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SINCE faculty development issues vary according to the specific makeup of departments, it seems appropriate to begin by describing the department that I chair, the Department of Foreign Languages at Illinois State University. We have twenty-three tenured or tenure-line faculty members teaching eight languages. We are a young department: we have nine untenured and fourteen tenured faculty members, four of whom received tenure within the past two years. Nine faculty members have been hired within the past four years, an extraordinary opportunity offered by a spate of retirements, mostly of faculty members not involved in scholarship. We have taken advantage of the market and hired carefully, making clear to our new faculty members that scholarly productivity is a condition of tenure and promotion. As a consequence, virtually all our faculty members are active in scholarship, although at varying rates.
But scholarship alone is not a guarantee of success in our department or in our university. As a former normal school (hence the name of our town, Normal, Illinois), we set ourselves apart from other state universities as an institution that values teaching, especially undergraduate teaching. Our model is that of the teacher-scholar, with the emphasis on the hyphen—both sides of the equation are equally significant. Consequently, in faculty development we seek to impress this dual model on junior and senior faculty members alike and to support and nourish creative teaching as well as creative scholarship.
We have several straightforward mechanisms for socializing faculty members to this dual model. Our annual merit-review process plays an important role. Each year, by mandate of the College of Arts and Sciences, faculty members must submit reports documenting their accomplishments in three evaluation areas: scholarly productivity, teaching, and service. An elected personnel committee in the department, chaired by the department chair, reviews the dossiers and composes and evaluation letter for each faculty member. The committee gives an overall ratings as well as ratings in the three categories and provides an explanatory paragraph for each rating, summarizing the committee's judgments. Though little more than a page long, these letters are quite specific both in giving praise and in suggesting strategies to address possible problems. This process allows us to articulate the standards of the department to faculty members annually.
We work extensively with junior faculty members to guide them through the pitfalls of the probationary period. We give them a general orientation when they arrive, but our tenure and promotion expectations do not sink in until the first annual evaluation. Thus every year or two we have follow-up workshops in which we go through the college's tenure and promotions document point by point. We want junior faculty members to know as soon as possible what the department and college expectations are and what the review process will be so they can begin to build their dossiers accordingly.
We also have a mentoring system in which senior faculty members are paired with junior faculty members. The assignments are made by the chair on the basis of common professional interests and personal factors. These mentoring assignments are something of a match-making enterprise; we would like to build friendship as well as give guidance. But mentoring has its limitations. Much depends on the conscientiousness of the senior colleague and the responsiveness of the junior colleagues, and mentoring relationships quickly break down and are replaced by other counseling relationships that may or may not be beneficial. Even at its most successful, mentoring can only be one of many departmental support factors.
Faculty development activities can be divided into two categories: those that require money and those that do not. Sad to say, even a university like ours that values teaching highly in theory concentrates its monetary support on scholarship in practice (although recently, teaching awards have begun to be offered). We do not, alas, have sabbaticals for junior faculty members, as many research institutions do. But there are monetary awards for outstanding college and university scholars; there are summer grants, given on a competitive basis throughout the university; and there is a modest amount of travel money. We have been successful in achieving these university awards, but our department has built its research culture not so much because of money as because of a mechanism that, fortunately, costs nothing at all.
As I indicate in my thumbnail sketch, in the last ten or twelve years, our department has been transformed from one largely inactive in scholarship to a very active one. Apart from careful hires, the most important factor in effecting and maintaining that change is Works in Progress, a departmental colloquium established about twelve years ago. At the meetings, held almost every Friday afternoon during the academic year, faculty members talk about their scholarly projects. The presentations at Works in Progress, whether formal papers or informal discussions, serve many important functions; they inform faculty members of colleagues' scholarly pursuits, promote the interchange of ideas in an intensely intellectual climate, and, above all, set tangible standards of scholarly performance. And since the discussions begin in Works in Progress tend to be continued at a nearby pub, the forum also promotes collegiality. Works in Progress has thus been an important factor in socializing junior faculty members to the scholarly standards of the department.
I have found the teaching side of the teacher-scholar equation the more difficult to develop. Though I am speaking in generalities, the valorization of teaching tends to be a generational issue. There are of course many dramatic exceptions, but younger faculty members tend to be more involved in teaching than faculty members over forty or forty-five, and I must defend the latter age group, as I belong to it myself. My contemporaries and I were never taught to teach. Graduate studies in literature were thought to be all the training we needed, and, as graduates of competitive research universities, we were inculcated with the idea that scholarship above all matters. We regarded teaching as a pesky necessity that took time away from our own work, our real work of scholarship.
To get the message across that teaching matters as much as scholarship, we in my department prefer the “carrot” approach to the “stick” approach, although the chair and the personnel committee must confront serious insufficiencies in the classroom. However, carrots are ultimately more constructive because they can prevent problems in the classroom from occurring and they also serve to build a departmental culture that encourages and values good teaching.
Drawing on our own wisdom and building on the success of Works in Progress, we began two years ago a teaching colloquium called Teaching in Progress, which we have given the nice acronym TIPS. We have four TIPS sessions a year, two each semester; they are intertwined with Works in Progress and held in the same Friday-afternoon time slot. Faculty members recommend subjects for the sessions; the topics have included Carrying the Communicative Approach beyond the First Year, Strategies for Teaching Composition, Strategies for Teaching Culture, Strategies for Teaching Literature at the Intermediate Level, Strategies for Teaching Conversation, and Computer Aids to Teaching and Research in Foreign Language. We have also had one session on developing a teaching portfolio.
The colloquia have been well attended and are continually improving. In the beginning, the presenters took the posture of experts. The presentations were quite formal and tended to highlight the speaker's successes, whereas we had envisioned a more open and candid exchange of problems and solutions. But in the final session last spring, on teaching conversation, the presenter began by reading a negative student comment from her evaluations, which opened everything up. We all discussed our frustrations in teaching conversation and tentatively concluded that, with the communicative approach so widely used on the first- and second-year levels, perhaps we do not need a traditional conversation course in the third year. We considered options for replacing the fifth-semester course with a content course, which would still stress the practice of oral skills but which would have a sustained intellectual focus. We also talked about the need, created by the communicative method, for more intensive grammar study in the third year and discussed how we might reconceptualize our advanced grammar offerings. This exchange demonstrated how a teaching colloquium can also be a mechanism for curricular change and the rethinking of departmental priorities.
Another way to support good teaching is to keep a file of syllabi of all courses taught in the department, semester by semester. We have done so since 1989. We keep the syllabi in binders in our coffee room, and faculty members regularly consult these notebooks as they plan their courses. Like TIPS, the file of syllabi is an important mechanism for the exchange of teaching ideas and for teaching the art and craft of writing syllabi. (We will soon hold a TIPS session on this topic.)
Then, of course, there is the teaching-portfolio movement, which is the best thing to hit the teaching profession since Socrates. Portfolios offer professors the opportunity to present, like artists, their best work, to display their interpretation and application of the art and craft of teaching. Moreover, compiling a portfolio is an excellent means of reflecting on one's teaching—one's goals, successes, and perhaps failures. Full-fledged portfolios, however, are quite time-consuming to prepare; they require, according to the format our College of Arts and Sciences uses, a mentor from outside the department to guide their preparation (see Seldon and Seldon et al.). Therefore the college requires them only at major junctures of professional life: tenure, promotion, and other major personnel reviews.
On an annual basis, however, one can do mini-portfolios in the spirit of the full-fledged portfolio. At a TIPS presentation by one of the college mentors for teaching portfolios, we discovered that, for our annual personnel review, faculty members were already submitting many of the materials that would be included in a teaching portfolio: syllabi and reading lists, sample exams, evidence of thorough assessment of student work, evidence of cognitive gain by students, and so on. Our department developed this procedure because we have long felt that the evaluation of teaching should not rely on a single measure—the ratings from student evaluations, the observation by a colleague of one hour's classroom teaching. The materials are ready by the personnel committee in conjunction with the student evaluations. What was missing, however, was a self-evaluation. In a full-fledged teaching portfolio, a personal statement of goals is needed to give coherence to the materials and contextualize the student evaluations.
This understanding led us to revise our departmental personnel document to encourage the submission of one-to two-page self-evaluations in the yearly productivity reports. Our faculty members are now articulating their teaching goals, using the student evaluations to judge how well they have attained these goals, and developing strategies for correcting problems and shortfalls. Our personnel committee makes a special effort to respond positively to self-evaluations so faculty members will not fear being penalized for discussing their problems. This new mechanism dovetails nicely with the new openness in the TIPS workshops, so that faculty members feel free to discuss their problems there as well. We feel optimistic that these measures will bring about improvements in teaching.
Now we come to faculty development issues that require money. Renée Waldinger contends that faculty development is a buzzword of the nineties: “At almost every professional meeting and in the innumerable articles and books concerned with the careers of college and university professors, references to the importance of faculty development abound” (55). But while there is a lot of discussion among faculty members and chairs, I do not believe that faculty development is a buzzword among upper-level university administrators. They seem only vaguely familiar with the concept. In the mysterious ways of public education, pots of money occasionally appear in our university, but when the calls for proposals go out, faculty development projects are rarely solicited.
We know that our profession is changing, that today's students are showing less and less interest in the study of literature, particularly canonical literature, and more and more interest in practical skills, the broader study of culture, and international and intercultural communication. Consequently, we must ask professors trained in the traditional language and literature disciplines to teach courses in cultural studies; in business French, Spanish, or German; or in instructional technology. We know that they need time to develop these new areas of expertise, and we certainly know that time is money, that giving released time for these preparations means finding dollars for part-time replacements. We also know that faculty members often cannot venture into new areas without help—that, for example, a literature professor might need some instruction in teaching business French—and that we must reimburse them for course fees, travel, and living expenses. We know all these things, but high-level administrators either do not or regard these issues as secondary. As Donald K. Jarvis suggests, we are the only profession that does not act “to protect its million-dollar-plus investment in each employee's salary over the course of a career with a well-crafted development program. [It is] unrealistic to believe people [can] keep up with their fields, support departmental goals, and cope with job burnout completely on their own”(23).
Of all faculty development issues, instructional technology is the most worrisome. Our institution is investing sums in hardware, and there is some money for software, but very few dollars are available to train faculty members in integrating technology into the classroom at all levels. In 1994 our department received university funding for a substantial upgrade to our text-based computer lab, and in 1995 we were awarded money for a multimedia lab with state-of-the-art interactive workstations. Now we must invest in a training program so we may utilize the equipment fully and incorporate it into the curriculum.
The occasional workshop will not accomplish this goal. Like many departments, we have a range of computer literacy among our faculty members: some write software for language, literature, and culture instruction; many have only basic word-processing skills (if that); and most fall between the two extremes. An intensive and sustained training program is required to enable all faculty members to understand the potential that instructional technology holds for innovative teaching and then acquire the expertise to use it creatively in their classes. Intensive seminars of several days' duration should be held regularly—preferably in the summer—and small stipends should be attached. Moneys should also be set aside for training faculty members to lead these seminars. They might be sent to take an intensive course on particular applications, or the funds may be used to bring in an expert from elsewhere.
If we do not begin training faculty members systematically now, we will suffer in the future, for instructional technology can radically change the teaching of language, literature, and culture. For example, we have a Russian professor who, using Multimedia Toolbook , is developing an interactive program for beginning language courses and a hypertext program for intermediate-level literature courses. He envisions a whole new format for teaching first- and second-year courses. A language class of twenty-five students meeting four or five times a week will soon be a thing of the past, he says, and he adds that, in his views, it never was the most effective format for teaching language. He foresees an individualized program in which students will work independently in the lab with interactive software and get as far as they can during the year. Testing would be done in the computer lab, and the computer would indicate whether the student has advanced far enough to move to the next level. Course credit would be conferred accordingly—a bright student, for example, may be able to complete three semesters instead of two during the academic year. In place of regular large class meetings, this professor sees students having two or three individual or small-group sessions of tutoring by the professor a week. Thus, we would have a proficiency-based program that offers immediate feedback, flexibility to the student to work at his or her own pace, and individualized, personal instruction. That is the kind of change that instructional technology promises, and two of our profession's greatest challenges are to be involved in this revolution and to convince administrators to invest in it.
The author is Professor of French and Chair of the Department of Foreign Languages at Illinois State University. This article is based on her presentation at ADFL Seminar West, 22–24 June 1995, in Eugene, Oregon .
Jarvis, Donald. “Who Needs Development?” ADFL Bulletin 25.3 (1994):23–25. [Show Article]
Seldon, Peter. The Teaching Portfolio: A Practical Guide to Improved Performance and Promotion/Tenure Decisions . Bolton: Anker, 1991.
Seldon, Peter, et al. Successful Use of Teaching Portfolios . Bolton: Anker, 1993.
Waldinger, Renée. “Faculty Development and Enlightened Self-Interest.” Profession 93. New York: MLA, 1993. 55–59.
© 1996 by the Association of Departments of Foreign Languages. All Rights Reserved.
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