Best Practices in Faculty Evaluation E-Book

Jeffrey L. Buller

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Bildung
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 392

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2012

Beschreibung

BEST PRACTICES IN FACULTY EVALUATION Best Practices in Faculty Evaluation is designed to be a hands-on guide for academics and administrators who want to become more effective and more confident in their handling of the important task of faculty evaluation. This vital resource offers chairs, deans, and members of evaluation committees the practical information they need to perform fair and accurate faculty evaluation. The book covers best practices in all forms of review and evaluation and includes directions that are designed to help evaluators understand how to use the information about faculty performance, convey clear messages about priorities, and protect themselves in cases when an appeal or grievance is likely. Best Practices in Faculty Evaluation is filled with practical advice and answers to commonly asked questions about oral and written reviews and evaluations, annual performance appraisals and evaluations, probationary and pretenure reviews, posttenure reviews, merit evaluations, tenure evaluations, promotion evaluations, and much more. In today's complex academic environment there is no longer a "typical" full-time, tenure-eligible faculty member. The staff of most colleges and universities includes increasing numbers of part-time faculty members, non-tenure-track faculty members, and even online course instructors whom the reviewer never meets in person. To address the wide range of diverse faculty members, the author offers clear guidance for evaluating both tenure-tracked faculty and nontraditional faculty members.

Leseprobe

Table of Contents

Cover

Series page

Title page

Copyright page

Jossey-Bass Higher and Adult Education Series

dedication

the author

introduction and acknowledgments

part one: the fundamental goals of review and evaluation

1 the accountability culture in higher education

° why everyone always seems to be evaluating everyone else

° the significance of the accountability culture for reviewers

° why these differences matter when reviews are conducted

° why review and goal setting should be merged into a single, seamless process

° conclusion

2 best practices in all forms of review and evaluation

° conclusion

3 oral and written reviews and evaluations

° oral reviews

° written evaluations

° combining oral and written reviews into a comprehensive evaluation

° conclusion

part two: primarily formative review and evaluation

4 annual performance appraisals and evaluations

° offering constructive criticism

° offering praise and recognition

° setting new annual goals

° evaluating progress on annual goals

° the formative-summative annual evaluation

° annual performance appraisals for the staff

° conclusion

5 probationary period pretenure reviews

° considerations resulting from the summative nature of probationary reviews

° considerations resulting from the formative nature of probationary reviews

° dealing with hostility or denial during a probationary review

° conclusion

6 posttenure review

° preserving a constructive and future-oriented approach toward posttenure review

° benefiting from best practices regardless of your current procedures

° conclusion

part three: summative review and evaluation

7 merit evaluations

° disentangling issues of merit from issues of equity

° disentangling issues of merit from issues of worth

° conclusion

8 tenure evaluations

° a brief history of tenure

° what tenure is and is not

° why the difference between tenure and promotion decisions matters

° incorporating both rigor and fairness into tenure evaluations

° the role of collegiality in tenure decisions

° how to convey the results of a negative tenure evaluation

° conclusion

9 promotion evaluations

° aligning promotion evaluations with institutional, national, and international standards

° best practices in promotion evaluations

° benefiting from best practices regardless of your current procedures

° conclusion

part four: quantitative and qualitative approaches to review and evaluation

10 the arreola model

° advantages and disadvantages of the arreola model

° benefiting from the arreola model regardless of your current procedures

° conclusion

° solution to mini-case study

11 the seldin model

° the nature of a portfolio

° the contents of a portfolio

° what else to look for when reviewing a portfolio

° benefiting from the seldin model regardless of your current procedures

° conclusion

12 incorporating quantitative and qualitative approaches into an integrated process

° two possibilities for blending quantitative and qualitative approaches

° why an integrated approach is particularly useful at institutions with specialized faculty tracks

° reducing appeals, grievances, and legal challenges

° becoming more confident as a reviewer

° general conclusion and final advice

index

Other Books by Jeffrey L. Buller

Academic Leadership Day By Day: Small Steps That Lead to Great Success

The Essential Department Chair: A Comprehensive Desk Reference, Second Edition

The Essential Academic Dean: A Practical Guide to College Leadership

The Essential College Professor: A Practical Guide to an Academic Career

Classically Romantic: Classical Form and Meaning in Wagner’s Ring

Copyright © 2012 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc. All rights reserved.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Buller, Jeffrey L.

 Best practices in faculty evaluation : a practical guide for academic leaders / Jeffrey L. Buller. – First edition.

pages cm

 Includes bibliographical references and index.

 ISBN 978-1-118-11843-6; ISBN 978-1-118-22451-9 (ebk); ISBN 978-1-118-23788-5 (ebk); ISBN 978-1-118-26268-9 (ebk)

 1. College teachers–Rating of–United States. 2. Universities and colleges–United States–Evaluation. I. Title.

 LB2333.B85 2012

 378.1'2–dc23

2012016816

The Jossey-Bass Higher and Adult Education Series

For Raoul Arreola, Peter Seldin, and the countless other scholars who have worked to make the evaluation process fairer, easier, and more useful for faculty members

The Author

Jeffrey L. Buller is dean of the Harriet L. Wilkes Honors College of Florida Atlantic University. He began his administrative career as honors director and chair of the Department of Classical Studies at Loras College in Dubuque, Iowa, before going on to assume a number of administrative appointments at Georgia Southern University and Mary Baldwin College.

Buller is the author of The Essential Department Chair: A Comprehensive Desk Reference (2012), Academic Leadership Day by Day: Small Steps That Lead to Great Success (Jossey-Bass, 2011), The Essential College Professor: A Practical Guide to an Academic Career (Jossey-Bass, 2010), The Essential Academic Dean: A Practical Guide to College Leadership (Jossey-Bass, 2007), and Classically Romantic: Classical Form and Meaning in Wagner’s Ring (Xlibris, 2001). He has also written numerous articles on Greek and Latin literature, nineteenth- and twentieth-century opera, and college administration.

From 2003 to 2005, Buller served as the principal English-language lecturer at the International Wagner Festival in Bayreuth, Germany. More recently, he has been active as a consultant to Sistema Univer­sitario Ana G. Méndez in Puerto Rico and the Ministry of Higher Education in Saudi Arabia, where he is assisting with the creation of a kingdom-wide academic leadership center.

Introduction and Acknowledgments

At first glance, it may seem as if faculty reviews and evaluations pose no difficulty whatsoever for the members of the administration and faculty who conduct them. After all, professionals in higher education review and evaluate students all the time. We assess our academic programs. We review research in our disciplines. And we’ve all been reviewed and evaluated ourselves. So how hard can it possibly be to apply those same skills to evaluations of our faculty? The answer, as you know or you wouldn’t be reading this book, is, “Very hard indeed.” Those other processes are very limited when it comes to borrowing from them for the evaluation of a colleague. For one thing, he or she is a colleague. No matter whether you’re the chancellor of a university system or an adjunct instructor of a single course, the concepts of collegiality, shared governance, and academic freedom probably resonate very strongly for you. In other words, every faculty evaluation is, in some ways, the evaluation of a peer, and just as you would object to someone who criticized your teaching techniques or research methods simply because they were different from his or her own, you may find it challenging at times to draw the line between upholding standards, offering advice, and meddling inappropriately. It can feel very awkward to be in a position of judging someone who in other situations is on your same level as a colleague—and who may someday be evaluating you.

Second, so many aspects of faculty reviews and evaluations seem rather subjective. What distinguishes “good” from “excellent” teaching, research, and service? How do you know whether someone’s instruction is really effective without relying too much on student ratings of instruction? How many peer-reviewed articles is “enough” when you’re looking at a relatively short period of time, as you do during an annual review? Should service on a major institutional committee count as much as serving as an officer in a professional association? Should it count more? Less? When it comes to faculty reviews and evaluations, you can become immobilized just by trying to answer these basic questions.

Best Practices in Faculty Evaluation will provide you with the information and skills you’ll need in order to perform these tasks more fairly, easily, and confidently. Most books dealing with reviews focus on the evaluation procedure itself. They’re wonderful resources if you’re looking to develop a new policy for conducting evaluations in your discipline or at your school, but they provide little help to you if there’s a system already in place and you just want to become a better reviewer. This book is a guide to doing exactly that: a training manual for administrators who want to become more effective and less anxious when they’re evaluating someone. Even when I am discussing a specific evaluation procedure, I offer ideas about how you can borrow certain aspects of that procedure and apply them to whatever system your school happens to be using. At every point, I’ve tried to take my subtitle—A Practical Guide for Academic Leaders—literally, offering advice to those who have never conducted a review before, as well as those who have had decades of experience but still want to learn more. I’ve tried to keep the emphasis on what you need to know immediately if there’s a stack of portfolios on your desk right now that you have to review by the end of the week. My goal, in short, is to be as practical as possible in as concrete a manner as possible. It’s the information I wish I’d had when, as a newly appointed department chair at age twenty-seven, I had to conduct my first annual evaluations, and the other members of my department were all full professors, aged sixty-seven, sixty-eight, and seventy-two, respectively. Did I mention that they’d be voting on my tenure in a few years? Taking the job seriously and not endangering my own future required a delicate balancing act, and I would have loved a little advice on what to do.

Some chapters, such as those on tenure and posttenure reviews, have necessarily been written from the viewpoint of evaluating the typical full-time, tenure-eligible faculty member. But that faculty member is often no longer typical. Increasing numbers of part-time faculty members, non-tenure-track faculty members, and even online course instructors whom the reviewer never meets in person are on the staff of most colleges and universities. For that reason, I have tried to avoid the underlying assumption that every evaluation for promotion to the rank of associate professor is inevitably also a tenure evaluation or that every annual review of an untenured faculty member is also a probationary pretenure review. I have separated these topics into different chapters, even though they are often single processes at some institutions. If your interest is primarily in evaluating faculty members who are not eligible for tenure, you may wish to focus your attention on Chapters Two through Four, Seven, and Nine through Twelve, which I wrote with these concerns specifically in mind.

Even experienced chairs, deans, and vice presidents can feel a good deal of anxiety when they approach faculty reviews and evaluations. It may be impossible to make this task enjoyable or completely anxiety free, but it is possible to make it a little bit easier, less likely to result in appeals or grievances, and more beneficial to the discipline, institution, and faculty member under review, all at the same time.

As you read through the chapters in this book, consider discussing various ideas and suggestions with your peers. How do they approach evaluations in their areas? Which recommendations do they think will be most effective in your own evaluation environment? How can you continue to develop your skills as a reviewer each year that evaluation is your responsibility? These are some of the questions you might consider as you work through these issues with your colleagues. How to conduct faculty reviews also is a good topic for a faculty development or administrative leadership program, and this book can provide a basis for how to structure that type of training. Finally, it could be a valuable resource for new deans, department chairs, and chairs of promotion and tenure committees so that their job will be somewhat less stressful.

Beginning with Chapter Three, you’ll find that most chapters contain a number of mini-case studies, designed to give you practice in the principles discussed in the chapter. But don’t go looking for the right answers in the back of the book! There are no “right” answers to these problems, since your school will have its own set of policies and you’ll have your own administrative style. So approach the mini-case studies not as riddles to be solved, but as complexities similar to those we face each day as academic leaders.

 Acknowledgments

Throughout the preparation of this book, I’ve owed a large debt of gratitude to our office’s student intern, Megan Geiger, who has cheerfully typed many of the quotations that appear in each chapter, tracked down sources, and provided an expert proofreading eye. I’m also grateful to all the institutions and organizations for which I’ve provided workshops on faculty evaluation for helping me to focus this topic through their questions and comments. The three anonymous reviewers of this book provided valuable suggestions that greatly helped me improve its content. Finally, I thank Sheryl Fullerton and the rest of the editorial staff at Jossey-Bass for their continued support and encouragement. If I were reviewing any of you, I’d be sure to give you my highest recommendation.

Jeffrey L. BullerJupiter, FloridaJune 1, 2012

part oneThe Fundamental Goals of Review and Evaluation

1The Accountability Culture in Higher Education

For much of the history of higher education, conducting student or faculty surveys—even conducting formal student examinations—was relatively rare. In some systems, course examinations either didn’t occur at all or didn’t play a major role in a student’s progress; the important test was the set of comprehensive examinations that occurred just before the granting of a degree. (See, for example, Amano, 1990; Kehm, 2001; Wiseman, 1961; Min and Xiuwen, 2001.) Even well into the twentieth century at American universities, many courses based a student’s grade solely on a final examination or research paper (Smallwood, 1935). Some professors also gave a midterm exam, and some courses included quizzes or tests after each major unit, but the notion of frequent grading opportunities was not particularly common at most colleges and universities.

Even less common were student satisfaction surveys, forms evaluating professors or administrators, and structured performance reviews of staff members. The assumption was that the faculty knew far better than the students what needed to be taught in university-level courses, and administrators were responsible for making sure that the faculty taught those courses effectively. They may not have evaluated those faculty members in a regular and former manner, but if they gained some sense that a particular instructor was ineffective, they responded with either advice or termination of the person’s contract. Systematic efforts to assess the effectiveness of academic programs or evaluate the continual improvement in a faculty member’s teaching, research, and service were all but unknown. And then, seemingly all at once, everything seemed to change.