A Texas A&M School Drives Faculty Engagement with Data

As the fourth largest school at Texas A&M University, the School of Education and Human Development (SEHD) has a rich history of training leaders in the classroom, office, research lab, and athletic field.

Recently, the school underwent several transitions, including a name change and a transfer of some programs as part of a university-wide restructuring plan. Michael A. de Miranda, PhD, led the school as interim dean for a year before being named permanent dean in 2022.

SEHD’s leadership team wanted to gauge faculty members’ working experiences and social-emotional needs, especially in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic and considering recent organizational leadership changes. They knew that this type of reflective feedback would be easier to acquire with the help of an external research partner.

“As a dean, you really need reflective feedback from faculty on their needs, their resources, and their social connectedness. We needed to find out what we could do to improve, and Hanover’s report helped us drill down to changes we could implement that would help faculty feel more included and supported.”
— Michael de Miranda, PhD, Dean

The Challenge: Improve Faculty Support and Retention

Within SEHD, the faculty’s sense of identity and belonging had become strained not only from the school’s transitions, but also by the isolation and stress of the pandemic. Having up-to-date benchmarks and indicators would help leadership better understand the diverse experiences of early-career faculty and determine their factors for success.

To capture this information, Dr. de Miranda and his team worked with Hanover Research to develop a needs assessment that included in-depth interviews with faculty to explore their lived experiences. The project included three primary objectives:

1. Explore how early-career faculty perceive and experience multiple dimensions of college life, particularly during the pandemic.
2. Understand the challenges encountered during the pandemic and otherwise.
3. Identify resources and strategies that SEHD can use to facilitate greater early-career faculty satisfaction and success.

“It’s very expensive to recruit faculty. You’re throwing resources away if you don’t have the structures in place to properly retain them. Retaining faculty means nurturing their development, their engagement, and their work-life balance. We needed to find out what we could do better to support our faculty, and that’s what Hanover’s report provided.”

— Michael de Miranda, PhD, Dean