Faculty development
Faculty development in Germany refers to the promotion of faculties at colleges and universities in terms of personnel and organization. The aim is not to promote the university, but to promote the individual faculties. This concept arises from the criticism of tuition fees , which are often levied by the state, but actually only develop their effect if they do not support the university but the faculty.
Comparison of faculties
Another model of faculty development - without tied to tuition fees or fees - provides for the comparison of faculties. All mechanical engineering or economics faculties in a country are compared on the basis of various criteria.
Faculty Development Criteria
1: Leadership by the dean : (chicken yard principle) The first field of competence relates to the faculty management by the dean as a manager: The dean, as the manager, is responsible for the structures, processes and results of the faculty. His work includes the control of development work in all of the following fields of faculty development together with the team of colleagues and employees in the faculty.
2: Aims of the faculty: This is about principles, models, visions and strategies (in the school context it is called the “school program”), which ideally often contain statements and key figures on all of these nine fields in the faculty brochure.
3: Participant orientation / personnel development for the employees: The employees and lecturers are an important potential in the faculty, only with their commitment, with their competent work, their interest in further training and change and improvement as well as constant learning through personnel development can the structures, processes and Results of the faculty mature.
4: Resources (skills, information, finances): This is about the budget of the faculty, how a financial plan is coordinated by the dean with those involved and in which projects and purchases are invested. It is also about the distribution of competencies and information: in this development field, it must be specified in writing, for example, how information is exchanged in writing and who has competencies in which fields.
5: Processes of teaching and research , d. H. especially seminar development and (third-party) funding activity for research projects : It is about checking whether seminars guarantee close supervision of students in order to lead them to learning success and graduation; The aim is to evaluate whether the seminar content corresponds to the state of the art and whether it is didactically structured and how it is integrated into the course curriculum, e.g. B. also be needed later in the job or for the final exam . But the processes of developing research projects are also addressed: Are the work steps in the faculty in such a way that projects can be acquired and successfully carried out, completed and marketed or transferred to the public?
6: Lecturer satisfaction: This is about determining the lecturer's satisfaction. As employees, you have a high priority in this development area, and all developments should include those involved and also increase their satisfaction, because only a satisfied lecturer, e.g. B. in the so-called mid-level staff can also make a positive contribution to faculty development.
7: Satisfaction of the students with the teaching and the learning conditions: In addition to the employees, the recipients of the educational material - i.e. the students - are asked in writing about their satisfaction with various criteria. Ideally, the development fields mentioned here are also embedded as questions in the questionnaire.
8: Cooperation and social responsibility, image of the faculty through projects: This is about the faculty facing up to its socio-political, socially responsible and democratizing responsibility and each faculty considering how it can contribute to this through continuous projects. These can be, for example, projects for environmental protection or for the improvement of social conditions or morally-ethically-responsible research in the natural sciences .
9: Success, evaluation and securing results: The results of the faculty and the controlling are presented in a kind of business report of the faculty by the faculty developer. In this field, progress in the above-mentioned development fields is regularly reported in writing. It also makes sense to define individual key figures as a kind of 'controlling' for each development field, which can be measured in order to show the positive change in faculty development in each field (e.g. increase in employee and student satisfaction).
Documentation of results
The aim is to calculate the comparative evaluation of faculties with points and to include the points achieved in the certificates of the faculties as a quality seal from an audit.
Success factors of faculty development
- The will to change.
- Top management support.
- Involvement of those affected (teachers, students, administration).
- Support and control of the change process by moderators.
- The willingness of all participants to learn something new themselves.
- Entering unsecured terrain with all the associated imponderables.
- Development of new teaching / learning materials and forms of learning.
- Put more trust in the students.
literature
- Journal for Evaluation: Models of Faculty Development - To Justify a Research Direction . Issue 2/2003: 149-170.
- H. Lang: Management certification of faculties according to EFQM . University of Prague 2002
- M. Hopfenmüller: Project to introduce faculty development based on the EFQM model at universities . Regensburg 2001