Events

Cosponsored by Workplace Learning and Development, the College of Natural Sciences and the Office of Faculty Development

A time for you to learn the evidenced-based key tools and techniques to support your overall wellbeing and resilience in your life, daily work, and career. Focusing on mindfulness, positive emotions and relationships, clarity of meaning and purpose, and a strengths-approach, you will learn and experience proven approaches and leave with your next steps for developing your own practices and approach. This workshop will be offered 3 separate times:  March 1st (1-3pm),  March 30th (10am-12noon), and April 22nd (1-3pm) and be a building block for OFD’s Starting Your Summer: Resilient Faculty, Sustainable Careers for all faculty to be held May 24-27.

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Co-led by: 

Paul Papierski - Sr. Organizational Development Consultant, WL&D

• Paul brings an extensive background in employee and manager development, performance improvement, coaching employees and facilitating programs having worked with non-profits and municipalities for 15+years. He holds a MA in International and Intercultural Management with a Human Resource Management focus. Paul is a certified professional coach through IPEC Coaching and holds an Associate Certified Coach credential from the International Coaching Federation, as well as a Society for Human Resource Management-Certified Professional credential. He's also a certified practitioner of Wholebeing Positive Psychology and as well as the Myers Brigg Type Indicator®. In his spare time, you can find him hiking and walking the wooded trails in New England and traveling the world, as well as tending to his honeybee hives.

Karen S. Whelan-Berry – CNS Director of Faculty Development and Programs

• Karen brings extensive higher education and corporate experience with a focus on individual and team strengths-based effectiveness, performance excellence and resilience; related positive individual and organizational change; and instructional design that cultivates immediate and long-term skills, habits, and practices. Karen has been tenured faculty in management, and in addition to over 20 publications, Karen has presented at national and international management and positive psychology conferences, as well as regional training and development and human resource management conferences.  Karen holds a PhD in Organizational Studies, a Certificate in Positive Psychology, and Certification in Wholebeing Positive Psychology Coaching. Karen enjoys downhill skiing, hiking, the beach, travel, movies, music, and reading.  

The Institute of Diversity Sciences is a multidisciplinary unit that brings together faculty and students from UMass Amherst and the Five Colleges to promote science, engineering, and technology research that advances equity, social impact, and the success of diverse students in STEM. Faculty and students in our Institute use STEM to promote equity in health, learning, and work and to mitigate the impact of climate change on communities.

This seed grant mechanism is one important way to achieve this goal by (1) encouraging new multidisciplinary research collaborations on equity-inspired research among faculty and students from different units on campus that can be later leveraged to seek larger external research grants; (2) offering opportunities for mentored research experience for graduate and undergraduate students interested in STEM research that advances equity in ways that cut across traditional disciplinary boundaries; and (3) encouraging research teams to consider social impact goals.

The Institute of Diversity Sciences announces its faculty research funding opportunity. In 2021, the institute will distribute up to $30,000 in seed project funds to teams who apply through a formal RFP mechanism. Funds will go toward supporting new collaborative projects between colleagues from different departments at UMass. Ideal projects will focus on cross-disciplinary research, involve graduate or undergraduate students in that research (i.e., include an educational component), and have an eye toward social impact.

Grants will range from $5,000 to $12,000. Funds may be used to pay for personnel, equipment, supplies, data collection costs, consultants, compensation of community partners, etc. 

For more information visit the Institute of Diversity Sciences Seed Grants 2021 

Hosted by UMass Libraries

Open Researcher and Contributor ID (ORCID) is a free, unique, persistent and universal digital identifier. Come learn how an ORCID can help you manage and promote your scholarly identity and research outputs. We’ll look at some robust ORCID profiles, go through the quick registration process and populate your profile with relevant data. Note: ORCID registration is required for doctoral dissertation and masters theses submissions to ScholarWorks.

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Hosted by The Center for Teaching and Learning

Our concerns about distracted students have intensified as we have shifted online. Indeed, this session with Dr. James Lang (author of Distracted: Why Students Can’t Focus and What You Can Do About It) draws upon scholarship from history, neuroscience, and education in order to argue that distractions are endemic to the human condition, and can’t be walled out of the physical classroom or online course.

The solution? We should focus on creating educational experiences that cultivate and sustain attention. Faculty, postdocs, and graduate student participants will learn about a variety of ways to develop such experiences for their students. Co-sponsored by the Center for Teaching and Learning, the Graduate School’s Office of Professional Development, and the Provost’s Office. Pre-registration for “Teaching Distracted Minds” is required. 

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We strongly encourage that applicants attend a Mutual Mentoring Information Session in order to learn about priorities and guidelines for the Mutual Mentoring grant application.  These sessions will cover both OFD and ADVANCE applicants.

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Facilitator: Christiane Healey, Chancellor’s Leadership Fellow, Office of Faculty Development, and Senior Lecturer of Biology

About the Working Accountability Group Series: These virtual accountability sessions offer dedicated time and facilitated support to work on your project, whether it is to write a proposal or manuscript, or to design a unit for your online course. The sessions will begin with a small group 10-minute check-in, with each participant introducing themselves, their project, and specific goals for the session. For the next 70 minutes, faculty will turn off microphones and video feed, to work together in their own protected environment. In the final 10 minutes, participants will rejoin their small groups to discuss their progress, challenges, and to set goals for the coming week. Open to all faculty: lecturers, instructors, research, clinical.

Faculty may participate in any or all of the accountability sessions offered each month.

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Learning from Fully Remote Teaching: Strategies that Improve All Courses

Hosted by the Center for Teaching and Learning and the Office of Faculty Development

In this session, we'll reflect on the lessons learned from fully remote teaching. The Center for Teaching & Learning will lead us through a discussion of best practices for transparency, flexibility, student engagement, course alignment, communication, accessibility, and more. Join us for an opportunity to connect and hear from each other.

Presenters:  Claire Hamilton, Associate Provost and Director, and Brian Baldi, Assistant Director and Senior Lecturer, Center for Teaching and Learning

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Hammering out the Details, Part 1: Data Management Plans

Hosted by: Institute for Social Science Research

Grants funding can be critical to faculty careers, but difficult to pull off on your own given limited time. ISSR invites you to take part in a flexible, year-long series aimed at motivating, informing, and supporting faculty writing grants for submission in 2021. All registered participants will be joined to the Funding Fridays Moodle course, where you will find the full year's library of helpful resources for all sessions and stages of the grant writing process. New registrants can review past materials, and seek support for early stages of grant development in our bi-weekly Research Design Office Hours.

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Sponsored by: Academic Personnel Office and the Office of Faculty Development

LEAD+ sessions cover topics of common concern to department leaders. This session’s presenters include Provost John McCarthy and Vice Provost Michelle Budig

LEAD+ is professional development and support program for heads and chairs of academic units.
Please email Vice Provost Michelle J. Budig at budig@umass.edu to register for this event.

Facilitator: Wendy Varner, Director of Faculty Development, Office of Faculty Development

These virtual writing sessions offer dedicated time and facilitated support for faculty to focus on scholarly writing in the company of colleagues. The sessions will begin with a small group 15-minute check-in, with each participant introducing themselves, their writing project, and specific goals for the session. For the next 60 minutes, faculty will turn off their cameras and microphones, to write together in their own protected environment. In the final 15 minutes, participants will rejoin their small groups to discuss their progress, challenges, and to set writing goals for the coming week.  

Faculty may participate in any or all of the accountability sessions offered each month.  We ask that participants commit to the full 90 minutes of each session.

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Open access, peer review and predatory publishing: can you have the first two without the third?
Hosted by UMass Libraries  

Answer: YES!! Open access refers to who can use scholarly works free of charge and how scholarly publishing is funded, not the scholarship’s quality or rigor. Open access publishing provides citation and impact advantages to authors and barrier-free access to users. However, some open access "publishers" use “author pays” models to reap profits while disregarding ethical publishing practices, peer review and quality. We’ll outline the attributes of high-quality open access publishing and the warning signs of shady publishers. With this information, you can gain the benefits of OA publishing and enhance your scholarly reputation.

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