Being a department chair did not come easily to me. Recently I’ve been thinking a lot about my experience of working with my department chair, because it is the time of year when I schedule teaching observations for the professors in my department. After several years of serving as department chair and many more as a professor, I can’t seem to figure out how to alleviate the apprehension of those being observed.
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Creating an Academic Culture of Working to Live
I’m often asked how I succeed at managing work-life balance—or as I call it, “life-work balance”— and it stems from my childhood. My parents both worked as educators, and