The boss made me administrator of the English/Literature Shared space Faculty Forum. It was an informal teacher forum where teachers were allowed to socialize and no Deans hung out there and no higher up administrators had access to the website either.
In order to keep the rest of the faculty apprised of the going on of the English/Literature Shared Faculty Forum website, I was assigned not only as the administrator of the website, but also I was the newsletter writer for the faculty newsletter.
Every month, I would keep the faculty up to date on current events regarding different faculty family lives, the Program Director who had everyone's phone numbers would fill me in on all her interesting telephone conversations with faculty.
I made the shared website and the newsletter informal, fun and newsy. I used a lot of clip art to brighten the text and I used a yellow text background for the newsletter itself.
Structure of the Newsletter
Introduction to the purpose of the Newsletter
Fun Contest Announcements and rules
School Policy Announcements
Departmental Announcements
Webinar/Prof. Development Announcements
Faculty/Family Announcements
Conference Announcements
Interesting Faculty Conversation Announcements
Interesting Course Lead News about the different classes in the shared website
I was to scour the website to see what people were talking about, and then write down what those conversations were about.
For instance, there was one faculty member who liked to constantly change her rubrics, so she and other Course Leads and other adjunct faculty would experiment with different DQ grading rubrics to see which was most effective. I published what they did and I published which rubrics they liked or disliked.
Other faculty talked about different ways they dealt with difficult students and I published their conversations in the newsletter too.
My Program Manager and I both created the newsletter together. She would also help create the threads and it was her idea to come up with the fun contests.
I then asked for faculty volunteers to tell me about conferences, webinars, that they had been to or knew about so faculty would contribute to the newsletter as well. Month by month, it was fun to do the newsletter and my boss and I had fun making the department feel like a family.
I was creating this newsletter on top of my regular teaching load and on top of my Course Lead duties at the time. Despite the work, for me the most rewarding part of working at AMU (besides the students) was networking with colleagues.
Do you and your school have a faculty newsletter? What do you include in your newsletter?
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