November 2005

PERSPECTIVES: Representing your teaching: The pre-tenure perspective by Holly Storkel, Speech-Language-Hearing

I agree with Professor Goldstein that the changes in how teaching is evaluated at KU are positive. Dr. Goldstein points out the value of teaching portfolios for departmental, college and university promotion and tenure committees. A few years ago when I prepared my teaching statement for my third-year review, I searched the web for examples of what needed to go into this document. In reading these statements, I was struck by how difficult it was to distinguish fact from fiction. In most cases, it was impossible to determine how lofty statements of philosophy might translate into actual teaching practices. I wondered how the P&T committee could accurately identify and reward quality teaching. The concrete examples now asked for at KU are a step in the right direction in helping the committee effectively evaluate teaching.

Moreover, by strengthening the teaching statement, the faculty voice also is strengthened. Prior to these changes, only the student voice was robustly represented through course surveys. The voice of faculty colleagues was represented to some degree, although there were some weaknesses as Dr. Goldstein describes. The new teaching statement encourages candidates to clearly enumerate learning goals for a course, detail teaching methods used to achieve those goals, and provide a self-evaluation of success in promoting student learning. This allows candidates to demonstrate that students learn in their courses, even if students themselves may not enjoy the process or may not realize how much they learned from the instructor.

This may sound like extra work for faculty, but in reality we are only being asked to make more visible the careful thought and planning that we already put into our teaching. In fact, having just submitted my application for tenure, I can attest that these changes facilitate completion of the teaching section of the blue form because the teaching statement is now an outgrowth of the iterative cycle of teaching preparation, implementation, self-evaluation and self-reflection.

This is a positive change for the University as a whole because it focuses teaching on student learning. Colleagues in K-12 education are already being forced to use this outcome oriented model with minimal power in determining goals. In higher education, we have the freedom of determining what constitutes important learning in our classrooms, and we should embrace the complementary responsibility of documenting that this learning is occurring.