciplinary colloquium in which a central topic of discussion was pedagogical theory and practice. In preparation for those discussions and then because our conversations sparked my interest, I’ve been reading books like Ken Bain’s What the Best College Teachers Do, Stephen Brookfield’s The Skillful Teacher, Susan VanZanten’s Joining the Mission, and others.

In short, I am convinced, as Bain writes, that “good teaching can be learned” and I’ve become an increasingly active student of pedagogy.

I can’t help but attribute that study to my feeling that I am coming off my best semester yet as a professor. And as I sit down now to rewrite my teaching statement, one of my first thoughts is that my philosophy no longer fits neatly on two or three pages. With that in mind, I’d like to share some of the issues I’ve been thinking through in a series of future posts on a junior faculty member’s evolving pedagogy in hopes that The Chronicle’s readers will help me interrogate that development.

Perhaps I might begin by asking if others have had an experience like the one I describe here. Was there a time when you made a stark transition in the classroom from scholar of your subject to pedagogically thoughtful teacher? What precipitated that change, and how did you pursue it?

My most common response to a “How should I respond to this e-mail?” question is to suggest a nonelectronic response. “Don’t be tempted to craft a retort,” I say. “Go talk to the person. This will probably make them very nervous, and that might be a good thing.”

In a conflict-averse, or at least conflict-uncomfortable, culture, face-to-face or even phone conversations can produce anxiety. Introverts with strong writing skills often find e-mail to be a perfect medium, as it permits them to dazzle recipients with artful word strings from a distance. Better to type, type, type, and push Send than deal with the messiness of emotion that can occur in a back-and-forth conversation.

In his recent “Office Politics Ninja” podcast, Brandon Moser calls those electronic assaults “e-mail drone strikes.” He notes that drones are emerging as preferred vehicles for warfare because they permit attacks on targets from afar, thereby protecting the assailant from injury. Bomb. Strike. KAPOW! No muss and no fuss. It works in the military, so it can work in professional settings, right? Not if you change the rules of warfare.

You can put a stop to e-mail drone strikes or at least reduce their frequency by making it dangerous to engage in that kind of warfare. It’s simple, really. Stop using e-mail to respond to e-mail. Pick up the phone. Drop by an office. Suggest a discussion over coffee. Send a message that you believe e-mail is for responding to routine inquiries, not for managing expressions of emotion. “You seem upset, let’s schedule some time to talk.” Or, better yet: “Oh, good. You’re here. I was surprised by your tone, so I thought I’d drop by to see you.”

Responding to e-mail drone strikes in person rather than electronically signals that lobbing e-mail bombs will have consequences, and forces your “opponent” to see you as a human being with actual feelings. That approach can also change the power dynamics and give you the upper hand. Better to be perceived as fearless than a chicken who uses a keyboard for protection.

Have you ever been a casualty of an e-mail drone strike? If so, how did you respond? Did your approach work?

[Creative Commons-licensed photo by Flickr user World Can't Wait.]

As the search committee began to review applications, it became clear that none of the candidates were the next Dr. Incredible. They were solid but not spectacular, promising but not omni-capable. Committee members began to believe that there was no way to replicate their about-to-depart colleague and said so publicly in the faculty lunchroom and in department meetings.

The department chair became frustrated by the committee’s dithering and demanded that it identify two candidates to invite for official interviews. The half-hearted response to those visitors by the department was discouraging to the finalists and maddening to the department leadership; even the students who attended the course presentations sighed, “They aren’t Dr. Incredible!”

Finally the department chair decided to ask the search committee to suspend its deliberations and allow the hiring of a visiting professor to cover the department’s needs for the coming year, with a fresh search to be undertaken in the following year. The thinking was that Dr. Incredible needed to be missed before she could be replaced, that her influence needed to be diminished before a new hire could be poised for success.

Have you ever seen a department commit the replication error of trying to replace a departmental star too quickly or too exactly? Do you think it is ever wise to limp for a year to allow a departing colleague’s magnitude to diminish before seeking a successor? What advice might you offer to a new hire who realizes that she is following in a giant’s steps?

I was walking across campus one bright, sunny day (this was in Florida, where almost all the days are bright and sunny), when I saw this colleague coming toward me on the hedge-lined concrete walkway. He and I had enjoyed a cordial relationship over the years, occasionally stopping to chat about children and vacations and such when we ran into each other on campus, so I smiled as he approached and prepared to greet him.

Then I noticed he wasn’t smiling.

In fact, he looked downright angry. And as he got closer, I could see that he was indeed livid. Before I could ask what was wrong, he stopped directly in front of me, blocking my path, and launched into an expletive-laced, five-minute tirade on how terribly his students wrote. In his view, that sorry state of affairs was entirely the fault of the English department, of which I was merely unfortunate enough to be the immediate embodiment.

“Aren’t you teaching them anything over there?” he concluded, in spittle-punctuated crescendo.

Not wanting to escalate the situation or make any more of a scene, I assured him quietly that we were doing our best and that I would be sure to bring up his concerns at our next department meeting. I then excused myself, squeezed through the small gap between colleague and hedge, and left him fuming there on the sidewalk.

I’ve thought about that experience often over the years, especially when I’ve heard complaints about student writing from professors in other disciplines. Not that Zaretsky blames the English department, but as I was reading his piece, I could almost hear colleagues across the country wondering the same thing my friend asked me all those years ago: “Aren’t you teaching them anything over there?”

If I could go back and talk to that colleague, knowing what I know now, I’d point out that students don’t always apply what they’ve learned in one class to their other classes—even if it’s the next one in a sequence. My fellow Chronicle columnist James Lang deals with this phenomenon quite thoroughly and cogently in his excellent multipart essay, “Why They Don’t Apply What They’ve Learned.” I’ve experienced it firsthand in my own courses, as I’ve had students in Comp 2 who also took me for Comp 1.

But I’d also like for that colleague, and all my colleagues, to understand what we do and don’t do—or perhaps I should say the limits of what we do—in the English department.

I’ve always believed that my chief job, as a composition teacher, is to show students how to approach writing the way writers approach writing—as a task to be completed rather than as some sort of esoteric activity. Along the way, I also need to help them learn the conventions of academic and professional writing, improve their grasp of standard American English, and begin to think critically.

Of those last three, only the first is primarily the province of the English department—and even it does not belong solely to us. The truth is that all three elements must be reinforced constantly, throughout their education, before students will even begin to internalize them. We’ll do our best in the English department to lay a solid foundation, but they’re never going to build on that foundation unless other professors encourage and expect them to.

To put it very simply, if you want students to use good grammar in your business or history course, then make your expectations clear and penalize them when they fall short. Hey, it works for me.

But if you think they’re going to walk into your classroom with impeccable grammar, just because they’ve already passed English comp, then you’re destined to be bitterly disappointed. Perhaps you’ll even wind up yelling at one of your English-department colleagues on the sidewalk one bright, sunny day.

So now we lose one week of whole-class instruction to make way for individual time with the final paper, a purple pen, and me. Instead of our usual 2 hours 40 minutes of class time, meeting with everyone who chooses to (about two-thirds) takes about four hours per class.

I’ve got to say, this last round of workshops was highly gratifying. I saw such improvement in my writers. Not perfect papers by any means, but evidence of students ready for English 101 in the fall. They’ll be well equipped for the next step in their education.

I worry sometimes whether I’m adequately preparing these developmental English students for the courses that follow. I try to touch base with them once they’ve left, and ask for feedback. Face to face, reading their culminating work, I feel pretty good about things. My courses demand a lot of writing—that old thing about practice makes perfect isn’t exactly true, but you definitely can’t improve without practice.

Seeing the work pay off is the highlight of my semester, but students have such bright smiles when they see how far they’ve come. This is definitely worth whatever time it takes.

Last year my subject was supporting and developing adjunct faculty. This year, it was “Serving as Department/Division Chair: Beyond the Job Description.” This topic was developed in response to discussions last year at the four regional workshops, during which it became clear that many chairs didn’t have a job description at all, or, if they did, that it was either too vague to be helpful or, in fact, did not cover the actual, if unspoken, core of the job.

In preparation for the workshop, I asked the participants to send me their job descriptions, if they had them, or to let me know that they did not have one at all. Obviously, if you have no description you can’t go beyond it, and it’s very hard to define “beyond” without knowing what’s actually in one. In response to this request I received about 20 descriptions and around a half-dozen responses noting that the chair had no description at his or her institution.

As one would expect, these job descriptions share a lot in common. The most-mentioned aspects of the position are bureaucratic imperatives such as schedule planning, curricular oversight, faculty hiring and evaluation, participation in chair meetings and reporting to senior administrators, and compiling department reports. Somewhat less common are participation in student recruiting, dealing with student complaints, overseeing faculty development, advocating for the department or division, external relations, pursuing grants, and managing equipment purchasing and maintenance.

But the most interesting thing about these job descriptions, to me, is their almost complete silence about several of the most important duties of a good chair. For instance, only a couple of them discuss fostering a collegial and functional work environment in the department, even though anyone who has worked for a chair lacking this skill knows exactly how bad it can make one’s professional life. They also almost universally ignore that a chair might helpfully be engaged in higher-education issues and trends, as opposed to disciplinary matters.

Both of these last two omissions are, I think, a subsidiary of a larger one, which is the chair’s role in advocating for and articulating the institution’s mission at the departmental or divisional level. I am certainly aware that many academics think mission statements and their attendant missions are a piece of corporate nonsense, but let me tell you: Accreditors and others who control institutional fates care deeply about them. Our regional accreditor, the Higher Learning Commission, has “Mission and Integrity” as its first criterion for accreditation, and expects its member institutions to pay serious attention to mission in their operations and planning. Boards of trustees, similarly, often come from corporate settings where organizational mission is a key component of operations and, in my experience, expect an administration to put mission at the center of its priorities.

And here’s the next key point: In tough financial times such as the current ones, an institution’s mission becomes ever more crucial, as it is surely going to be used to determine strategic (and therefore financial) priorities. On the CIC’s e-mail list for chief academic officers, we have for some time been discussing how to prioritize our programs to secure institutional viability (if a college has reduced revenue, something has to be done, and most private colleges are struggling with reduced or, at best, flat revenue these days). The days of institutions striving to be “all things to all people” are over, and we are all going to have to make very tough decisions about discontinuing programs and taking other actions to control costs and improve efficiency. These decisions simply have to be made according to an institution’s values as articulated in its mission for it to maintain its integrity and identity.

As the first level of administration, department and division chairs have a crucial role in supporting and enacting an institution’s mission. This is why they should be conversant with the national “big picture” of higher education, because each individual institution’s mission has significant interactions with this big picture.

For example, if a college serves a high proportion of needy students, national policies concerning Pell Grants and other need-based financial support are crucial to its future. If an institution seeks to preserve its identity as a traditional liberal-arts college, the national conversation about the value of the liberal arts, the federal priority being placed on career training in higher-education policy, and the waning student demand for traditional liberal-arts majors are all very serious issues for the faculty, and they need to understand them.

Engagement with these issues is crucial for chairs. They can continue their traditional advocacy role for their programs, but that advocacy will be vastly more effective coming from a perspective informed by a real knowledge of the national scene. At administrative levels above the chair, institutional mission is a driver of strategic priorities. Understanding the interactions between the large issues in higher education and the institution’s broadest articulations of its values can help chairs move from pushing paper to being key leaders on campus.

• Don’t assume that conducting a successful search is just a matter of posting an advertisement far and wide. Advertising in multiple venues is important, but having a well-written job description is critical. Explain what’s unique about your campus and the leadership role you’re seeking to fill. Review similar job postings so you have a benchmark. Nominations and referrals are also keys to your recruitment success. Always ask search-committee members and campus leaders to call or write to colleagues in their networks about new leadership roles and career opportunities at your institution.
• Make sure you have the right person chairing the committee. The chair’s excitement for the role should be evident in the first call to the candidates. This person should be knowledgeable and enthusiastic about the institution and the position and should be prepared to answer questions like the following: Why is this position open? What are the challenges and opportunities of this role? What is the team like within that division or college? What is the division’s or college’s operating budget? To whom will I report? Remember, the chair is the recruiter, the face of your organization, its cheerleader and advocate.
• Don’t stop recruiting candidates when you receive a few good-looking résumés. You haven’t yet vetted the candidates and don’t know if they are serious, if you can afford them, or if they’ll be a good match. You need to have a solid group of four to six finalists to proceed. Take time do your research and consider up-and-coming talents who might be ready for the next step in their career.
• Let candidates know what to expect. Once you’ve narrowed the pool, it’s time to call the candidates. Tell them how the process will unfold and what your time frame is. Candidates welcome the screening process; it gives them added insight into the opportunity, the campus, and the seriousness of your search. At the close of the initial call, let them know what happens next (e.g., “We are conducting screening phone calls this week, and we expect to narrow the pool and conduct Skype interviews over the next two weeks. We hope to conduct campus interviews with finalists over the next month.”)
• Is your campus-visit schedule candidate friendly? Make sure the schedule includes meetings not only with the search committee, but with the team this new campus leader will manage and key peers, as well as one-on-one time with the manager to whom the candidate will report if picked for the job. Set up meetings with student, employer, or alumni groups, too, if appropriate. Day 1 is usually a travel day, so give the candidate a little time to catch his or her breath. Offer a real-estate tour in the afternoon and host a dinner that first night. Those are great ways to set the right tone. Excellent hospitality will make a big difference in your recruitment effort. Don’t forget to arrange for someone to meet the candidate at the airport or hotel and escort her/him to and from campus. Make sure someone takes the candidate to the airport when the visit is over.
• If at first you don’t succeed … try again. If, following on-campus interviews, you still haven’t found a good match, then it’s time to regroup. You and your committee must figure out what went wrong. Did the ad and your recruiting efforts not yield the interest expected? Does the job description need to be rewritten or retitled? Talk with the finalists about how the search was conducted; you might gain some added insight. You can start the search over, but unless you change your recruiting practices and consider the feedback offered by the finalists, you may get the same results the second time around. Searches fail for many reasons—salary and benefits issues are often cited, but these can be vetted much earlier in the process. Did your top candidate withdraw for personal family reasons, or were their high expectations not met? Was the committee divided over who would be the best candidate? Were there other internal issues?
• Seek outside help. Search firms are often called in because the first recruitment effort did not yield the results the committee had hoped for or the top candidate was the one who got away. This might be a good time to seek assistance from a trusted search partner who can commit the time and resources to recruiting candidates for this important leadership role on your campus.

Have you been involved in a failed search? Why did it fail, and what would you do differently next time?

Diane M. Fennig is a senior consultant with the Human Capital Group, an executive-search and leadership-consulting firm based in Brentwood, Tenn.

I’ve given up wearing a sash with badges of my skills, though perhaps it is a look I could bring back into fashion. I hadn’t thought of my brush with citizenship in a lot of years, until a few weeks ago.

A student in my intro-to-composition class came up to talk to me, saying she’d have to miss the next session. The reason? She was getting naturalized, becoming a U.S. citizen after a process that had taken years. She had her appointment paper to prove it and excitedly showed it to me. The ceremony was to be held in the state capital, more than three hours away, and she worried she wouldn’t be back in time. I assured her that this was a good reason to miss class, congratulated her, and we worked out a plan for the content she’d be missing.

The next week, this student was unexpectedly in class. I worried that something had gone wrong, but one look at her radiant smile told me otherwise. Things had gone as planned, and she’d rushed back to make it in time for our course.

The path to citizenship is long, no matter where you come from or what your legal status is. It costs a lot of money and requires a lot of patience. Having observed the process and seeing my student go through it reminds me of how amazing some of my students are, as well as of the promise of America that I so often forget in the midst of my frustrations with reality.

There’s a conversation I have with my first-year composition classes almost every semester, usually triggered by a student’s question about one of the many things they were warned in high school never to do in an essay: Use first-person pronouns, use second-person pronouns, begin a sentence with “and,” “but,” or “because,” end a sentence with a preposition, and so on.

Can they do that in my class?, they want to know.

My answer is that there’s literally nothing they can’t do in a piece of writing, if they have a good enough reason—although if they’re going to use the F-word, for example, or an ethnic slur, they had better have a darn good reason. The corollary, I tell them—the responsibility that goes along with the freedom—is that they should think through and have a good reason for everything they do in a piece of writing.

I believe that’s sound advice, not just for first-year comp students but for writers in general.

However, having said all that, if I were Supreme Arbiter of the English Language and had the opportunity to eliminate one word—not merely ban it, but eradicate it entirely—that word would be “being.” Not all forms of to be, mind you. Just that one.

The main reason for my irrational and perhaps unhealthy antipathy toward this one word is that it’s the primary culprit in what I’ve come to regard as the most egregiously obnoxious construction ever to defile an otherwise-acceptable sentence: “being that.”

“Being that I was an only child ….” “Being that the chapter wasn’t supposed to be on the test ….” “Being that my teammates looked up to me ….” “Being that Poe was one of the greatest poets of the 19th century ….” What all those sentences have in common is that the first two words make me not want to read the rest. In fact, they make me want to wad the essays up, douse them in lighter fluid, and set them ablaze while performing a ritual dance.

OK, that’s going a bit too far. But as you may have deduced by now, I do not like that construction.

What’s so bad about it? Let’s start with the fact that it blatantly flouts Orwell’s rule for conciseness, using two words where one will most certainly do. Clearly, when the writer says “being that,” what he or she really means is “since” or “because.” Think how much better the sentences above would read if the writer had simply said what he or she meant: “Since I was an only child ….” “Because my teammates looked up to me ….”

“Being that,” by comparison, just sounds awful. It’s an inversion, and a perversion, of a more common but only slightly better construction, “that being.” I’m not a big fan of “that being,” either, not least because in student essays it almost always signals a sentence fragment, with the verbal “being” substituted for an actual verb: “That being my favorite restaurant” instead of “That was my favorite restaurant.”

In addition, “that being,” even if used correctly in an introductory phrase, often requires two additional words (“the case”) in order to make any sense, thereby once again violating Orwell’s dictate.

I’m sure there are times when “being” is a perfectly good and perhaps even indispensable word choice. I just can’t think of any right now. And that being the case, I’m going to conclude this blog post, being that I’m finished and all.

I have found that search committees consistently interview candidates for teacher-administrator positions based solely on their administrative chops. After all, this is the primary concern for the position, as even a 50-percent teaching load really tends to be less than that in terms of the actual day-to-day functioning of the position. That teaching load, however, is a pretty big role to have detached from the considerations, especially if the position is in academic administration (a deanship or even a department-chair position). If the new administrator stinks as a teacher, or perhaps worse, views administration as wholly superior to teaching, the tone that establishes can lead to many problems.

For institutions where these positions are common, especially smaller institutions where teaching is integral to everything, the wise search committee will seek teaching evaluations and reviews, even for positions that are primarily administrative.

Have you ever seen an administrator’s classroom duties negatively affect his or her success at an institution? How can search committees balance their need to find an administrator and a teacher?