Resources for Department Chairs

Fall 2024 Dates and Deadlines

  • Sept. 15: Program Assessment Reports for 2023-2024 due on Watermark
  • Oct. 15: Program Assessment Plans for 2024-2025 due on Watermark
    • Watermark how-to documents can be found here.
  • Oct. 24: Optional Chairs Special Topics meeting on using Informer5 to examine enrollment data from previous semesters. Use this form to sign up.
  • Nov. 15: Course Scheduling Spreadsheets for 2025-2026 due (email registrar@allegheny.edu and provost@allegheny.edu when ready)
Assessment & Data

Assessment

See the Assessment page and the Assessment @ Allegheny site.

Watermark how-to documents are also available on the Assessment site.

Contact Associate Provost Peter Bradley (pbradley@allegheny.edu) with any questions.

Data

See the Institutional Effectiveness site.

To request data or propose a research questions, use the WebHelp system and select Academic Reporting as the category.

Chairs Meetings and Workshops

Chairs Meetings

Notes for Distribution to Departments

May 2024 Chairs Workshop Materials

May 2023 Chairs Workshop Materials

Chair Responsibilities

In short, department chairs are responsible for:

  • leading their department by fostering a positive climate and facilitating long-range planning and innovation;
  • acting as a departmental representative and liaison;
  • overseeing departmental staff and faculty and managing personnel issues;
  • handling student or parental concerns and complaints;
  • handling and keeping RSE narratives;
  • managing faculty development and evaluation;
  • calling and running department meetings;
  • managing course scheduling;
  • certifying minors;
  • approving transfer credit;
  • managing and overseeing departmental facilities; and
  • managing the departmental budget.

For more information, see the Chair Responsibilities in Section 2.6 of the Faculty Handbook.

Quick Links

Course Scheduling

Quick Links

Sample Templates

Departmental Budgets

Directories & Lists

Hiring, Tenure, & Promotion

See also the Tenure & Promotion page

Hiring

Classroom Observations

Faculty Evaluation Process

Interfolio

RSEs

Writing Review Letters

New Chairs Resources

Getting Started

  • Your department should have a department shared drive and a chair shared drive. During the chair transition, the previous chair should add you as a Manager to both of these drives, which serve as the main repositories for all department materials. Take some time to familiarize yourself with their contents and reach out to the former chair if you have any questions.
  • Take a look at your departmental Common Practices document and Classroom Observation Policy. If you can’t find your department’s observation policy, take a look at this collection.
  • There are chairs meetings roughly once per month during the academic year and these are typically held over lunch on Fridays. You’ll receive a list of the dates from the Provost’s Office and they are also included in the Provost’s Office Important Dates calendar (see these instructions to add this calendar to your Google account). The list of meeting dates is also posted on the Chair Resources page.

New Chairs Workshop Materials

Reports & Data

  • At the start of each month, you should receive a budget report from Financial Services. Your building coordinator also receives these reports. If you’re on campus, you can drill down for further details about specific transactions; see this document for more details.
  • As a chair, you should be now able to look up any student in Self Service. One way to quickly find a student is to look up their ID number using Informer and then search in Self Service using this number.
  • You should also be able to login to Informer 5 using your Allegheny email and password. With Informer, you can look up student information like ID numbers or advisors, run reports on class enrolment (current and historical), get lists of majors and minors in your department, and see which classes are being taught in your building. Your building coordinator also has access to Informer and can run reports for you.If you don’t yet have access to Informer 5, submit a WebHelp ticket.

Time and Task Management

As a chair, you’ll find yourself managing a variety of tasks. The start of your term is a good time to examine your current strategies for keeping track of tasks and implement new ones so that you don’t get overwhelmed. Here are some ideas:

  • Bookmark frequently-used resources in your browser. You can also add bookmarks for files and folders in Google Drive since these have web addresses.
  • Log in to Chrome and sync your profile across devices so that you have access to all of your bookmarks on any computer
  • Use Google calendar to track meetings and plan your time.
  • Organize and sync your Google Drive so that you can access it from anywhere. You can use folders, etc, as you would have with My Documents. Try not to keep important files on your desktop as you won’t be able to access them from other computers or devices and you may lose them if your computer crashes.
  • Develop a todo list system and take time to plan your day/week/semester. See, for example, GTD for Academics.

Technology

Informer

Shared Drives

WordPress