Free Sane Semester Checklist

Protect Your Writing, Priorities, and Time This Semester A 30-minute checklist to help faculty start the semester with more clarity, focus, and intention. The Sane Semester Checklist is a free NCFDD resource designed to help faculty pause before the semester accelerates. Use it to clarify what matters most, protect your writing time, set boundaries early, … Read more

Free Academic Writing Playbook

Write More Consistently. Make Progress More Confidently. A practical guide to creating a writing routine that helps you move projects forward, one session at a time. The Academic Writing Playbook is a free resource from NCFDD designed to help faculty make the most of their writing time. Whether you’re working on articles, grant proposals, book … Read more

How to Revise a Book Manuscript for Publication

Facilitator: Laura Portwood-Stacer, PhDPublishing Advisor and Developmental Editor for Scholarly Authors Manuscript Works Revising a scholarly book can feel overwhelming, especially if you’re not sure what to prioritize, when to revise, or how to approach the process. The good news: there is a clear, repeatable method that takes the guesswork out of revision entirely. Watch … Read more

What Is Faculty Development?

faculty development in higher education

Faculty development is often described as professional development for faculty. While technically accurate, that definition no longer captures the full scope of what development includes. For many years, faculty development was closely associated with teaching support through workshops, pedagogy training, and instructional resources. Today, the term is used more broadly. Faculty development increasingly refers to … Read more

Why We Built a New Online Community for Academics

NCFDD Community introduction

Author: NCFDD At NCFDD, we’ve spent the past 15 years building programs, tools, and resources to support faculty development at every career stage. But one thing we kept hearing from graduate students, new assistant professors, and tenured faculty alike was this: “I feel like I’m doing this alone.” Whether it’s the pressure to publish, the … Read more

How to Translate Research for a General Audience Through Digital Media

translating research for general audience

By Danielle Bainbridge, PhD, Assistant Professor, Northwestern University Many academics share a commitment to bring our work and expertise to a wider audience outside of our own classrooms. This could be through video web series, podcasts, op eds, online articles, building our own websites, and so much more.  I think one of the biggest mistakes … Read more

Mentoring Up: Pro-actively Engaging With Your Mentors Begins With Assessing Yourself

Author: Steve Lee, PhD In an upcoming workshop, I’ll be offering some strategies to help faculty find and manage relationships with mentors. My approach has been to encourage faculty to “mentor up”, i.e. to learn how to pro-actively engage with their mentors, which is based on Gabarro’s and Kotter’s original concept of “managing up”. When Gabarro … Read more

The 3 P’s to Plan Your Professional Pivot

Professional Pivot

Author: Carlita Favero, PhD When I think back to 2009 or so when I was starting my first professional pivot, I was at a point in my career where I was transitioning into the next expected phase, a faculty position, but I was seeking employment at an institution very different from the ones I had … Read more

Pivoting to Public Writing

published writing

Author: Anthony Ocampo, PhD Whether in the sciences or humanities, academics are so specialized in their niche that they often forget how to convey their knowledge to a general public. In fact, in academia, your success is predicated on your ability to be in conversation with other experts, not everyday people.  When we’re doing our PhDs, we … Read more

Five Tips for Making Your Writing Shorter

writing

Author: Kate Epstein, editor, EpsteinWords It happens all the time: you write an article that is the right length for a particular outlet, and then you learn you’re going to have to shorten it for some other journal or book. It’s exhausting, I think, to imagine how to take a paper you were happy with … Read more