New faculty without prior teaching experience are encouraged to develop good teaching methods by attending teaching effectiveness workshops, and using the more senior colleagues as critics of lectures, laboratory sessions and test problems. Anyone entering the profession of graduate education will recognize that quality research by the faculty is the most vital component of a graduate program. Research develops professional scholarship, which is then extended to the graduate students not only through their thesis 1 research, but also in classroom instruction. Supervising graduate student research is expected of all faculty and it requires competence in the research field, external funding, and ability to attract good graduate students. The following are considered the major indicators of a strong research program.
Publication is important for at least three reasons.
It is nevertheless expected that a strong research program will result each year in at least a couple of quality manuscripts submitted to recognized journals. But the quality and consistent output of publications are certainly more important than the numbers. The quality of a publication can be judged by where it is published and by how often it is cited by one's peers publishing in the same field of research. There is also the matter of co-authorship. If most of the papers are co-authored, an effort will be made to clarify the candidate's contribution to each of those publications by consultation with the principal authors.