For doctoral students – Your relationship with your chair: Too chummy or too distant?

If you’re at the dissertation writing stage, your most important relationship (other than the one with your chocolate/peanut butter cups stash) is that with your chair/advisor/first reader. Your chair can be your best friend or worst nemesis. But there’s no getting around it; if you want to get done, finally, and graduate with those proud letters after your name, you need your chair.

When your chair is friendly, forthcoming, and responsive, you may be tempted to become friends. When your chair is too formal and standoffish, you may be tempted to ignore him or her entirely, or as much as the required paperwork allows. Either extreme is a mistake, and you’ll likely regret it later.

Member Spotlight: Victor P. Maiorana

TAA member Victor P. Maiorana is both a textbook and academic author in the disciplines of curriculum & instruction, education, linguistics, literacy, and college textbook psychology. 

He has written three textbooks published in the last three years, all by Rowman & Littlefield, including Teach like the mind learns: Instruct so students learn to think, read, and write critically (2017), Preparation for critical instruction: How to explain subject matter while teaching all learners to think, read, and write critically (2016) and Fixing instruction – Resolving major issues with a core body of knowledge for critical instruction (2015).