Mediated Learning Newsletter

The University of Montana department chairs hold two positions: faculty and administration. Most of the time, these dual responsibilities lead in the same direction. However, the October 15 to November 15 span, the chair’s faculty evaluation time, requires the chair to be totally an administrator, trying to evaluate each faculty member’s professional papers for promotion, tenure, and merit. The three parts of the professional responsibilities each require unique perspectives: levels of professional services, quality of professional creative/research contributions, and success of teaching. Teaching seems to be the most ephemeral to judge, yet good-toexcellent teaching is required of all faculty members.

Usually, faculty members turn in their students’ evaluations, for all classes or for the number of classes required in the unit’s standards, as the sole source of good teaching evidence. These evaluations may be the standard university evaluation instrument which asks students to rank an individual class against what they consider a perfect class in “learning value, instructor enthusiasm, organization, individual rapport, group interaction, breadth of coverage, examinations and grading, assignments and readings, and workload difficulty,” all items identified by Marsh (1987) as valuable to faculty for assessing their own teaching. Students can augment the numbers on the evaluation sheet with anecdotal comments directed to improve the faculty member’s teaching. However, none of this information, data or remarks, is returned to the faculty member until the middle of the next semester, so it is at least one additional semester before suggestions by the students can be addressed thoroughly. Students upset about the course, may lower the overall averages of the class “scores” by simply marking the teacher down in any or all areas. So, these evaluations may be neither reliable nor valid judgments of a faculty member’s teaching. However, lacking other documentation, the department chair must evaluate a faculty member’s teaching on these data.

Evidence of quality teaching could be more fairly and evenly demonstrated if faculty members had other evidences of teaching. Added sources of evidence could include, but rarely do, peer evaluations, electronic recordings of classes such as video tapes or CD’s, syllabi of classes, personal descriptions of how an individual’s teaching incorporates the most current research on pedagogy and content of the particular curriculum area, or unsolicited student testimonies concerning classes. A “portfolio” of presented evidence with such a variety could greatly augment the student evaluations now required by the union contract and the university. And, the items could also be used as part of formative evaluations as the semester/year progresses and not just part of the individual’s presentation for merit raises.

Evaluation of teaching now comes down to a number. For a portfolio to be effectively evaluated, the evaluation process must go beyond numbers in a consistent manner. The University of Newcastle, in Australia, with extractions from The University of Adelaide, seems to have developed rubrics for assessing teaching portfolios. Their assessment data include student evaluations, but go beyond them to the review of teaching materials and the measures of student learning as well as other indicators. For The University of Montana to use a portfolio system, the faculty would need to develop an assessment rubric. And once the teaching is evaluated at the chair’s level using that rubric, the results might move forward with the research and service evidence. Since chairs are usually in the same teaching area as the faculty members they are evaluating, they are closer to the evaluation criteria and Mediated Learning evidence and should therefore be better able to make sound judgments about quality teaching.

Without getting into all the theories of organizational culture and theory (Waller, 2004)), I want to stress that the faculty evaluation process that culminates with faculty turning in a self-prepared package to their peers, chairs, deans, and provosts makes it hard to be objective. As faculty, our futures at the university depend on how we are perceived during the evaluation process. As evaluators, chairs strive to be fair and honest when examining each person’s attributes in each area of assessment. More evidence of good teaching, certainly more than the student evaluations, would make the entire process better.

Citations:

Marsh, H. W. (1987). “Students’ evaluations of university teaching: Research findings, methodological issues, and directions for future research.” ERIC Database # ED338629.

Murray, J. P. “Successful faculty development and evaluation: The complete teaching portfolio.” Accessed September 28, 2006 at http://www.ntlf.com/html/lib/ bib/95-8dig.htm .

The University of Newcastle, “Evaluating teaching.” Accessed September 28, 2006 at http://www.newcastle.edu.au/service/ teaching-learning/teaching-portfolio/evaluating.html .

Waller, S.C. (2004). “Conflict in higher education faculty evaluation: An organizational perspective.” Accessed September 28, 2006 at http://www.newfoundations. com/OrgTheory/Waller721.html .