The R&CA team works with faculty to build on their existing leadership and communication skills. The team also partners with groups across campus to facilitate networking activities and to connect faculty with collaborators to tackle multi-disciplinary challenges.
The team offers workshops on increasing productivity, forming teams, managing multi-investigator proposal development, and communicating your work.
We can also work with you one-on-one to create a personalized strategy to fit your research and creative activity goals and provide coaching on developing impactful publications and presentations. You can schedule a consultation by filling out our Support Request Form.
The Center for Faculty Excellence provides this workshop to help you describe your work to educated non-experts, think through your strategy to pursue external funding, and begin to form your strategy for research and creative activities. This includes a brief introduction to GrantForward.
Come develop your strategy for productive research! An interactive 90-minute workshop aimed at arts and humanities faculty who are starting a new book (or other multi-year) project, or who are in their first year at OU. The workshop will help participants with:
Introducing ourselves and our work in informal settings is not a skill that most of us learned during our professional formation—but it turns out it’s important to know how to do it! It can help to have a succinct message to share with people who you are meeting for the first time. Attend this workshop to prepare your self-introduction through exercises to produce a 60-second and a 2-minute verbal introduction relevant for meeting colleagues at conferences, beginning discussions with potential funders or collaborators and communicating with others who are interested in your work.
Growing your professional community offers opportunities for knowledge sharing and learning, showcasing your work, and identifying potential collaborators. Attend this workshop to learn more about expanding your professional network and building meaningful, mutually beneficial relationships.
This workshop provides tools to help faculty improve their ability to balance competing priorities and manage multiple ongoing efforts with varying timescales. Join this workshop to learn about productivity approaches and tools that you can adapt and tailor to your individual style and needs. Topics include: Assessing your portfolio of activities, strategically aligning your efforts to priorities, and keeping long-term projects on track.
This workshop series is facilitated by the Graduate College in partnership with the Center for Faculty Excellence. Whether you are new to mentoring or have years of experience, this interactive series offers practical strategies, practices, and perspectives meant to help you enhance how you mentor graduate students and postdocs. This learning experience is focused on mentoring designed to empower mentors to guide the next generation of scholars towards academic success while helping build a culture of effective mentoring across our university. Please reach out to Dr. Ioana Cionea (icionea@ou.edu) or CFE Faculty Fellow, Dr. Adrienne Carter-Sowell (arcartersowell@ou.edu) with any questions.
Whether you are planning to set up your research group or are already underway, this workshop will provide some brainstorming activities and discussion with peers, as well as present resources and tools for you to structure, guide, and coordinate your research group and to reduce the workload associated with managing students and researchers. Tools to increase group productivity and lower manager stress include: Setting expectations through a welcome letter, creating loose group hierarchies, structuring group meetings, and leveraging project management tools.
Collaborating with other researchers presents interpersonal and organizational challenges for which most of us have not been prepared. Whether you’re leading a multi-PI grant proposal, embarking on a team science project, or engaging in research with external partners, you need to be ready to address problems related to role-setting, communication, scheduling, and co-writing—issues that can hamper a collaborative project. This workshop will introduce project management tools that can help you establish positive norms for collaboration from the start of the project. These tools include: checklists and page budgets for team writing; Gantt charts and timelines for scheduling and delegation; shared online platforms for communication and version control; and explicit strategies for handling role-setting, intellectual property, and other aspects of collaborative research.
CFE partners with groups across campus to facilitate workshops and networking activities and to connect faculty to tackle multi-disciplinary challenges.
CUREs can help you achieve your research goals. CUREs are in-class experiences that engage students in conducting novel research that would enhance, and be of interest, to their field broadly. This workshop will discuss how to use your research interests to create a CURE.
Are you planning to write a book proposal to send to potential publishers? The book proposal is a high-stakes document that can influence academic publishers and set your scholarly book project into motion. The Center for Faculty Excellence, in collaboration with the Arts and Humanities Forum, is offering a workshop on writing your book proposal. Facilitators will walk participants through the steps and elements of writing an effective book proposal, beginning with finding the right press, developing the proposal documents, and outlining the plan for writing the full manuscript. This workshop is offered each spring semester.
Establishing healthy, sustainable writing habits is a lifelong endeavor for academics as our personal and professional circumstances are ever changing. In this session, scholars in any stage of career and life will learn how to intentionally experiment with, reflect on, and grow writing practices and routines in order to stay productive and engaged as our goals, needs, and conditions evolve over time.
Whether you are brand new faculty who has very recently filed your dissertation, or not-so-new faculty with a dissertation that needs to be published, this hands-on workshop is designed to set you on the road to submitting your doctoral work to a publisher. Practical activities will help you rethink and repurpose your dissertation. You will leave the workshop with a plan of action. At the end of the workshop, you will also be invited to join a monograph writers’ group that can help keep your project on track.
If you are looking to revise a dissertation chapter into a journal article, have a conference paper begging to be extended into a full-length manuscript, or need to revise and resubmit an existing article to a better-fit journal, this writing seminar series is designed to step you through the process of preparing your manuscript for publication. Based on Wendy Belcher’s popular workbook Writing Your Journal Article in Twelve Weeks: A Guide to Academic Publishing Success, this seminar provides the instruction, activities, structure and community you need to complete and submit an effective article revision by the end of the semester.
CFE supports writing groups for faculty working on any kind of writing, including writing for research and creative activities, tenure and promotion dossiers, teaching, and various types of proposals and fellowships. These accountability groups are focused on writing in a supportive and encouraging environment. If you are interested in joining an existing writing group or leading a new writing group, please reach out to us by filling out the Support Request Form.
Our capacity to create impactful scholarship is influenced by a range of factors beyond the logistics of crafting publications and presentations. Forces may include navigating career transitions, carrying a heavy workload, wrestling with high-stakes decisions, taking on new leadership roles, experiencing identity shifts, and facing significant change or challenges in life outside of work. Working with a trained coach can help you respond to the realities of academic life with greater energy, optimism, and intention. Distinct from mentoring or consulting, coaching is a collaborative partnership that supports faculty in maximizing personal and professional potential through powerful questions, reflection, goal-directed action, and accountability. Contact Sandra Tarabochia (sltarabochia@ou.edu) with questions or to schedule a session.
