Developing Your Department's Teaching Schedules

By mid fall, the chairs and the dean and associate dean of the faculty will begin to discuss staffing needs for the subsequent academic year and an official application for visiting faculty ("personnel planning process") will open. The review decision and approval for visiting positions (visiting blocks and year long positions) will be issued by the end of half-block.

Typically, chairs begin working internally on the course schedule in block 3. See Chairs and Directors Teams page for more detailed information. Chairs and directors typically share a in-progress draft of their course grid in January, and begin discussion with the deans on department and college needs with timing of course offerings. 

The college-wide teaching schedule will be finalized and approved by the Dean of the Faculty in early February.

Factors that influence course schedule approval include but are not limited to class sizes and room/space needs, need for general education and First Year Program courses, not over offering courses in some blocks and under offering in others. Visiting faculty should typically be scheduled later in the academic year (blocks 2-8) to allow for additional time for enrollment and onboarding of new visiting faculty.

Overview of General Guidelines for Teaching Schedules

1. The standard annual teaching load of six blocks shall apply to all full-time faculty, whether tenure-track or visiting. New tenure-track faculty on a six-year-to-tenure-review schedule will teach a five-block load in their first year, and will typically not be assigned committee service or advisees in their first year at CC. 

2. Chairs and directors may receive teaching release for their administrative role. Some professorship awards also come with teaching release. There are also internal teaching-release grants available for faculty development. Some external grants allow for the funding of teaching release blocks in the academic year.

3. All programs and department contribute to the general education courses via the First Year Program and/or the Critical Learning Across Liberal Arts. We need approximately 35 CC100 and 35 CC120 per year, and thus each department should typically plan to offer 1 section of either CC100 or CC120 for every two to three faculty members.