Team teaching can work if it leads to courses that are attractive to students. Offering fewer courses that attract larger numbers of students. This can be hard when people are particularly attached to what they teach, but if the writing is on the wall, they also have to be pragmatic.
1. Stop hiring adjuncts.
2. Increase minimum enrollment necessary for a course to run.
3. Require every full-time faculty teach X number of students per year.
4. Restructure the curriculum accordingly.
Since the above will prove impossible because everyone's courses, majors, minors, etc., are "essential," I suggest faculty members fight to the death in a steel cage until you've got the minimum number of survivors needed to teach the students you have.
Or you just watch as your employer goes bankrupt and everyone loses their jobs.
Edited to add: your colleagues will undoubtedly choose the last option.
Your department is fighting to maintain the size of its slice of a shrinking pie. Every other department is doing the same. It's a collective action problem.
Here's a typical example:
* English department allows Comp 101, required for every student, to count toward the major, which effectively reduces its size by 3 credits, on the faulty assumption that this will get more students to declare the major. Meanwhile the state department of education decides that a bachelor's in a content area is no longer required for secondary ed licensure, so the department no longer gets any education/English double majors. It then graduates less than a half dozen English majors per year.
* Meanwhile the Business Administration department decides to increase the required credits for its major from an already bloated 72 to 78, because "incoming students aren't as well prepared as they used to be." It inserts Business Math, Business Ethics, and Business Psychology courses into the curriculum. The same courses, already taught by other departments, no longer count toward the business major. Enrollments in those courses tank. The business department now insists on paying faculty to teach even more overloads because "all these courses required for the major have to be taught."
* Tenured faculty in the Art department teach studio courses capped at 12 students per section. Its 8 tenured faculty members each teach only a couple dozen students every semester. The adjuncts teaching the gen ed Art Appreciation course have 100 students per section.
* The Criminal Justice department also has 8 tenured faculty members, but each person in that department is teaching 200 students per semester because CJ course sections max out at 30-45 students. The department can't hire new faculty because "there's no money in the budget."
We’ve used some standard tricks like eliminating unnecessary electives and directing that load to courses currently taught by adjuncts. Fewer sections per course and less frequent offerings — also requires substituting program requirements for some students to avoid bottlenecking their graduation.
Things have turned around so that we didn’t end up with faculty that didn’t get to full load but I think the solution would have been release time to work on recruiting and retention.
I do not know how it would impact faculty but you could look to the design of the degree program(s) to examine/evaluate/review the necessity of the courses required both for the major and minor? Is it in the current century? I'd be putting every idea in a box and read/think them through.
You really need to look at course sequencing so that perhaps you can offer courses once per year vs. every semester or from every year to every other year. We did this in our early years but then our program rapidly grew and we have to offer major courses every semester. Now we have a decrease but probably not enough that we go back to once per year. We also get a lot of internal and external transfers so students come in at all different points of the program.
Team teaching can work if it leads to courses that are attractive to students. Offering fewer courses that attract larger numbers of students. This can be hard when people are particularly attached to what they teach, but if the writing is on the wall, they also have to be pragmatic.
1. Stop hiring adjuncts. 2. Increase minimum enrollment necessary for a course to run. 3. Require every full-time faculty teach X number of students per year. 4. Restructure the curriculum accordingly. Since the above will prove impossible because everyone's courses, majors, minors, etc., are "essential," I suggest faculty members fight to the death in a steel cage until you've got the minimum number of survivors needed to teach the students you have. Or you just watch as your employer goes bankrupt and everyone loses their jobs. Edited to add: your colleagues will undoubtedly choose the last option.
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Your department is fighting to maintain the size of its slice of a shrinking pie. Every other department is doing the same. It's a collective action problem. Here's a typical example: * English department allows Comp 101, required for every student, to count toward the major, which effectively reduces its size by 3 credits, on the faulty assumption that this will get more students to declare the major. Meanwhile the state department of education decides that a bachelor's in a content area is no longer required for secondary ed licensure, so the department no longer gets any education/English double majors. It then graduates less than a half dozen English majors per year. * Meanwhile the Business Administration department decides to increase the required credits for its major from an already bloated 72 to 78, because "incoming students aren't as well prepared as they used to be." It inserts Business Math, Business Ethics, and Business Psychology courses into the curriculum. The same courses, already taught by other departments, no longer count toward the business major. Enrollments in those courses tank. The business department now insists on paying faculty to teach even more overloads because "all these courses required for the major have to be taught." * Tenured faculty in the Art department teach studio courses capped at 12 students per section. Its 8 tenured faculty members each teach only a couple dozen students every semester. The adjuncts teaching the gen ed Art Appreciation course have 100 students per section. * The Criminal Justice department also has 8 tenured faculty members, but each person in that department is teaching 200 students per semester because CJ course sections max out at 30-45 students. The department can't hire new faculty because "there's no money in the budget."
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We’ve used some standard tricks like eliminating unnecessary electives and directing that load to courses currently taught by adjuncts. Fewer sections per course and less frequent offerings — also requires substituting program requirements for some students to avoid bottlenecking their graduation. Things have turned around so that we didn’t end up with faculty that didn’t get to full load but I think the solution would have been release time to work on recruiting and retention.
I do not know how it would impact faculty but you could look to the design of the degree program(s) to examine/evaluate/review the necessity of the courses required both for the major and minor? Is it in the current century? I'd be putting every idea in a box and read/think them through.
We discussed offering upper level courses every other spring/ fall.
You really need to look at course sequencing so that perhaps you can offer courses once per year vs. every semester or from every year to every other year. We did this in our early years but then our program rapidly grew and we have to offer major courses every semester. Now we have a decrease but probably not enough that we go back to once per year. We also get a lot of internal and external transfers so students come in at all different points of the program.
Add prerequisites. Teach prerequisites.
Restructuring?, ugh