Your suggestion about a comment schedule is well-taken!

As for your question, it’s a tough one. I’ve been to a number of excellent faculty development sessions at Baruch (particularly the Master Teacher sessions). I found them incredibly informative and helpful, and yes, did get paid for going. But I think the kind of professional development I’m talking about– which would ideally augment, not replace, those PDs– are sessions more directly linked to specific course planning, rather than broad themes in pedagogy.

For example, paid professional development seminars within departments that would train and facilitate the creation of thoughtful, well-functioning Blackboard pages, or blog development like we’ve been discussing. These brainstorming and work sessions would certainly be more productive, and more informative, than providing the tools but allowing adjuncts to sweat it out alone.

While I’m thinking big here, the summer and intersessions are opportunities, too– just as public school teachers get paid for the days they spend preparing their classrooms before the first day of school, professional development geared towards pre-semester planning during these usually-sleepy days would probably get more takers than expected. Especially if they weren’t looking generally at working a blog into a syllabus, but spending the time, keyboards in hand, working *your* blog into *your* syllabus.

Excellent post. I had similar experiences in my class that blogged. I have one suggestion and one question:

I found it easy enough to get students to return to the blog by assigning them a specific schedule for commenting, not just posting. I devised a rotation in which they had to post or comment four weeks out of five.

How would you suggest that those who are responsible for faculty development approach helping Jane Q? (For the record, many faculty development sessions at Baruch do pay adjuncts for their participation.)