PERSPECTIVES: Positive changes in representing your teaching by Robert Goldstein, Geology
Procedures on how to evaluate teaching for promotion and tenure files have changed recently to be more meaningful to faculty who are being considered for promotion and for those committee members evaluating their records. Those changes appear to be very helpful. I remember the anxiety I felt years ago as a new faculty member at KU, when I was told that members of the department's promotion and tenure committee would appear randomly to view my lectures and evaluate them. I could not imagine anything more horrifying, but I soon learned that there could not have been a more useful exercise for my development as a teacher. Expert teachers actually sat down with me after my lectures and discussed what worked well and what didn't. Not only did they provide peer evaluations for my promotion and tenure file, but also they gave me useful suggestions about how I could improve and pointed out embarrassing habits I seemed to possess. I can honestly say that those letters and sessions really helped me, and eventually, I welcomed the visits.
When I put together my file applying for promotion and tenure, I learned that those peer evaluations would supplement student evaluations of the courses. I also discovered that I was to summarize my teaching philosophy on the blue form. Again, the anxiety set in. Did I have a teaching philosophy that was more than just finding ways to help my students learn what I taught? A teaching philosophy was something that I really had not thought about until that very day when I was forced to sit down with the blue form for the first time.
Years later I served on the University's committee on promotion and tenure and learned much more about how teaching was represented by others on campus. Many of our colleagues writing those peer evaluations of teaching sat in on only one or two lectures and just included positive comments without any of the constructive criticisms that I found so useful as a new teacher. I also found that statements about teaching philosophy were most useful to me as a committee member when they took the form of a narrative about teaching as opposed to the deeply philosophical statements similar to the one that I had written.
Current expectations for peer evaluations of teaching have changed so that they are more useful to the instructor and to the committees evaluating promotion and tenure files. Peer evaluations should contain the constructive criticism as well as the positive comments, and they should evaluate more than a single lecture. A series of lectures in various courses can be evaluated as well as objectives, methods used to attain them, and success in attaining them; syllabi, PowerPoints, and examinations; and examples of student work.
In addition to changes in peer evaluations, the old "teaching philosophy" statement on the blue form has evolved. It now asks for the nominee's narrative of major teaching interests, teaching philosophy, and approaches to teaching. Specifically, it states this: "Describe the topics you teach and give one or two examples of the intellectual goals you have for students. How do you help students achieve course goals? How do you know that students are achieving these goals? How have your teaching experiences shaped your ongoing goals and practices as a teacher?" Now candidates for promotion can provide details that relate more closely to their activities as teachers, their goals for having students learn, and their trajectory for improving as teachers. They can include anything they have done that is special or innovative, a sense of future directions, a presentation of teaching philosophy linked to student learning, a consideration of a focus on assessing and improving teaching, what has been done to deal with problems, and an idea of how far they have come and where they are going.
Documentation of effective teaching in the form of a teaching portfolio is expected for promotion and tenure files, so it makes sense for faculty to keep track of their teaching and add to these portfolios as they go, rather than wait until the year in which they are considered for promotion. These portfolios could include documentation of all courses taught, course syllabi and outlines, examples of homework assignments and student work on those assignments, laboratory assignments and tests, peer evaluations of teaching, summary documents from the Curriculum and Instruction or other surveys, all completed student questionnaires from surveys, documentation of supervision of students, testimonials from students, and any evidence of student learning.
Our procedures for evaluating and representing teaching clearly are improving. As a University community, we can look forward to the advances these changes can bring in teaching and student learning, and the evaluation of excellence in both.
For a response to this article, see Representing your teaching: The pre-tenure view.
