Improving Faculty Collaboration Within and Across Networks

Abstract

The Tennessee Board of Regents (TBR) prides itself on being a system that fosters a collaborative environment with workforce partners, community leaders, and the faculty across the system. This mixed-methods study sought to generate findings and recommendations assisting TBR in cultivating collaboration among community college faculty within and across its network. We synthesized a conceptual framework of shared navigation for comprehensive collaboration through network development and unpacked faculty perceptions of trust, psychological safety, and structural supports. Initial conversations with faculty, as well as survey results, indicated that TBR faculty perceived that TBR leadership makes system-wide decisions in isolation, without campus-level context or input, which frames the inquiry of this study. Our approach through the lens of our synthesized, conceptual framework and literature-informed methods allowed us to reach the following findings:

There is a system-wide commitment to developing formal structural support for collaborative efforts across the TBR system. Faculty members experience minimal psychological safety within the TBR network. Faculty holds a limited perception of trust in collaboration spaces across the TBR system.