Goal Setting and Faculty Development in an Indian Engineering College

Abstract Faculty members are the most critical resource that engineering education institutes possess and their development is the most important thing that the institutes can do. The development activities, however, largely focus on core engineering and, to some extent, on instructional strategies. The activities do not cover other developmental aspects such as goal-setting. A rural Indian college - one of the top 100 engineering colleges in India - decided to change that. The college leadership organized a workshop to set goals for all their forty senior faculty members. The workshop had the following broad elements: self-assessment using a variety of techniques, alignment with organizational goals, analysis of the aligned goals and their discussions with the full cohort. The workshop prerequisites included watching the Indian movie “Lakshya” (meaning goal), filling a questionnaire on career goals, and self-assessment using an instrument from PLOTR, a free-to-access, government-supported, and industry-led organization that identifies strengths of individuals. The workshop started with the discussion of importance of meditation in education followed by a 20-minute meditation session. That helped participants to calm their minds and note the activities that they would undertake if they did not have to earn for livelihood. After a 30-minute break, participants identified activities that they were best at and activities that they enjoyed the most. The lists were peer-reviewed and validated. All these self-assessment measures brought forth capabilities and interests of individual faculty members. Then we discussed the fundamentals of goal-setting and presented the organizational goals set by the college administrators. Participants formed groups of two to four faculty members each and each group chose an organizational goal. Interestingly, there was no contention over any of the goals and all (twelve) goals, except one, were chosen. The groups analyzed their goals using the force-field analysis technique, which resulted in concrete projects that they would undertake to achieve the goals, and presented them to the cohort. The participants’ overall rating of the workshop was 4.1/5.0. The college leadership regularly reviews the identified projects to ensure their success and plans to administer the career goal questionnaire after a few project reviews to ascertain that the workshop has contributed to the development of the faculty members. The final paper will have details of the workshop, analysis of participants’ feedback, and analysis of the pre- and post-goal questionnaires.

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