Faculty Mentor Program

How and when do you negotiate balanced expectations with your grad students? Join us for a panel of experienced supervisors who will share strategies for negotiating expectations with graduate students. Panelists will discuss setting expectations around workload and establishing positive interactions with students. This session is intended for faculty members who are graduate supervisors. This session will be moderated by Carol Beynon (Teaching Fellow, Centre for Teaching and Learning) and the panelists are:

• Peter Simpson (School of Graduate and Postdoctoral Studies)
• Tom Drysdale (Physiology & Pharmacology)
• Kathy Hibbert (Faculty of Education)

This is a workshop on suicide intervention strategies for faculty members. In your roles as instructors and supervisors, you may occasionally interact with students in crisis. Through safeTALK training, you will gain the strategies and skills to better handle these situations and connect students to the supports that they need. By completing this workshop, you will be better able to:

• Recognize invitations for help from students.
• Connect students with thoughts of suicide to the appropriate resources and professionals both on and off campus.

No prior training around mental health is required. Please contact the facilitator, Kate Barnes (kbarnes8@uwo.ca), if you have any questions or concerns.

Faculty who are new and those in tenure-track positions will be interested in this interactive session. Representatives from the University Faculty Association, the Office of the Provost, and the Office of Faculty Relations will discuss and respond to questions on the tenure and promotion process. (Note: this workshop does not include information about the tenure and promotion process for clinical faculty.)

Topics will include: the Official File; annual performance evaluation; documenting your career; the balance for teaching, research and service; the P&T Committee; the process of file review; the roles of Chairs, Deans, and the Office of the Provost.

Panelists

• Karen Campbell, Vice-Provost (Academic Planning, Policy and Faculty)
• Andrew Boaden, Faculty Relations Consultant
• John Ciriello, UWOFA President
• Cindy Cossar-Jones, UWOFA Professional Officer

Session slides are available here.

Before applying for tenure and promotion, a teaching dossier and a statement of one’s teaching philosophy must be developed. This interactive session will provide valuable material to assist members of faculty in the preparation of these components for a personal file. This session will be conducted by:

• Karyn Olsen, Educational Developer, CTL
• Mike Atkinson, Teaching Fellow, CTL
  Associate Professor, Department of Psychology
• Aisha Haque, Acting Director, CTL

Note: Participants should be prepared to attend both parts of the workshop.

For faculty, the end of the academic year can be a stressful time with exams, end of term grading and various student issues, but we too often do not take the time to look after ourselves as pressure mounts. Please come and join us for a two-part workshop on Mindfulness at Work which will also include a discussion of emotional intelligence. Mindfulness can turn workplace challenges into opportunities by helping us to work with our innate qualities, be less reactive and appreciate different perspectives for healthier workplace interactions. Emotional Intelligence helps us to listen, communicate and resolve conflict so when paired with Mindfulness, makes a powerful combination.

The workshop will be facilitated by Dr. Thomas Telfer, Faculty of Law, who has experience with bringing mindfulness into the classroom and the workplace. Thomas recently gave a workshop on mindfulness to the judges of the Supreme Court of Victoria in Melbourne, Australia and has spoken on mindfulness and mental health on numerous occasions. He has taught a highly successful course on mindfulness in the Faculty of Law.

In Part A, Dr. Telfer will introduce you to mindfulness and the positive benefits of being mindful. Dr. Telfer will share his own experiences with mindfulness. The session will then focus on mindfulness practices and strategies and how these practices can work with emotional intelligence. Part B of the workshop will allow you to reflect upon and share how mindfulness practice worked for you in the preceding week. Also in Part B, Thomas will expand upon how mindfulness practice and emotional intelligence can be used in teaching, and the resulting changes that students have noticed in themselves and the classroom after undertaking mindfulness instruction.

In this interactive session, we will discuss different strategies for how you might increase the meaning and significance that your teaching has for you. Drawing on the research on job crafting, meaningful work, and psychological strengths at work, we will help you develop realistic goals for shaping your teaching based on your strengths, values, and/or interests to increase the meaning that your teaching holds for you. A panel of faculty members will discuss how they shaped their teaching, the benefits these changes had for them as well as their students, and the challenges they faced making these changes.

This 3-hour workshop gives you the tools to take a strengths-based approach to wellness in your role at Western. Learn how to practice wellness in your daily life, promote wellness in your professional role, and refer individuals struggling with their mental health to professional support. By the end of this workshop, you will be able to: describe the elements of – and challenge misconceptions about – mental health and mental illness; apply tools and resources to identify students in distress and support them in accessing appropriate mental health resources; design new strategies to reach students who are less likely to request mental health support. This session will be facilitated by:

• Melanie-Anne Atkins, Centre for Teaching and Learning
• Rebecca Smith, Student Experience
• Erin Anderson, Student Experience

Students always enter teaching environments with personal histories which we might not know, but nonetheless impact how they learn and engage in classrooms. This is also true for courses that explore topics like racism, sexual violence, homophobia, etc., where our students might have personal histories of trauma and/or violence as a result of their lived experiences relating to these issues. This workshop provides an overview of some best practices for teaching 'sensitive' issues online, through trauma- and violence-informed approaches. By the end of this workshop, participants will be able to: reflect on some of the challenges and opportunities involved in teaching sensitive material; describe four key principles of trauma- and violence-informed care; and implement teaching strategies based on these principles for teaching about sensitive issues online. This session will be facilitated by:

• Melanie-Anne Atkins
• Nicole Fice