Thriving in faculty success

Our focus on belonging and intersectional ally development extends to faculty success beyond the classroom context. We support faculty from traditionally underrepresented groups as they make new connections across campus and in the community, move forward to promotion(s), and navigate scholarship, teaching, service, and career development. CTLE also supports faculty in developing their own ally and accomplice knowledge, skills, and robust toolkit for social justice in the context of their careers. 

At VCU, we value the richness that a broad range of intersectional diversity brings to our learning, scholarship, and growth as professionals. Our CTLE team is committed to moving these conversations forward in deep and meaningful ways that promote social justice, equity, and the dismantling of systemic oppression. Our teaching focus page provides an overview of our pedagogical support related to diversity, equity, inclusion, and social justice.

Our philosophy of faculty success emphasizes attention to faculty as wonderfully complex human beings. Many faculty share with us their goals of finding more balance and integration to better navigate their busy lives and seemingly competing obligations. Our team aims to provide opportunities for faculty to engage in reflective wellness practices to nourish themselves both intellectually and holistically. When we make time for even small acts of self-care, we model healthy well-being practices for our students. Visit our Faculty Wellness Day page to explore our collection of resources.

Faculty navigate much more than teaching, scholarship, and creative works. And even those major responsibilities require early, thoughtful, intentional, and strategic planning. Career planning is often a neglected aspect of faculty development support even though this planning is key to success (as defined by each faculty member). Our career planning focus, in close relationship with mentoring programs, covers topics such as understanding department and university promotion standards, making invisible labor more visible in your portfolio, how to identify potential external reviewers, workshops on writing scholarship, teaching, and service narratives for review/promotion, and much more. We know it is never too early for a faculty member to begin purposeful career planning.

The Write Track initiative is designed to support faculty scholarship, creative works, and writing goals, whatever they may be. No matter what task you need to complete to move your writing along, The Write Track offers you many opportunities to keep that writing train moving! Perhaps you need to write manuscript outlines, literature reviews, an IRB proposal, your first grant, revise and resubmit, conference presentation, a book proposal, a chapter, or anything else your scholarship path may include. The Write Track includes the Just Write weekly writing accountability groups as well as writing workshops and retreats. 

CTLE supports faculty in curating a robust support system as they navigate various career stages. We emphasize the importance of faculty developing a wide network of mentors to meet various needs related to progress and success. We offer workshops and consultation to help faculty members identify coaches, senior mentors, peer mentors, and sponsors across a variety of settings (e.g., departmental, outside one's home college, conference colleagues).

The Office of the Provost hosts the Faculty Peer Mentoring Program which is a cross-disciplinary, one-to-one faculty mentoring program. In the program, early career tenure-track faculty are matched with tenured faculty from outside their own department. Term faculty are matched with a more advanced term faculty member. We view this mentor and mentee connection as mutually beneficial. The main goals of the peer mentoring program are to help faculty make connections across VCU, gain new perspectives from someone who went through the promotion and tenure process, and successfully launching their VCU career!