EvalTeach

Guidelines for Evaluating Teaching Performance
of Candidates for Promotion and Tenure
Department of Agricultural, Environmental and Development Economics (10/99)
Reproduced with the permission of Alan Randall, Chair

The Department's evaluations of the teaching performance of candidates for promotion and tenure for summative purposes includes (1) annual reviews by the Chair, (2) standardized evaluations by students or by participants in outreach activities, (3) peer reviews, and (4) candidate's self-assessments of progress. None of these four instruments can individually provide an adequate assessment of teaching performance, either in a classroom or outreach setting. However, when used as a portfolio, a more complete and accurate assessment of teaching performance results.

These four evaluation instruments are seen as complementing the Department's mentoring program for promotion and tenure candidates by providing additional information for the mentoring program. For a discussion of the Department's faculty mentoring program, see pages 19-20 of the Department's Pattern of Administration.

The Department intends that this program of evaluation and mentoring will:
· Improve teaching and learning · Increase enthusiasm for teaching
· Strengthen promotion and tenure dossiers · Increase student satisfaction
· Improve understanding of the Department's curriculum

From the Department's Pattern of Administration (p. 5), the Chair shall "conduct an annual performance review of each faculty member in accordance with criteria approved by the Board of Trustees and subject to instructions from the Senior Vice President for Academic Affairs and Provost, and also according to the document Criteria and Procedures for Appointments, Promotion, Tenure and Salary Adjustments." Another duty of the Chair is "to promote improvement of instruction by providing for the evaluation of each course when offered, including written evaluation by students of the course and instructors, and periodic course review by the faculty" (Department's Pattern of Administration, p. 6).

The Department requires the use of the University's Student Evaluation of Instruction (SEI) for each course offering, except for individual study courses. The SEIs must be administered and collected by a third party.

Extension appointments vary substantially as to type of program and ways in which extension personnel interact with clientele. Given this heterogeneity, the Committee recommends that during a candidate's first two years, the candidate, the Chair, and the candidate's mentoring committee devise and implement an appropriate and fair evaluation process. The process can be updated as programming efforts change. The agreed to process should be appended to future promotion and tenure documents. Possible components of the evaluation process include (A) EEETs, (B) standardized evaluation instruments other than EEEt's that are developed by workshop or conference organizers, provided comparative benchmarks with other presenters are provided; (C) letters from colleagues, including extension administrators, who have observed the candidate's performance, provided the letters are solicited by the chair or chair designee, (D) letters from clientele who have observed the candidate's performance on committees or other outreach activities, provided the letters are solicited by the chair or chair-designee, and (E) standardized assessment of conferences with individual clientele, provided the assessment is conducted by a third party.

The Chair or chair designee is responsible for overseeing the peer review of teaching [Department's Pattern of Administration, p. A14] for candidates for promotion and tenure. Two faculty peers will conduct an individual assessment of one outreach teaching program or one classroom course offering during the candidate's first year of teaching at Ohio State. Thereafter, one faculty peer will conduct an assessment of one outreach teaching program (course offering) per calendar year. For faculty with both course and outreach teaching responsibilities, peer reviews will be conducted for both.

The Chair or the chair designee shall assign the faculty peer reviewer. Peer reviewers can not come from the candidate's mentoring committee in order to maintain a separation between evaluation and mentoring functions. Peer reviewers can come from outside the Department. At the beginning of the school year, the candidate shall convey to the Chair or chair designee the course or outreach teaching responsibility he/she selects for peer review.

For the academic year that precedes a decision on tenure and/or promotion, the faculty peer reviewer must be, when feasible, one of the two faculty peers who conducted the assessment during the candidate's first year of teaching at Ohio State. This reviewer should have access to all previous peerreviews.

Each peer reviewer will write a letter of assessment addressed to the candidate. The letter must be written and sent before the end of the finals week of the quarter in which the peer review was conducted. The candidate is invited to comment on the letter within two weeks. It is recommended that the letter be shared with the candidate's mentoring committee and be jointly discussed by the committee and the candidate. The candidate is responsible for archiving the peer review letters for use at the time a promotion and/or tenure dossier is prepared.

Items to be evaluated include: content, syllabus or learning plan, materials, assignments, and exams (where applicable), and delivery.

For additional details on the criteria to be used when evaluating each of these items, please see the list below ("Criteria for Evaluating Teaching Quality"). The candidate and peer reviewer should set the date for an observation of the teaching situation. It should be announced to the students in the class prior to the observation class. In the case of outreach teaching, the observation should be announced to the audience if appropriate. Also in the case of outreach teaching, the observation may be through videotape.

The peer reviewer and the candidate may agree to expand the peer review beyond the minimums specified here.

Self-assessment is an important part of any evaluation and development process. All candidates for promotion and tenure with a teaching responsibility are expected to annually assess the information presented to him or her regarding teaching performance and to plan improvement. The results of responses to previously identified issues also should be included. The Department's current annual report form provides an opportunity to document this self-assessment. Items which can be part of self-assessment include administering the candidate's own evaluation instrument, administering interim evaluations during a course or series of extension meetings, selecting one or more colleagues to assess teaching performance, seeking assistance from the University Faculty and Teaching Assistant Development Program, taping videos of teaching experiences, and conducting focus groups, in addition to the assessing the results of peer reviews or standardized evaluations of students or participants in outreach activities.

This list of criteria is gleaned from a list prepared by the College of Food, Agricultural, and Environmental Sciences' Teaching Academy. A good source book for additional information on criteria for evaluating teaching quality in the context of peer review is Peer Review of Teaching by Nancy Van Note Chism, Anker Publishing Company, Inc.: Bolton, MA; 1999.

Peer review of teaching is a service to the Department and should be reported in the annual report. A peer review section is recommended to cover all types of peer review activities.

The candidate should be given the opportunity to evaluate the quality of the peer review.

The Committee proposes the following paragraph be added to the Department's Pattern of Administration on page A14 as the first paragraph in the section titled "Course and Instructor Evaluation."
The Department is committed to helping each faculty member reach his or her potential as an instructor, whether the teaching activity occurs in the classroom or in an outreach setting. This commitment is fulfilled via four means for candidates for promotion and tenure. (1) The Chair orients and advises the candidate through annual reviews and other methods. (2) The Department provides a mentoring program. (3) The Department facilitates the administration of standardized, OSU-mandated evaluations of instruction by students and extension clientele. (4) The Department conducts a peer evaluation of teaching.

The Department will need to revise its Promotion and Tenure Guidelines to specify how peer review of teaching and candidate self-assessment are to be incorporated into the documentation of performance for promotion and tenure.

This document becomes effective once the Department approves it. However, the Committee recommends (1) that the Department defer implementation of the guidelines on peer review of teaching until Winter Quarter 2000 and (2) that it invite Faculty and TA Development to conduct a session on peer review of teaching at the beginning of Winter Quarter 2000.

The Committee believes that self-assessment is an important component of improving one's teaching and is an important part of documenting one's commitment to improving teaching. Therefore, we encourage the Department to make its Annual Report Guidelines more suggestive of the importance of including a self-assessment. of teaching performance.

The Committee recommends that the Department needs to clarify the duties of its mentoring committees. We also recommend that the mentoring committee be required to meet as a full committee at least one time per year with the candidate. These two recommendations are based on dialogue with the assistant and associate professors in the Department.

The Committee recommends that the Department invite Faculty and TA Development to provide a seminar on peer review of teaching for full professors during the first two years of implementing this document.