Faculty Affairs Committee Meeting Minutes from September 30th, 2011
Attendees:
Steven Berg, Gail Henson, AK Mahmood, Christy McGee, Mike Ryan,
Daylene Zielinski
Meeting began at approximately 2 pm.
The first item was a request to a couple of observers/Chapter 7 experts to attend a meeting in the School of
Communications at 11 am October 4th. Mike Ryan and Daylene Zielinski agreed to attend. Mike Ryan agreed
to inform the Coordinating Committee of the request and our planned response.
The next items were primarily informational. The Lansing school has some, as yet incompletely articulated,
concerns about the portfolio process for R&T. They should be sending more information about their concerns
with Peri Jacobson to our next meeting. Mark Wiegand, president of FC, has asked that FA look into the
number of committee positions versus the number of (active) faculty. The expectation is that faculty time may
not be being used wisely and there may be committee positions that replicate each other. FA will look into this
after the Faculty Town Halls on Excellence in Teaching at Bellarmine. Gail Henson has agreed to join the
Parking Committee. They have not met yet.
The main item of discussion was fleshing out the plans for the Town Halls.
We have decided to hold the event twice. Once on Monday, October 17th from 3 – 4:30 in the School of
Communications room 230, and once on Tuesday, October 18th from 3 – 4:30 in BOB room 203.
Monday’s Town Hall will be facilitated by Daylene Zielinski, Steven Berg, and Gail Henson.
Tuesday’s Town Hall will be facilitated by Daylene Zielinski, Mike Ryan , and Christy McGee.
The goal for the Town Halls will be to help faculty articulate behaviors that demonstrate the Excellence
ranking in teaching for the purpose of annual evaluations. Implicit in this goal is descriptors for the
Meritorious and Favorable rankings also.
The format will be pseudo-randomly assigned small groups that create the widest cross-section of
faculty with highly focused tasks, a working time of 15 minutes, and a reporting time of 5 – 10 minutes.
The small groups will give their reports verbally to the whole and a summary in writing. This format
will be repeated twice, followed by an open discussion time.
The primary task of the small groups will be to identify discipline-crossing teaching behaviors
and describe those behaviors in terms of Meritorious, Excellent, and Favorable.
Example:
We all need to be available to our students outside of the classroom.
Favorable:
Meets office hours
Excellent:
Frequently available beyond office hours.
Meritorious: Maintains some version of nearly 24/7 availability
FA will use data collected from A&S faculty to focus these tasks.
The faculty will be asked to consider at least two different models for determining a ranking
from the discipline-crossing teaching behavior descriptions. One could require all behaviors to
align with Excellent/Meritorious descriptions in order to achieve that ranking. One could require
some subset (perhaps 4 of 6) to align with the Excellent/Meritorious descriptions
The faculty also needs to define how we believe academic and career advising should be folded
into our annual evaluation rankings in teaching. FA will urge the faculty to clearly articulate a
distinction between academic and career advising and being of service to Admissions and the
ARC. FA also suggests that the faculty suggest a percent of the teaching ranking that would
represent academic and career advising.
Finally the status of the Faculty Survey was discussed. It is hoped that the administration will see the value in
repeating the survey in the same manner as it was originally conducted since this will produce the most reliable
data and therefore the most reliable comparisons.
Meeting adjourned at approximately 4 pm.
The next meeting will be Frida,y October 14th at 2 pm in P006K.