How to Talk to Faculty Who Receive Low Course Evaluations
This article is the second installment on conversations about course ratings. The first installment explored how to frame a discussion with a faculty member who receives average ratings semester after semester. This second scenario may be the most challenging for department chairs. It’s the conversation that needs to occur with a faculty...
Understanding Course Evaluations: Resources for Faculty and Chairs
Despite a great deal of research on course evaluations, institutional policies and practices are not always well informed by that research. Faculty are often not as informed as they should be either. Anecdotal evidence, myth and folklore tend to prevail. It’s good to encourage faculty to learn more about how...
Conversations about Course Ratings: Encouraging Faculty to Make Changes
Talking with faculty about end-of-course ratings is generally a high-stakes conversation where merit raises, promotions, or permanent contracts are on the line or at least hovering in the background of the exchange. Most chairs, program coordinators, or division heads would like to use the conversation for more formative purposes—to engage...
Rewarding Excellent Support for Non-tenure-track Faculty, Part II
The annual Delphi Award presents a $15,000 cash award to each of two applicants who have worked to support non-tenure-track, contingent and/or adjunct faculty. In the first installment of this article, we examined how California State University, Dominguez Hills, supports its non-tenure-track faculty. We continue with the next institution recognized...
Rewarding Excellent Support for Non-tenure-track Faculty, Part I
For decades, campuses have hired increasing numbers of non-tenure track faculty. The number of adjunct faculty is now more than 52 percent of faculty nationally and full-time non-tenure track make up another 18 percent of the faculty, with all types of non-tenure-track faculty (NTTF) accounting for 70 percent of faculty...
Pitfalls of Using Student Comments in the Evaluation of Faculty
The use—or misuse—of student ratings of instruction (SRIs) in faculty evaluation is a frequent topic in higher education news. Unfortunately, popular press articles on the topic often garner more attention than the vast empirical literature. A recent review of the research by Linse (2017) pointed to common misperceptions about SRIs,...
Clock Time Versus Piece Work in Higher Education
Albert Einstein is credited with the observation that “Not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted counts.” Perhaps nowhere is this principle truer than when trying to evaluate the work of faculty members and administrators in higher education. Yet the difficulty of the task...
Developing a New Faculty-Evaluation System
At Georgia College & State University, each academic unit was tasked in 2011 with developing a new faculty-evaluation system. We were instructed to create an instrument that had both qualitative and quantitative components. It took a year of discussion, compromise, and eventual consensus, but we finally moved forward with a...
After Promotion and Tenure: Maintaining Faculty’s Upward Trajectory
While a necessary and worthy milestone, earning promotion and tenure is not an end goal of an academic career. During the pretenure years, a faculty member is gearing up for growth in the areas (e.g., teaching, research and teaching) defined by the institution to meet the mark for tenure. Ideally,...
Evaluating Online Teaching: Implementing Best Practices
More than a decade ago, Thomas Tobin, coauthor of the new book, Evaluating Online Teaching: Implementing Best Practices, was hired to teach a business English and communications class in a hybrid format. When the time came for evaluation, he received a very thorough evaluation based on the chair’s observation of...
