Future Professoriate Program

Owned by George Rhinehart
Last updated: Oct 30, 2023 by Krista Kennedy
2 min read

What is FPP? 

CCR participates in the Graduate School’s Future Professoriate Program. FPP has two basic goals: preparing graduate students for the various duties of the professoriate and fostering a culture that values pedagogy within graduate education. Students begin this two-year program during their second year at SU.

How do we participate in FPP within CCR?

Your FPP mentor can help you develop and expand your teaching practice. Ideally, they will be someone other than your Exams or Dissertation Director, since they will be well positioned to be one of your letter writers when you go on the market and your Director will already be writing for you. They will visit your classes at least once a semester for the four semesters you participate so that they can provide you with real-time feedback and develop a deep familiarity with your teaching that will enable them to write a strong teaching letter when the time comes. During your last semester in the FPP program, your teaching mentor will work with you to develop a teaching portfolio that can prove useful on the job market. They can also support your development of course designs and help you sharpen teaching proposals for upper-division courses.

In addition, you’ll have access to various teaching-related colloquia that you may attend, with the expectation that you will attend at least four. You’ll see announcements from Glenn Wright about university-wide FPP colloquia, and you’ll occasionally see additional notifications from about FPP colloquia explicitly designed for our department.

In March, if you’ve attended at least four colloquia, had your teaching observed by your mentor, met regularly with your mentor to discuss your teaching, and filled out a one-page form describing your activities in FPP, you’ll receive a stipend from the university.

At the end of your second year in the program, if you’ve completed a teaching portfolio, you’ll receive a Certificate in University Teaching (CUT), an award you can add to your CV. With your CUT comes a title change: you move from “Teaching Assistant” to “Teaching Associate”—another item for your CV.