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Department of English - Arts & Sciences

To: The Academic Affairs Committee of the Faculty Senate From: Paul Cantor and Jahan Ramazani, Department of English Our report is brief because it represents conversations that are still in progress and because the most distinctive feature of the English Department's teaching evaluation is already one of the AAC's "selected practices."

  1. Evaluation of Teaching

    The English Department rigorously evaluates faculty members through intensive student interviews at the time of third-year review, tenure, and promotion to full professorship. This process is already explained in the AAC's initial report. It should be added that these interviews are taken so seriously that faculty have sometimes not been recommended for tenure and/or promotion when the results have been substandard in quality. The Department also supplements these interviews with class evaluations written by students.At present, the Department is carefully reevaluating its tenure and promotion procedures, under the direction of an ad hoc committee. During a recent meeting of the tenured faculty, many members of the Department reaffirmed the value of the faculty interviews of students but added that the Department should also consider making more extensive use of written student evaluations at the time of promotion and tenure. Independent of the tenure and promotion processes, student evaluations are read by the department chair. In the recent past, the chair has written individual letters of commendation to faculty members with exceptional student evaluations. The chair uses the student evaluations as an integral part of the annual review, which bears on salary recommendations to the Dean.

  2. Development of Teaching

    The evaluation procedures outlined above have a direct relation, of course, to the development of teaching. Further, we have asked the department chair to schedule a meeting to discuss with the Department's Steering Committee the possibility of instituting a program of teaching partnerships. We hope that some members of the faculty would be interested in either forming pairs or being paired for mutual observation of a few classes each year. If the Steering Committee endorses the concept, then we will approach the Department with this proposal. We believe that the Department could benefit from such a program, as long as it is voluntary and decoupled from the process of teaching evaluation. Mutual observation of teaching could enhance the quality of faculty reflection on teaching, generate new discussions about teaching practices, and reinvigorate the sense of community in the Department.The Department already has a junior faculty mentoring procedure in place. The department chair assigns mentors to incoming junior faculty, usually someone who has expressed interest in or enthusiasm about the new faculty member. The mentor offers support and advice to the junior faculty member on all aspects of teaching, from designing course syllabi to grading papers. If a teaching partnership program were established, then the junior faculty member could, if he or she wished, agree to mutual teaching observation with the mentor.The English Department currently has in place a task force, consisting of faculty members and graduate students, which is charged with rethinking all aspects of the graduate program. One of the chief topics being discussed by this task force is the place of teaching within our graduate program, specifically the question of how the training of graduate students as teachers might be improved. This task force will be reporting to the Department in early April, at which time the whole Department will be engaged in discussing its recommendations, including those on teaching.The Department has also just been involved in a search for a new director for its writing program, which is in many ways at the core of its teaching mission within the University as a whole. Arriving at criteria for choosing a new writing director inevitably involved the Department in discussions of teaching; meeting with the candidates for the position also involved discussions of varieties of pedagogical strategies. When the new director of the writing program assumes the position, he or she will obviously make changes in both how writing is taught to our undergraduates and how the teaching of writing is taught to our graduate instructors. Both of these activities will involve the Department in further discussions of teaching.

  3. Incentives

    The primary incentives for superior teaching in the Department are, as outlined above, tenure and promotion, as well as salary increases as determined by the chair. A teaching partnership program would add the incentive of collegial esteem. We rejected the idea of basing a fixed percentage of raises on the evidence of student evaluations, because they do not always provide reliable evidence.