Mayo’s Clinic: Planning for the Fall and the Year
31 August 2011
As you plan your goals and desires for your courses, student activities and department, here are three useful tools to inspire.
By Dr. Fred Mayo, CHE, CHT
This past summer, we discussed pursuing the ABCs and DEFs of your professional development and I indicated that September’s “Mayo’s Clinic” would be about planning for the fall and the year. It is something that we all do when we write syllabi, create new materials for our students and consider what we want to happen during the term. (In fact, I was just revising my MLA guidelines sheet for undergraduates. If any of you want a copy, just send me a note at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. asking for it, and I will be pleased to send you a copy.)
If we are involved in leading committees or task forces, it is time to refocus the agenda for the year, get the individuals engaged again and invite new members. It is also a time of dreaming about what you want to happen in your courses, your student activities and your department. I hope that the three points—Categories of Goals, Limited Goals and Mottos—in this “Clinic” provide you with some new things to try.
Categories of Goals
Many of us at the beginning of an academic year make a list of all the goals we have for the year. As we remember things we have to do or want to do, they become goals and we write them down. In order to save yourself from being overwhelmed, you can organize them into categories. Some faculty members have found the following 10 categories helpful in ensuring that they consider all aspects of their lives:
- Teaching tasks and goals
- Departmental or institutional priorities and tasks
- Personal development
- Professional development
- Home
- Family
- Community
- Social life
- Physical life
- Spiritual life
Once you have the list of goals, I encourage you to place them in these categories or even develop your own categories.
Limited Goals
Another way to help plan the year requires some focusing. Many of us make excellent “To Do Lists” of all the things that we need to do. Some make the list for each week, many keep a running “To Do List” in a notebook or on a pad of paper, and others do it electronically. The benefits of the “To Do Lists” are that you increase the likelihood of accomplishing the tasks that you write down. You tend to remember them, and that focus makes it more probable that you will actually accomplish them. In addition, the great thing about a “To Do List” is crossing off the items that have been completed.
However, “To Do Lists” do not help you think about the big picture—the overarching changes that you want to make or make happen during the year. Developing a few clear goals can help you remember them and assist you in making decisions about what activities you will undertake and how much time and energy you can or want to commit to them.
Providing just a few overarching goals also helps you make clear what you want to accomplish this year. The goals may or may not include goals given to you by your department chair, dean, colleagues, partner or others; however, they are your goals for you for this particular year. Try condensing your goals to just three – which you can remember; a long list of goals means you have to read them to remember them.
Motto or Mail Signature
As you plan for the year, you might consider adding or revising a sentence to your e-mail signature. I have done a new one every year, and students have indicated that they often use it to keep them focused during the year. It also keeps me focused on what I am trying to do.
Several years ago, I used “Keep the faith,” which led to some interesting discussions with some individuals who thought I was promulgating a religious tradition. However, most of the students found it inspiring and something that helped them feel that they could do all the work they needed since they realized I knew they could do it (write that paper, find that internship, conduct those interviews, perform well on tests and get all the things done that they needed to accomplish). It also helped me during that year of teaching several brand-new courses, learning a new university, adjusting to a four-hour commute and facing some personal challenges; it reminded me that I could get through that difficult year. I just needed to believe that I could.
This year, I have selected the phrase “Work hard, play hard, delight in opportunities, and celebrate accomplishments,” a motto that I hope my students pick up. Since about three quarters of them are involved in internships or part-time jobs and about half juggle both a job and an internship along with a full academic load, I want them to celebrate their performance and not always look at the glass as being half empty. They should recognize how much they are accomplishing. Try coming up with a slogan that you put on all your e-mail, something easy to do by adjusting your mail signature.
Summary
Thank you for reading this column about planning for the fall. Next month, we will discuss using case studies, an educational strategy that some of us use, but many of us forget to try. If you have comments about your professional development or suggestions for others, send them to me at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it., and I will include them in future “Mayo’s Clinics.” Also write to me there if you would like a copy of my revised MLA guidelines sheet for undergraduates
Dr. Fred Mayo, CHE, CHT, is a clinical professor at New York University and a frequent presenter at CAFÉ events nationwide.