1. What will be the timeline for transition? How will faculty experience the transition to the
new system?
All faculty will move to the new evaluation process in Fall 2011. This means that:
o The existing annual evaluations (that follow the calendar year) will end.
o Faculty will be encouraged and supported to use Digital Measures.
o The requirements for tenure-track faculty will follow the portfolio process as
outlined in the documents “Review Process for Reappointment and Tenure” and
“Portfolio Materials for Review.”
o SRIs will be administered in all classes as appropriate.
During the first academic year only (2011/12), certain exceptions will be necessary:
o 4th-year faculty will follow the documentation requirements and levels of review
of 3rd-year faculty.
o For all tenure and promotion candidates (6th-year faculty and early tenure cases)
it remains to be determined whether they will follow the existing “dossier”
process or the new “portfolio” process. Currently there is discussion in the Task
Force of asking these faculty members to vote on their preference. The results of
any such vote will be binding on all faculty within this group. For this election to
take place, the College will need to identify faculty who intend to go up for early
tenure.
During AY 2011/12, departments will work on revising guidelines to bring them in line
with 1) the intended purposes of guidelines and 2) the definitions of Teaching, Scholarly
Activities, and Service that the Task Force has developed.
2. What support will be in place for faculty transitioning to the new faculty evaluation
system?
Academic Affairs and members of the FETF will work over the summer to develop
numerous means of support, including:
o A written document akin to the currently available “Guidelines for Dossier
Preparation for...” (This document will be available by early June 2011)
o Informational workshops and Q&A sessions.
o Training for the required peer observations of teaching and additional online
resources for all peer observations—both required summative observations and
optional formative observations.
o Workshops, seminars, and retreats on various aspects of developing an academic
portfolio for evaluation (i.e. writing an effective narrative; selecting and
presenting the additional materials for review).
3. What role will department guidelines play? Will there be common guidelines?
The FETF has purposely avoided articulating common guidelines. The task force believes
that departments, in conjunction with the deans, should determine what a tenurable
faculty member “looks like” in the areas of Teaching, Scholarly Activities, and Service.
Ultimately we expect that department guidelines will strike a balance between the
overarching mission of the College and what is appropriate for each discipline. So, while
there will not be common guidelines per se, we shouldn’t expect there to be significant
discrepancies between individual department guidelines.
Furthermore, as the FETF recommendations state, the purpose of guidelines will be to
establish the standard for a cumulative record of accomplishment over time (up to
tenure, promotion, or post-tenure review). As such, department guidelines should
undergo revision only rarely.
4. What will be the process for rewriting guidelines?
Rewriting of department guidelines will take place during AY 2011/12. The FETF has not
yet made recommendations for how the process will unfold, but we do expect that:
o Departments will have most of the year to accomplish this. It will not be a rushed
process.
o There will be ample back-and-forth between the deans and departments.
Departments will not feel as if they are undertaking this project in isolation.
o It should be an inclusive process involving all tenure-track/tenured faculty within
departments.
5. Will there be percentage values attached to each category of evaluation?
No. Currently, weights and measures are used only in the annual evaluations that follow
the calendar year; they are not used for reappointment, tenure and promotion decisions.
(Members of the school and college RTP committees have confirmed that it is their
current practice to review RTP cases holistically without regard to weights and
measures). In that regard, and because we are ending annual evaluations that follow the
calendar year, the Task Force does not believe that percentage values are necessary.
Without weights and measures applied to each category, reviewers will be looking to see
that candidates for reappointment, tenure, and promotion are meeting expectations in
all 3 categories of evaluation and are showing evidence of professional growth.
Candidates, for their part, will have the flexibility to excel in the category(ies) most
important to them. Again, this does not represent a departure from current practices
regarding reappointment, tenure, and promotion decisions.
6. I have put a lot of work into advising for my department. Will all this work now count for
nothing in tenure and promotion decisions, since advising is no longer its own category?
By including advising within the category of Teaching, the College is signaling that it
values especially the developmental aspect of advising--advising that focuses on
encouraging and guiding students toward career opportunities or toward graduate
studies. The quality of advising should be what is reflected in portfolios.
That said, we recognize that some faculty have invested considerable time into
developing advising materials and protocols for their programs, and some faculty simply
take on a disproportionate share of advising. It will be possible, even without a separate
category for advising, to capture the quality of that work in portfolios.
7. How will the work I do on reassigned time be evaluated?
In most cases, it will make sense for faculty to include the work they have completed on
reassigned time as either teaching, scholarly activities, or service. For example, a grant
proposal submitted to an external funding agency, completed on reassigned time, might
be placed under Scholarly Activities, while work done as chair of a Faculty Senate
standing committee, likewise completed on reassigned time, might be placed under
Service. In still other cases, work done on reassigned time is more administrative in
nature and should be evaluated on its own merits.
In all cases, the FETF is proposing that all reassigned-time evaluations and reports be
included in the 3rd and 6th-year portfolios.
8. Can a faculty member with a lot of reassigned time be penalized for having taught less
than a full load?
No. Evaluation of teaching is based on the courses taught.
9. What measures will be developed to protect against unfair evaluations?
The Task Force is working on several means of ensuring fair evaluations:
o There will be extensive “user training” for faculty and administrators at all levels
of review on the principles and processes of the new evaluation system.
o The Task Force is currently developing Handbook language to establish a
“reconciliation process” for cases where there is disagreement between levels of
review. The purpose of such reconciliation meetings will be to attempt to resolve
differences before the case is forwarded to the President.
o There will be continued oversight of the evaluation system to ensure that
practices that run counter to the Handbook are corrected.
10. Why is the definition of “Service” lacking the level of detail found in the definitions of
“Teaching” and “Scholarly Activities”?
The Task Force initially desired to keep this definition both succinct and broadly
encompassing because we felt that any attempt to capture exhaustively all the forms that
service could take would inevitably exclude something we had not considered. By
keeping the definition succinct, the Task Force never intended to diminish the relative
importance of Service.
Despite our intentions, the feedback we have received suggests that faculty desire
additional elaboration on what “Service” is, similar to how the definitions of “Teaching”
and “Scholarly Activities” are elaborated upon.
Most recently, the FETF has developed the following definition of service:
Service
Faculty engage in service when they participate in the shared governance
and good functioning of the institution; service to the institution can be at
the program, department, school, or college level. Beyond the institution,
faculty engage in service when they use their disciplinary and/or
professional expertise and talents to contribute to the betterment of their
multiple environments, such as regional communities, professional and
disciplinary associations, non-profit organizations, or government
agencies.
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Examples of service might include:
Committee participation
Committee leadership
Program or department contributions
Board participation
Volunteer consultancies
Contributions to disciplinary associations
11. Will the portfolio approach make it easier for weak performing faculty to “slip through”?
No. It is unlikely that under-performing faculty will be able to “slip through” unnoticed.
It is true that the portfolio system allows faculty to put their best foot forward and to
showcase their most important accomplishments. Still, all faculty will be expected to
meet their department guidelines for tenure. The CV, as an encompassing and
cumulative document within the portfolio, should make it possible to identify those cases
when faculty do not meet the department guidelines for tenure. Portfolios are essentially
evidence-based documents, just like an academic article where the author selects
evidence to make a case for his/her thesis.
12. Is the Task Force establishing a system that will allow for merit-based pay adjustments?
The Task Force has carefully avoided questions concerning compensation. It has been
our priority to establish the best evaluation system possible that meets our desire for a
“meaningful” system (one that uses valid measures to capture the quality of faculty work,
allows faculty the flexibility to make the best case for themselves, and reduces “busy
work”). Our work neither precludes nor renders inevitable any future decision regarding
merit-based pay adjustments.
13. What will happen to annual evaluations of tenured faculty, the process for promotion,
and post-tenure review?
The Task Force recommends that annual evaluations (those that follow the calendar
year) end. The next steps in the process of revising faculty evaluation will include
developing recommendations for promotion and for post-tenure review. It is likely that
those processes will be similar to the portfolio process developed for tenure-track faculty,
where faculty will have options to make their strongest case.
Questions related to proposed SRI instrument
14. Is the college making the evaluation of teaching more complicated by substituting openended questions (eliciting qualitative responses) for scaled items (eliciting quantitative
responses)?
The summative portion of SRIs (the portion intended for evaluation purposes) has a
reduction in the number of scaled items from 4 to 2. There is no evidence that this
reduction diminishes the ability of the evaluative portion of the SRI to capture the
relevant instructional dimensions of teaching.
Where we see significant replacement of scaled items (quantitative) by open-ended
questions (qualitative) is in the “Teaching Improvement” section of the SRI. This section
is not intended for evaluation purposes, and the student responses to these questions
“belong” to the faculty member to use for formative purposes.
15. Why did the FETF stay with the same 6-point rating scale as used on the current
Instructional Assessment instrument?
The subcommittee that developed the instrument intentionally sought to retain a degree
of continuity with the existing instrument so that some longitudinal data can be
preserved. Thus, we retained 2 of the 4 items from the existing Instructional Assessment
instrument that are used for evaluation, and we preserved as well the same 6-point
Likert scale.
16. Can SRIs be administered online?
There are good reasons for moving the SRI to online administration, not least of which is
that the instrument lends itself very well to online administration. However, it is widely
documented that response rates tend to fall when SRIs are administered online rather
than in class on paper. We need to be sure that the fall in response rates will not be so
severe as to render SRI results unrepresentative. We expect to begin the process of
carefully moving SRIs online by piloting certain programs or departments in Fall 2011.
17. Does the evaluation of teaching rely too much on SRI results?
This is a question of judgment, but the Task Force believes that enough additional ways
are available to capture the work we do and the results we attain as teachers that we are
not placing too heavy a reliance on SRIs. For example, even though peer observations are
optional, other than the one required summative peer observation in the 6th year, faculty
have the option to include additional observations in both their 3rd and 6th year
portfolios as a counter-weight to SRIs. Departments, too, can establish within their
guidelines expectations and protocols for peer classroom observations beyond what is
required at a minimum for all faculty.