|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
FACULTY assessment is generally conceptualized and practiced as a type of summary judgment of faculty members' performance, rendered after the fact, in a largely decontextualized fashion, by outside forces—all of which results in a pervasive sense of an adversarial relation. Furthermore, the assessors are guided by standards and rules that usually are statements of lofty ideals rather than operationalizable goals or criteria. Even when reviewers apply more specific standards, they only rarely attempt to devise nonjudgmental approaches to faculty evaluation that seek to aid the faculty member's development. What I suggest is to recast assessment as a collaborative enterprise that favors partnership even as it recognizes and acknowledges institutional and professional demands and hierarchies.
Just as student assessment practices are, at last, being rethought with regard to their effect on student learning outcomes, so too must faculty assessment be revised to emphasize faculty members' growth. Ideally, faculty assessment has two related objectives: (1) to serve an institution by providing needed information about its faculty members' performance and (2) to nurture professionalism.
In placing assessment in the proximity of personal professional growth and, by implication, of institutionally supported professional development, the reviewing body recognizes that such growth is as vital to the home institution as it is to the individual faculty member. Furthermore, a professional-growth perspective of assessment shifts emphasis from the product to the process. Given the potential for interpersonal friction between colleagues or within the academic hierarchy, not to mention the fact that careers are at stake, one might even say that in assessment, more than in any other area of departmental life, the process is the product. Therefore, my discussion is less an enumeration of dos and don'ts (though some are included) than a reflection on how one might make assessment an integral part of the life of a department.
The department should begin to establish an environment conducive to the joint enterprise of assessment during the hiring process. Interviewers must present candidates credible signs that the department considers it in its interest to work toward the success of its new faculty members, rather than to prove, ultimately, their unworthiness. In fact, determining, in all candor and before a firm offer is made, whether such a stance exists in the department—taking personal, disciplinary, and programmatic issues into consideration—may be the most important way a department chair can avoid future heartache, not to mention legal action. A failed search, then, would be one in which the department lacked such a consensus, and not only one in which it could not attract its preferred candidate.
If an institution is to achieve a development-oriented assessment process, it must take at least the following steps:
Develop extended career plans. For newly hired faculty members, these plans might initially span five to seven years. Ideally, they should be formulated jointly by the department chair, a faculty mentor, and the junior colleague. These parties should take into account the opportunities available to the junior faculty member at the institution, as well as the institution's expectations of him or her. Preparing such plans in writing will not only force the planners to reflect thoroughly on their goals but also make it easier to trace a changed institutional environment or refocused departmental or professional expectations of the faculty member, with their attendant repercussions for steady career development.
For example, in a large university, a faculty member will likely be expected to support both the graduate and the undergraduate programs and will need to gauge carefully how to balance them (or which to favor over the other). The department should spell out these expectations in some detail for junior colleagues and should offer guidance on how to deal with competing demands.
Specify intermediate goals. Those involved in developing that long-term career program must include in it a set of intermediate steps conceived so as to provide the junior colleague a workable professional agenda. Given the great variance in philosophy and practice among institutions of higher learning, the department should ascertain its specific expectations in the areas of teaching, scholarship, and service. For example, what kinds of teaching evaluations should the colleague work toward at a liberal arts school that places a premium on excellent teaching and close contact with students? And what rate of publishing in what kind of scholarly outlets does the department consider appropriate performance? A set of goals mindful of the colleague's interests, preferences, and needs and of the institutional context provides a clear standard against which to measure progress and render evaluations. Again, the chair plays a critical role in establishing these steps and in conveying the understandings arrived at to the entire department.
Identify skills that are required for reaching these goals. It is well known that graduate training prepares future faculty members only marginally well for the full range of challenges in academia. For example, some graduate programs may place greater emphasis on honing students' research skills than on teaching pedagogical principles. Therefore, augmenting that training, perhaps with the help of a teaching resource center, may be necessary to enable a colleague to develop a larger repertoire of classroom skills, such as familiarity with a variety of learning environments (e.g., lecture, seminar, group and partner work, case study, demonstration, and fieldwork) and resources (e.g., data and text bases, software packages).
Allocate resources for attaining these goals. If the department expects candidates to present a significant number of publications at the time of the tenure review, it should provide the means for research and writing. This support would certainly include material resources, such as accessible computers and quality libraries. But it might also include convenient teaching schedules and take into consideration the nature of faculty members' courses; teaching classes in their fields of specialization, graduate seminars, or classes that afford the opportunity for classroom-based research in second-language acquisition all might aid faculty members in their scholarship. Only when such issues have been carefully negotiated can the department and faculty members be held accountable for successes and failures.
Conduct regular reviews. The degree of attainment of both intermediate and long-term goals must be discursively ascertained and, ultimately, documented. For this purpose, reviews, whether formal or informal, should take place regularly. Many institutions conduct formal three-year reviews with tenure-track junior faculty members. However, less official, though by no means less serious, conversations between mentor and faculty member should periodically occur as well. These meetings would also serve to socialize the colleague steadily into the system of values concerning the institution's and the individual's expectations, rights, and responsibilities. Also, such a relationship would help him or her network with others outside the department since they, too, work within the same framework of institutional conversations and goals.
More formal assessment meetings might begin with a discussion of a candidate's progress by all members of a department, or, at the very least, with a conversation between department chair and junior colleague. The discussion should be followed by a written summary.
Thus far I have described a reconceptualized system of faculty assessment involving a dialogue among the faculty member and other members of the department, in particular the chair. But although I have focused on the department as the locus for assessment and, by implication, on the chair as a critical player, the review process has an additional dimension: the larger institutional setting. In most institutions, decisions on tenure and promotion ultimately rest with the president or a provost, with deans and diverse entities of faculty governance contributing input. These parties are more likely to concur with departmental judgment if the department has thoroughly considered and defined its relations to the larger wholes that provide its context: an interdisciplinary program, the institution, higher education, and society.
Specifically, I urge departments to articulate their mission and goals in action plans covering a number of years and to base their criteria and procedures for assessing faculty on these statements. Far from being superfluous administrative diversions, such documents can aid critically not only in departmental growth but also in recognizing faculty efforts and achievements. This approach to assessment offers the strategic advantage that a department will be able to explain its activities in the language of the realm in times of difficulty.
The more important ways of stimulating an internal conversation on the department's mission include the following:
Be attuned to issues in higher education. These include such broad educational desiderata as equity and access and such language-related issues as multiculturalism in the curriculum and diversity in the student body along with the emergence of global bases for knowledge and the global reach of proposed solutions. By relating their work to these concerns faculty members may become resource persons within the institution, serve as liaisons to the outside world, and perhaps even undertake research that attempts to answer some of the complicated questions being asked.
Get a clear sense of the mission and goals of the institution. This understanding is absolutely essential if assessment is to be perceived as valid outside the department. The promotional materials an institution creates to attract prospective students, to lure potential funders, and to keep in touch with alumni and friends are gold mines of information. Instead of dismissing them as idle posturing or propaganda, one should take these materials quite seriously: they provide powerful arguments why certain activities by a faculty member are or are not important to the institution.
Know the targeted student population. Many colleges and universities carve a market niche for themselves by targeting certain student populations, including ethnic and racial minorities, students from a particular region or economic class, and students with certain interests, backgrounds, or academic profiles. Faculty activities—whether in teaching, scholarship, or service—that are closely related to this student population are likely to be perceived as more meritorious than those that are not.
Determine the institution's favored educational philosophy and classroom approaches. Here, again, brochures can provide strong signals. For example, if the school prides itself on the innovative incorporation of technology into the learning environment, the development and use of such materials are worth mention in a faculty member's evaluation.
Understand the institution's developmental thrust. Despite outer appearances, educational institutions are by no means static entities. In this day and age they cannot afford to be. By being attuned to what new initiatives are likely to be introduced a department may be able to give prominence to and reward faculty expertise and creativity that might otherwise go unrecognized.
Even as I emphasize the importance of a locally constructed set of assessment criteria, I do not dismiss an institution's right to insist that its faculty members win recognition for their scholarship by their national or international peers. But, as we know, such recognition is not and should not be demanded by all institutions. Rather, any requirement of this kind should arise as a result of the vision of leaders at a given school.
One of the biggest injustices in academia may be the fact that many faculty members are assessed according to a standard that has only the most tenuous connection to their lives: they are hired according to local needs but assessed according to a nebulous national standard of graduate research institutions. And this failing may harm not only individual faculty members but also institutions as a whole. It may be that the often decried copying of the standards of research institutions by schools that clearly have very different educational missions and goals occurs because faculty members have given relatively little thought to, and have created few explicit statements about, how they wish to be evaluated within their departments and institutions.
The only way that mismatch can be remedied is with rigorous criteria and processes for accountability developed with the institution's proclaimed goals in mind. We have implicitly accepted that proposition in teaching and service, although we have not always been so wise as to apply it to our assessment practices. We should now consider it explicitly, as we connect the review process with all three areas of our professional lives: teaching, scholarship, and service.
In this section I want to offer, if only briefly, some suggestions for conducting assessments of the three areas mentioned above. I hope that, used in conjunction with criteria and procedures already in place, they might enrich departments' assessment processes.
In many institutions teaching quality is assessed, though not always successfully, on the basis of student course evaluations and, perhaps, peer class observations, which are usually rather informal. However, discussion in higher education has recently spelled out, with much greater care, broad understandings in three key areas: (1) the nature of learning and learners, particularly at the college level, and by extension the nature of the role of teachers; (2) the goals of education in relation to changes in world politics, the rise of the global economy, and the diversity of American society; and (3) the core knowledge, insights, and unique approaches that distinguish our various academic disciplines.
As a consequence we can now identify a set of classroom characteristics that we take to be most conducive to the kind of learning outcomes we desire:
Assessors can gauge excellence in teaching by the ways in which and the success with which instructors apply these principles inside and outside the classroom. Faculty members can document their performance with a portfolio, much as artists do—and much as we present our published scholarship for outside review. Such a portfolio might include the following components:
A statement of teaching philosophy
Student course evaluations, with feedback on course, such as student journals or diaries, in addition to the computerized printouts
Material from specific courses, at different levels, for different student populations and learning goals, including reading lists or sequences of assignments, along with detailed instructions
Annotated syllabi, including statements of goals, reflections after completion of the courses, and plans (if any) for adjustments
Description of a particular unit or topic
Formative and summative assessment instruments
Feedback on student work
Information on how the instructor has used special forms of study: group work, collaborative projects, discussion groups, computer-assisted instruction, video, lab work
Evidence of classroom approach (e.g., videotape)
Samples of student work, perhaps including the best work submitted in a course: writing samples with comments by professor, papers, presentations, projects (such as community service)
Materials from thesis and dissertation mentoring
Classroom observation reports from colleagues
Letters of support from colleagues and students
In the most critical assessment of faculty, the tenuring and promotion process, we typically use outside peer reviewers. A reconceptualized system will necessitate that this process, traditionally the most formalized, also be rethought and realigned. Having defined, planned, and nurtured a colleague's professional work within the context of a department's and an institution's culture and goals, the department must now clarify that context, at least in broad strokes, to the outside reviewers. To reiterate, in no way does such a clarification invite reviewers to lower their critical standards, nor is it an attack on the validity of the universal expectations that professionals in a field rightly hold of their colleagues. On the contrary, by spelling out what was agreed on as an appropriate expectation, the department can ensure that assessment is all the more lucid and fair.
To explain the institutional framework within which a colleague has worked, the department should draft a standard letter that provides an overview of the department and outlines the junior faculty member's responsibilities and research agenda (for a sample letter, see app. 1). The letter should also describe the school's expectations in the areas of teaching, scholarship, and service; the official documents of the institution that pertain to faculty issues, particularly the faculty handbook, can prove useful in composing this section. Again, instead of asking a reviewer to evaluate according to lofty but vague ideal standards, the department should pose specific questions in the cover letter.
The chair must be as informed as possible about all aspects of the tenure-review process, from the creation of an appropriately formatted curriculum vitae to the number of outside reviewers and the manner of their selection (e.g., by the candidate, by the department, or jointly; with or without the knowledge of the candidate regarding the final choice) to limits on access to information about votes during the review process. Junior faculty members should be informed about this process as soon as they are hired and should be assessed with the tenure-review guidelines in mind at all stages of their untenured status.
The same institutional and scholarly principles used to define worthy teaching and scholarship for the purposes of tenure review also indicate what constitutes worthy service within the department and institution, as well as within the profession as a whole. Aside from spelling out which committees are most labor-intensive, or most critical to the smooth functioning of the department, the reviewers' letter should also indicate whether certain committees are likely to be staffed by junior or senior faculty members and whether the institution holds different expectations of service at different stages of a faculty member's life.
Recognizing that standards of assessment for service, like those for teaching and scholarship, are often unclear, the MLA recently formed a committee to provide a more specific definition of what constitutes service in modern language departments within different types of institutions. A department might well wish to have faculty members describe and document their service accomplishments, taking such guidelines into consideration, just as they would document their teaching and scholarly activity.
In the kind of faculty assessment I propose, colleagues play a meaningful role in planning their careers at all stages of their professional lives. The department helps them in this endeavor by learning from them which kinds of contributions they consider most appealing, engaging them in establishing appropriate and realistic goals, supporting them in the attainment of those goals, and, ultimately, evaluating them according to these jointly constructed plans.
New and future colleagues should begin to take responsibility for planning their career goals early—probably in graduate school and certainly no later than the critical first years of appointment. For that purpose a summary sheet of review criteria, such as the one developed at the University of Texas (see app. 2), could be provided as a ready guide to and reminder about the interrelatedness of the diverse aspects of academic life.
A participatory approach to assessment transforms the process from one of external judgment into one of personal career development. It also ties together the previously disparate parts of our working lives: personal, professional, and institutional goals; our roles as teachers, scholars, and members of an academic community; and the rights and responsibilities that attend the privileges we enjoy as members of the academy, privileges that continue even amid the beleaguered state of higher education.
The precise shape such a system would take in a given department would be highly dependent on the personalities of the faculty members involved, but it would be most critically influenced by the skills of the department chair. The complex task of transforming the assessment process in a competent and reassuring way requires comprehensive local and general knowledge and outstanding interactional skills. None of us takes over the position of chair with that level of ability, but we must make its attainment a personal goal during our tenure.
My thanks go to two valued colleagues and friends in the German department at the University of Texas: Janet Swaffar, who offered helpful suggestions as this paper took shape, and Katherine Arens, who provided the guidelines for a third-year review. Other materials in the appendices are adaptations of documents used in the assessment of faculty members at Georgetown University.
Enclosed with this letter is a copy of Dr. X's curriculum vitae and a set of [his or her] publications. You may find it helpful in making your evaluation to refer to Dr. X's curriculum vitae, and in particular to those sections that describe [his or her] teaching and service records, which will help you understand the conditions under which the candidate has worked. In addition, I think it best if I describe, in general terms, the _____ department. Out of an enrollment of _____ students in _____ classes this semester, the _____ department has _____ majors, making it a midsize [small, the largest] program within the college. The department offers the BA degree; at present, there is no graduate program. However, the _____ department faculty members do contribute to the offerings of the MA program in comparative literature. There are currently _____ full-time faculty positions: _____ associate professors (tenured) and _____ assistant professors (_____ tenure-track, _____ visiting). As of spring 19__, full-time faculty members usually teach three undergraduate courses per semester in a two-semester academic year. Previously, the teaching load for Dr. X and [his or her] colleagues was four undergraduate courses per semester. _____ department faculty members are also expected to perform such service to the university and community as their interest and other responsibilities allow, particularly…
Dr. X's scholarship should be judged in terms appropriate for a member of a department in which it is understood that promotion to the rank of associate professor requires examples of scholarship that demonstrate the candidate's continuing ability to make original contributions to [his or her] field of knowledge, that further [his or her] development as a scholar, and that are recognized by colleagues in the same field of endeavor to be of high quality. At [name of institution], it is accepted that scholarship is demonstrated primarily by published work appearing in relevant journals, books published by respected publishing companies, and citation of the candidate's work in the literature of the field. Major addresses given at national and international conferences are also taken as evidence of scholarly energy and ability. Extramural research funding from organizations utilizing peer review committees is an index of scholarly potential. In a formal statement, the University Committee on Rank and Tenure has asked that letters from external evaluators address the following questions:
Have the publications of the candidate added to or modified existing knowledge, and how was this accomplished? Has the candidate developed new ideas? Has the candidate provided additional examples or applications for the theories stated by others? Has the candidate explained, at least partly, a difficulty encountered by other researchers? Has the candidate tested any theorem or idea under different conditions, or in new circumstances?
The committee also asks evaluators to state explicitly the justifications for their conclusions regarding the quality of the applicant's scholarship and to do so in sufficient detail as to permit the committee to understand the achievement of the applicant relative to the standards of excellence in that field. Finally, the committee asks that, if any social, academic, or institutional relationship exists between the evaluator and the candidate, this relationship be disclosed in the letter of evaluation.
In summary, you are being asked to provide a serious, critical, careful, and just evaluation of Dr. X's scholarship, giving consideration to [his or her] other responsibilities as a member of the _____ department.…
[This text is likely to be followed by information about the legal status and confidentiality of outside reviews and further practical information on deadlines, points of contact, addresses, phone numbers, etc.]
The traditional categories used in reviewing the progress of an academic career are teaching, scholarship, and service. Examining the components of these activities helps to clarify their relation to the professional profile.
The candidate should ask:
What am I doing for the institution and for the profession (including teaching, scholarship, and service)?
What opportunities are the institution and the profession offering me (that is, how do they acknowledge and reward success in scholarship and teaching)?
How am I documenting, positioning, and reinforcing my professional profile?
Each of these questions indicates several measures for a candidate's success or progress:
Institutional context
What am I doing within the institution?
Teaching
Levels taught at
Consistency with institutional opportunities and needs of the program
Diversity of topics, approaches, and students
Contribution to other programs
Service
Departmental level
Institutional level
What is the institution doing for me?
Teaching evaluations
Letters from other programs or organizations acknowledging contributions
Opportunities for diversification and growth, use of talents
Grants and awards
What is my follow-up?
Document service (sponsors, elective or appointive terms, nature)
Request letters confirming service
Request both student and faculty evaluations and documentation for file
Keep student “fan letters” for documentation
Maintain a current teaching portfolio (including syllabi, assignments, tests, summative outcomes assessments)
Evaluate diversity and centrality of teaching and service in terms of institutional mission
Note “hidden service” (e.g., helping students with grant applications, publishing efforts, presentations at professional conferences; note also student successes, e.g., Fulbright fellowships)
Professional context
What am I doing for the profession?
Scholarship
Given my professional profile, is my body of scholarship appropriate in terms of
amount
quality
authorship, single or joint
editorship, single or joint
placement (acceptance rate and circulation of journals)
regularity of production
diversity, yet coherence of topics
scope of professional outreach
grant-worthiness
Service
Reviews
Workshops or professional-development seminars
Organization of conferences or sessions or sections of conferences
Papers given at conferences
Evaluation of manuscripts for journals, conferences, or major competitions
What is the profession doing for me?
Gives grants, scholarships
Confirms status with
major conferences
major sections within conferences
selectivity of journal
quality and visibility of presses
Invites diverse contributions in lectures, symposia, committees, or task forces
What is my follow-up?
Ensure that conference presentations or lectures must lead to publication
Document prestige of lectures or conferences (e.g., sponsorship by an international organization is generally more prestigious than sponsorship by a single college or department)
Document selectivity of journals (consult MLA Directory of Periodicals )
For publications in proceedings volumes, document invitation or selectivity
Document blind reviewing procedures
Collect reviews of books, important citations in other articles
Outline plans for large projects (e.g., development from conference paper to published article to book chapter, each with expansion and different thrust)
© 1994 by the Association of Departments of Foreign Languages. All Rights Reserved.
|
|---|
|
|
|
