Some, but by no means all, academic staff members feel that investing time and effort in teaching activities impedes progress in their careers because it goes at the expense of their impact/output in research. I am very much interested in best practices, do's and don'ts on how to optimally combine these two primary academic processes, especially in the early phases of academic careers.
I do not have good recommended publications, but I wish to comment as follows:
1. Many US universities allow faculty to teach for two terms and take off summer break. If the summer term is 3 months and there are 2 other holidays at the end of each term, faculty can have over 5 months when they can finalize their research. It is possible to use this period to publish a paper in a top tier or B journal and improve one’s tenure. The down side of it is that you never have vacation and you’ll spend all your life in academic work only.
2. Collaboration with colleagues and peers and exploiting each other’s strength. Given the very taxing and demanding nature of quality publishable research, faculty with good collaboration can produce quality papers at regular intervals by allowing their colleagues to bring in their strengths and group spirit and objectives. This will enhance quality publication and accelerate tenure.
3. Collaboration and supervision of PhD students. Early faculty can work with students by way of supervision and data collection and publish papers together. I see in Africa good students papers not published because students do not know how to go about it and faculty can finalize that. This situation should not be exploited by lazy faculty writing their names on students work and publishing the same. Under such circumstances faculty will not have learned anything since that is as good as plagiarism.
4. Engagements- Consulting and other undertakings can also prove exciting and rewarding and many universities accumulate points in these areas that go towards promotion credit. Faculty can engage society and present a good output for tenure points.
5. Mentoring and serving students-faculty engaged in general student preparation outside class also gets credit and gets to understand students better which improve performance of both faculty and students.
6. Sabbaticals-Faculty can always have time off as sabbatical or leave of absence where they work on very visible projects like a book, industry experience or some other activity which can be packaged and assessed as an academic product.Innovate and sell.
7. Post Doc opportunity could also be used to accelerate research and publications which get into faculty promotions and tenure oriented faculty could pursue this.
8. Converting every activity and action into academic salable product can also lead to academic innovation and diversity which builds the academic enterprise.
9. While teaching component also adds to tenure in a small way especially where faculty has under gone full faculty preparation, it is a key source of knowledge that drives other aspects of faculty success. A faculty member who only focuses on teaching maybe as good as a faculty who focuses on research only and hardly gets time to debate with students and other colleagues. So focusing on teaching activities only is not a good balance.
10. Easier said than done and these matters are already well known, the only difference is that sometimes lack of personal discipline and commitment to follow through a rigid pattern can delay ones tenure. Those who do follow a pattern accelerate their tenure and loose out on other goodies in life. I once saw a paper asking how do faculty spend their time and how do they account for the summer term which could have been used for a holiday
best of luck in 2015
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