Author: Chavella T. Pittman, PhD, Effective & Efficient Faculty
Most campus procedures for reviewing teaching for retention, tenure, and promotion run counter to best and evidence-based practices. This means that faculty must be intentional and proactive about their teaching review materials. This is especially important for diverse faculty because we often face unfair teaching threats (e.g. biased evaluations, student incivility, etc.) to our reviews [To learn more about bigger picture teaching threats, read Empowered.].
The first thing to do about this is notice the warning signs. If you’ve ever wondered “could my university’s process for reviewing my teaching be flawed?!” Kudos for asking because the answer is likely 100% yes. Here are just three warning signs:
- Your institution over-relies on student evaluations. Um, just no. According to multiple studies, student evaluations are simply not correlated with student learning, therefore teaching effectiveness should not be equated with them.
- Your institution doesn’t exclude unjust student, colleague, and public resistance to your teaching content and pedagogy. You are the expert on your scholarly area and the best methods to teach it to students. Attempts to ‘cancel’ these based on opinion in reviews is unjust, unmerited, and methodologically unsound.
- Your institution conducts your teaching observations with minimal (or no) input from you. There’s more than one successful way to teach, which means your lens is essential. Without your guidance about your teaching and how the observation should be conducted, your institution’s procedure is sorely misaligned with the scholarship of teaching and learning.
The above warning signs reflect a troublesome one-size-fits all approach to evaluating teaching for retention, tenure, and promotion. They frequently mean you’re being assessed by whether or not your teaching reflects dominant (rather than best) teaching practices. You do NOT have to resign yourself to this in institutional reviews of your teaching. In fact, you shouldn’t.
If your institution has any of these flags in their retention, tenure, or promotion procedures for teaching reviews, you’ve been warned. To meet this threat, you’ll need these two tools:
Awareness: Your awareness of the flaws above means you’ll have the power to deal with or get ahead of them. Now that you can see the problem coming—you can start thinking and planning ahead.
Action: Do something…anything to preempt or address these flawed practices. E.g. think through what you’ll say about the situation, collect and present counter documentation, connect with allies to prevent or disrupt the flawed practices, etc.
Trust your gut, and know that the evidence supports you. Seek opportunities to tweak the institutional review process and tailor the teaching materials you provide for it. For detailed help with this, attend Beyond Course Evaluations: Documenting Teaching for Tenure & Promotion. You don’t have to do this alone.
Remember: knowledge is power and more power lies in what you do next. Be strategic, proactive and intentional about your teaching review materials and above all, do not be seduced into going along with a flawed review process. Stay grounded one term at a time and you’ll wake up one day to a teaching review process that is less fraught — and you’ll be empowered to thrive in your teaching, career and in many other ways.