While reactive faculty and staff development deals with eliminating the occurring challenges and problems, the proactive approach rather focuses on using the current opportunities and applying the existing potential. Thus, when using the proactive approach, the management does not spend resources and energy on dealing with issues that could have been prevented. That is why I am a supporter of building the faculty and staff development approach based on the proactive approach.
On the one hand, education exists in the contemporary world that is changing very quickly; on the other hand, the educational system should meet the requirements of the modern society (Le Grew & Calvert, pp. 11-14); finally, the needs and abilities of students are also evolving (Gillespie, p. 8). Therefore, the purpose of faculty and staff development is adjusting the educational process to the current social requirements and involving the new opportunities. This corroborates reasonability of making faculty and staff development:
- Proactive.
- Flexible.
- Continuous.
In turn, organizing staff and faculty development “in leaps and bounds” makes the process more complicated for educators: they have to grasp the new tendencies and acquire new skills not gradually, but promptly and without continuity. Making breaks in training and development makes an educator stick to his/her traditional teaching methods and lose flexibility. However, the task of the management is to avoid “overloading” educators with training programs and divert them from teaching itself.
There is a big range of available training and development methods, such as on-the-job training, audiovisual trainings, business games and oth. (Taylor), and this diversity should be used by the training and development managers in order to make their programs continuous, effective and many-sided.
References
Gillespie, K. H. (2010). A Guide to Faculty Development. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.
Le Grew, D. & Calvert, J. (1998). Leadership for Open and Flexible Learning in Higher Education. In C. Latchem & F. Lockwood, Staff Development in Open and Flexible Learning. USA; Canada: Routledge.
Taylor, M. Six Types of Training and Development Techniques. Ezine Articles. Web.