Posted on March 30, 2021 by Sarah Gillig

March 30th 2021

The goal with this iteration: work in any points from our discussion with the department chairs as well as the follow-up with the Provost and Associate Provost (on February 22, 2021). This will be shared with FEC, department chairs, Provost, and Associate Provost before being shared with the faculty at large.

Background

The Faculty Personnel Committee recognizes that the coronavirus pandemic is impacting how faculty allocate their time and energy amongst their teaching, scholarship, and service responsibilities. FPC also recognizes that, while restrictions on in-person gatherings and travel may soon be lifted, the impacts of pandemic-related disruptions on an individual’s work may persist for some time, and that the extent of these impacts will depend on the individual’s professional pursuits and personal situation.

To gain broader perspective on how candidate files for retention, tenure, and promotion might be reviewed in the wake of the pandemic, FPC has been consulting documents from academic associations that discuss review and reappointment procedures during the pandemic. We’ve also been gathering input and feedback from department chairs, the Provost, Associate Provost, and the Faculty Executive Committee on appropriate pandemic-related adjustments to the review process at K. This memo serves as an update to the February 3, 2021 memo from the Faculty Personnel Committee on alterations to the review process as a result of the pandemic.

Impacts of COVID on FPC Procedures

The Faculty Personnel Committee will take account of the pandemic when evaluating a candidate’s record of teaching/advising, scholarship, and service. FPC will continue to review candidate files using these traditional three areas of evaluation outlined in the FPC Procedures document while being mindful of the pandemic-related disruptions caused by shifts in teaching modality, restricted access to spaces and materials needed for scholarly and creative pursuits, and heightened calls to service. When composing the personal statement, FPC realizes that candidates may find more crossover between teaching and scholarship or service than under normal circumstances, or that their achievements in the three areas of evaluation are distributed differently than in pre-pandemic times. This is understandable. FPC will look at each case in light of the general impacts being felt across the entire faculty, and at the individual level, dependent on one’s professional pursuits and personal situation.

Statements from candidates, department chairs and advocates

A candidate’s personal statement, together with letters from the department chair and advocate, have always served the important role of providing context for a candidate’s review. In light of the disruptions and challenges posed by the pandemic, these letters become even more important in guiding FPC’s reading of a file. We recommend that candidates adopt a strengths-based approach in the personal statement to highlight their innovations and accomplishments rather than dwell on what didn’t happen because of the pandemic. If the candidate wishes, they may attach a one-page-long memo to the personal statement explaining the pandemic’s impacts on the three areas of review, rather than including this information in the body of the statement. Letters from department chairs and advocates should place the candidate’s work in context at the department/disciplinary and college level, while also addressing any personal circumstances of the candidate that may be relevant to the case.

Instructions sent to external reviewers by the Provost will be modified to reflect the need to consider pandemic-related disruptions on teaching and scholarship as well.

Concrete Adjustments

Research/Scholarship

FPC has never had specific requirements for scholarship, especially not for the number or type of works or the types of external validation, in recognition of the fact that these vary greatly from discipline to discipline and, within disciplines, by subfield and methods. In reading a file, FPC seeks to understand each candidate’s trajectory of scholarship, the kinds of external validation sought, and an account of the candidate’s progress and future plans. We rely on the department chair’s letter (and if applicable, the advocate’s) to help contextualize the candidate’s personal statement and convey this information.

In light of the pandemic’s impact, FPC will adjust expectations for scholarship and external validation to take account of challenges and disruptions to a candidate’s opportunities for scholarship and to receive external validation. Candidates should make clear what they have accomplished during the review period and any new directions their scholarly work has taken in response to the pandemic. Candidates may explain any challenges and disruptions experienced as a result of the pandemic—and their responses to them—in the memo attached to the personal statement, but FPC intends to pay special attention to the chair’s (and if applicable, the advocate’s) letter to explain the framework and context within which we should evaluate the candidate’s scholarly trajectory.

In discussions between FPC and other college bodies (department chairs, FEC, TLC, and the Provost), an understanding was reached that some aspects of faculty work traditionally associated with teaching could be considered forms of scholarship because of the research effort needed to transition to effective online teaching or provide expertise in a colleague’s class. Instances with some level of external validation (e.g. dissemination via websites like the TLC Teaching Commons site or external association sites; invited guest lectures to classes or groups) provide stronger evidence of scholarly engagement that does work that remains solely with the candidate. FPC recommends that candidates review the Boyer Model document that describes forms of scholarship for guidance on how best to frame their teaching-related work into a scholarship context. (For more on the Boyer Model, please see page 5-9 of the Faculty Handbook.)

Teaching

While the pandemic-imposed shift to online teaching has presented an array of significant challenges and required major change and innovation, FPC believes it important to continue using student evaluations as one measure by which teaching effectiveness is assessed. Course evaluations from Spring 2020, when faculty had to make the rapid transition to online instruction are the exception; these evaluations will not be reviewed. As with scholarship, FPC has never had specific criteria for judging candidates based on course evaluations, and always has taken into account the courses taught, class size and demographics, and specific pedagogies employed. This continues to be the case, and any evaluations from the pandemic period will be read in the context of pandemic-related changes and challenges. FPC understands that online teaching is not mastered in a single term. In recognition of the effort and learning required to take our classes online, candidates may designate up to two course evaluations during the pandemic period, outside of Spring 2020, to exclude from their file if they wish (from the 2020-2021 academic year).

In addition to student course evaluations, FPC also uses additional materials when reviewing a candidate’s teaching record. The candidate’s narrative in their personal statement is integral to understanding their approaches to teaching, and FPC expects the candidate to reflect on innovations, successes, and challenges—and their responses to these challenges—in their statement. Course syllabi and letters from the chair, advocate, other colleagues who have observed the candidate’s teaching, and alumni are also important. FPC will look to the chair and advocate letters for additional insights into the candidate’s accomplishments and course-related challenges. Associate Provost MacLean (in collaboration with some department chairs) prepared a document outlining alternative ways in which online teaching might be assessed by department chairs and we urge chairs to consult this document (available on the Department Chairs Teams site).

Service

Faculty responsibilities to college service did not stop when the pandemic began. In some cases, the pandemic may have added to those responsibilities, thereby impacting time allocation to other responsibilities such as teaching and scholarship. If a candidate’s service record has been impacted by the pandemic, in terms of what they took on, and how they met service responsibilities, this should be addressed in the candidate’s statement and, if appropriate, in the letters from the department chair and advocate.

Timing of Tenure Review

In response to the pandemic disruptions, current College policy allows a candidate to delay the tenure review for a year if they choose. To determine how best to proceed, FPC urges candidates to meet with their department/program chairs and the Provost to review priorities and expectations outlined in any prior review letters along, with progress made toward their stated goals while also considering FPC’s adjustments to the review process outlined in this memo. In light of these adjustments, FPC no longer recommends that candidates seek additional time beyond the one-year tenure clock extension before coming up for tenure.

Posted on February 24, 2020 by Tabatha Coleman

To: Ad hoc committee on course evaluations
From: FPC
In re: Summary of FPC meeting on course evaluations, 24 February 2020

While many of us recognize the inherent problems in course evaluations, we also believe that they serve an important purpose, allowing students to share their views and experience of the classroom. We discussed that many students who have concerns about what is happening in the classroom might well be reluctant to share that information with a department chair or the provost. As a tool that gives students agency and may bring to light problems that are otherwise invisible, we think course evaluations have a role.

In discussing ways to best evaluate our colleagues, where “best” means that the information gleaned would help the instructors themselves become better teachers and would give us on FPC an accurate sense of who they are in the classroom, we came up against familiar obstacles. As one colleague put it: “You can have cheap, easy or effective. Pick two.” That is, models that seem to be the gold standard and that would offer us the best information are so labor-intensive as to be impracticable on our campus. Thus, we would like to have as much good information as possible, recognizing that we may not be able to get the best.

Members had varying degrees of comfort with our current evaluations. Some expressed an appreciation of these over the old ones, since we can now track trends over time in specific categories. Some lamented those sets of evaluations where we receive few or no narrative comments (especially as we work hard to appreciate the entirety of a set of evaluations, and not merely the numbers). Others described the problem of disentangling enthusiastic or disparaging comments (which may be about personality or its absence, bias, etc.) from substantive comments about the quality of instruction. And all of us noted in various ways how we work hard to contextualize every set of evaluations—a class of only four students; a despised but required class for a major; an intellectually or emotionally charged class. In sum, given the imperfect metric we have, we work like archaeologists, sifting through each set of evaluations, carefully weighing the evidence, always attempting to contextualize it as best we can, knowing that they can only approximate the past.

In the end, one colleague summed up what we most want from course evaluations:

An assessment method that helps us identify a strong teacher, who offers clear expectations, supportive scaffolding, is available to students, and is broadly supportive of our student body. It should also be a tool that helps instructors improve their craft.

To that end, numerous ideas arose that we felt could be pieces of a teaching assessment process that would support the above desiderata. These include (in no particular order):

• A method of course visitation by faculty in the discipline that is standardized across the college and conforms to best practices. This would ideally involve multiple visits over multiple quarters by multiple individuals. One colleague employs a method of visiting a colleague’s course for an entire week, and uses a rubric to evaluate what he sees. Another discussed how the entire department visits the class of junior colleagues, so they get the benefit of multiple perspectives. Yet, we on FPC have seen many department letters that showed little to no evidence of classroom visitation, or perhaps merely one visit by a department chair at one point during the probationary period. A more formalized, clearly articulated system would lead to more detailed evaluations from peers, and would likely benefit instructors as well.
  • There was also a mention of trained student evaluators. If peers might fall into the same trap as students (because we love our peers and want to see the best in them), trained student evaluators might be able to offer more objective snap-shots of one’s teaching.
  • There is a model that exists (somewhere? in the ether?) where members of the RPT committee conduct course visits. It exists; we are not advocating for this.
• A modified assessment tool that encourages specific feedback on a more limited set of data points. We observed that the current evaluation form is most helpful when students take time to expand upon an assessment. For example, students who expand upon “The teaching techniques were effective in helping me learn” by noting appreciation of group work, the challenges of getting a group of five people together to work on a presentation, the boredom of reading straight from a PowerPoint—these give important information to the instructor and to FPC about what it looks like inside the classroom. As one colleague noted this would “make student engagement in the evaluation process more explicit and helpful.” Some ideas we generated around this:
  • What if there were fewer items and students were explicitly encouraged to explain their responses with detailed narrative comments about issues they can more fairly assess (e.g., class organization, materials, etc.)?
  • Perhaps it would be fairer to eliminate questions where we are more likely to be evaluating charisma or personality, instead of the learning that is happening.
  • Would it be possible with online evaluations to import from a syllabus the course goals, have students review them, and then evaluate whether the course has met them?
• Building in more reflective self-assessment throughout one’s teaching career. If our goal is not only to assess our colleagues’ teaching, but to support them in their journey to becoming better teachers, are there things that we can do to encourage self-assessment in ways that are not onerous? These small opportunities for self-assessment could provide a foundation for formal self-assessments in FPC review, and give them a treasury of documents to draw on. Two ways we might do this:
  • Create a template for/encourage/require midterm evaluations. These would not be for FPC or necessarily anyone other than the instructor. Yet, establishing a culture where midterm evaluations are the norm, might encourage on-going formative assessment for us as instructors.
  • One colleague noted that at a different institution, he was required to fill out an evaluation of the course at the same time that students filled out their course evaluations. This struck us as an interesting model, where one could at an optimal moment pause to look back on what worked and what didn’t, things you might do differently going forward, and differences between this iteration and previous iterations of the class. It would also offer candidates who are writing personal statements for 3rd-year and tenure reviews a way to review their own change over time.

We hope these reflections are helpful to you as you begin the process of reviewing the efficacy of our current student evaluation process.