Faculty Development for Student Success | Jackson State University

Thee Next Level | Fall 2026

Faculty Development for Student Success

THEE Next Level is our academic-year faculty development programming, and this year it looks different on purpose. We paid attention to what you told us works and what doesn’t, and above all, to how much you learn from one another. This fall there are four ways to plug in, almost all built around community.

Most of us grow alone. We attend the session, read the article, mean to try the new thing, then get pulled back into the work. The colleagues who could help are one office over, doing the same solitary version of the same struggle. The expertise is all around us and mostly out of reach.

These programs close that gap. Each gathers faculty working on the same thing at the same time—teaching, scholarly writing, or building a career here—so the person who has already solved your problem is in the room. Progress that’s hard to sustain alone becomes ordinary when the people around you are attempting it too.

You don’t have to do all four. Find the one that fits where you are right now.

Find what fits

Jump directly to the opportunity that matches what you need right now.

Teaching & Learning Communities

Work on your teaching with colleagues, all year

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AI for Faculty

Panel conversations and hands-on workshops

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New Faculty Mentoring

Build your first three years with a cohort

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Writing Accountability Group

Protect time to get scholarly writing done

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Why we build communities, not one-time sessions

Almost everything in Thee Next Level is built around sustained, small-group faculty work rather than the standalone workshop. That choice follows a well-developed body of research on faculty learning communities and communities of practice: structured groups in which colleagues take up a shared concern over time, learn from one another, reflect on their practice, and build the relationships that make real change feasible.

Faculty learning communities are typically small, cross-disciplinary groups that meet across an academic year to strengthen teaching, scholarship, and collegial connection (Cox, 2004; Cox, 2013). Their particular value is that they counter the professional isolation that makes new practices hard to sustain alone. Faculty who take part commonly report stronger relationships with colleagues, more reflection on their teaching, and greater confidence in trying something new. In institutional assessments of these communities, most participants have reported meaningful changes in both their teaching methods and their beliefs about teaching, alongside gains in teaching effectiveness.

This is also why the community model matters for students. Faculty development is most likely to reach the classroom when it supports ongoing change in practice rather than delivering information once and moving on. In one large-enrollment course, faculty collaborating through a learning community redesigned the course toward active learning, and that shift coincided with measurable gains in student learning.

The same holds for scholarly writing and career development. Faculty writing groups and accountability structures protect time for scholarly work while offering peer encouragement, feedback, and community, conditions the literature associates with greater writing confidence and productivity and with sustained scholarly output through protected time and group support. Some of this work has looked specifically at writing groups built for faculty who have been historically excluded in STEM fields. It is the reason our Writing Accountability Group is built on standing, shared time rather than solitary resolve.

We are careful not to overstate this. Student success depends on many things beyond any one program, and much of this research rests on participant reports and local program evaluations. What we can say is that Thee Next Level is designed to support the faculty practices and professional relationships that research links to stronger teaching, sustained professional learning, and the conditions in which students do well.

Full sources:

Cox, M. D. (2004). Introduction to faculty learning communities. New Directions for Teaching and Learning, 2004(97), 5–23. https://doi.org/10.1002/tl.129 · free PDF

Cox, M. D. (2013). Faculty learning communities: Change agents for transforming institutions into learning organizations. Full text

Richlin, L., & Essington, A. (2004). Assessment of a faculty learning community program: Do faculty members really change? To Improve the Academy, 22. [link to come]

Vandermolen, R., Meyer-Looze, C. L., Sonderegger Smith, C., & Richards, S. (2018). Increasing teacher effectiveness through faculty learning communities. Full text

Elliott, E. R., et al. (2016). Improved student learning through a faculty learning community: How faculty collaboration transformed a large-enrollment course from lecture to student-centered. CBE—Life Sciences Education, 15(2), ar22. https://doi.org/10.1187/cbe.15-11-0240

Writing groups in teacher education: A method to increase scholarly productivity. (ERIC EJ995171) Full text

The impact of protected writing time and group support on scholarly productivity. Full text

Neikirk, K., Barongan, T., Shao, B., Spencer, E. C., Kabugi, K., Conley, Z., … Hinton, A., Jr. (2023). A pilot study on our non-traditional, varied writing accountability group for historically excluded and underrepresented persons in STEMM. Heliyon, 9(12), e22335. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.heliyon.2023.e22335

Teaching & Learning Communities

Open to all faculty.

Somebody Down the Hall Already Solved This

Thursday, August 27, 10 a.m., Zoom

Our fall kickoff is where it starts. Four Faculty Teaching and Learning Fellows will each lead a learning community this year. At the kickoff, each will take a few minutes to share the direction they are exploring and the kind of question their community might take on. It is your chance to hear all four, talk with the Fellow whose direction speaks to you, and, if it is a fit, sign up to join.

This year you can join a learning community open to any faculty member who wants to work on their teaching alongside colleagues. Here is how a community works. Together, the group settles on a teaching question worth investigating, digs into what is already known about it, decides what is worth trying, and tests it across the year. It is careful, shared inquiry into teaching, led by one of this year’s four Faculty Teaching & Learning Fellows and driven by the faculty in the room.

This fall’s Fellows:

Craig Meyer — Department of English and Modern Languages
Amirah Nelson — Department of Counseling, Rehabilitation, and Psychometric Services
Carmen Wright — Department of Mathematics and Statistical Sciences
Wanda Harris — Department of Psychology

Each community sets its own pace, so presentation dates will come together as the groups form. Watch this page and your inbox, and we will share them as they are set.

AI for Faculty

Open to all faculty.

Faculty are putting AI to work in a lot of ways, but the classroom is where the questions get hardest. Teaching well in the AI era is a challenge for all of us, which is exactly why it belongs in community.

Join Our Panel Conversations and Ask the Faculty Who Tackled AI Head-On

Last spring and summer, faculty across the university trained together on teaching with AI. This fall they are back with something more than a presentation: a conversation. They share how they built it, and you ask what you need to know to transform your courses. Bring what you been stuck on; the people who have already worked through it are the ones answering.

Sept 10

11 a.m.

Making Students Audit the Machine. AI will hand students a confident answer, so the useful question is whether they can tell when it is wrong. Dr. Firas Al-Douri, Dr. Li-Jing Chang, and Dr. Erasmus Tetteh-Bator will share assignments they have designed for urban planning, journalism, and mathematics where finding the error is the work and defending the correction is the grade.

Oct 1

11 a.m.

Bias in Our Own Fields. Bias does not look the same in a newsroom, a business plan, and a chemical model. Prof. Kachelle Pratcher, Dr. Edith Davidson, Dr. Da’Ja’Nay Askew, and Dr. Naira Ibrahim teach students to catch the failures that actually turn up in their own disciplines, working from real cases rather than general warnings about AI.

Nov 5

11 a.m.

Redesigning a Whole Course: Systems You Can Adopt. You are building your spring courses soon. This panel’s faculty built complete, ready-to-use AI frameworks for their own courses, with approaches you can adapt before the next term begins.

Workshops

These hands-on workshops will move you forward. You will see it done first, then do it yourself with your own course in front of you, with people nearby who can help when you get stuck.

Sept 19

Building a Bot for Your Course. More faculty want a custom AI tool built around their own material: a practice partner, a study aid, a tutor that knows only what you taught. Colleagues who have already built one for their own courses will walk through how it works. Bring a course in mind and leave knowing how to start building your own.

Oct 17

AI-Resilient Assignment Design. The question we heard most this year: how do you design work that AI cannot simply do for a student? Colleagues will share the approaches they built, from authentic decision-scenarios that call for real-time judgment, to grading structures that keep AI use bounded and visible, to pairing simulation with AI reflection in clinical training. You will leave with design principles you can apply to your own assignments.

More AI programming will follow in the spring, shaped by what these sessions surface and what you tell us you need next.

New Faculty Mentoring Program

For new tenure-track faculty in years one through three.

If you are early on the tenure track, start here. Join a support community organized around your college, alongside colleagues a year or two ahead of you because the person just up the road from you usually has the answer you need.

The work is developmental, not evaluative, and it is built to be manageable. A couple of hours a month across the year, ending in a Three-Year Faculty Success Plan you will actually use.

Here is the shape of the fall:

Sept

Assemble Your Crew (Zoom). Come together with peer mentors in your college and meet the people who will be your sounding board this year. Find your footing and find out what you most need to figure out.

Oct

Surviving the Service Tsunami (Zoom). For new faculty, saying no to service before tenure feels impossible. Join a candid conversation about which commitments to protect or to decline and how to tell the difference.

Nov

You, Your Cohort, and What’s Next (in person). You have made it through your first semester. Come sit down with your cohort over lunch to trade what the term taught you, and to look together at the year ahead.

In the spring, a series of senior-faculty workshops picks up the longer arc: research opportunities, publications, cross-institutional collaboration, and working with graduate students. In person where we can, and cross-college by design.

Writing Accountability Group

Open to all faculty.

Scholarly writing is the easiest thing on a faculty schedule to postpone. There is always a class to prep, an email to answer, a meeting that eats the morning you meant to spend writing. The work that matters most for your career is usually the work with no deadline until suddenly it has one.

The Writing Accountability Group solves that the way the research says it actually gets solved: not with willpower, but with other people. Faculty who write alongside a group, with protected time and brief goal-setting, write more and more consistently than those going it alone. The accountability is the point. It is far harder to skip the writing when your colleagues are showing up to do it too.

Each session is simple and free of busy work: a few minutes to set a goal, a long stretch of quiet writing together, and a few minutes to report back on what you got done.

This fall we are running two standing groups, both beginning the week of August 31. Choose the one that fits your week, or move between them as your schedule shifts:

Thursday mornings, 7:30 to 9:00 — start the day with the writing done before anything else can claim it.
Wednesday afternoons, 4:00 to 5:30 — close the week’s midpoint by putting the work first for once.

Join a Writing Accountability Group →