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Department of History -- Arts & Sciences

On Monday, 10 February, we spent ninety minutes discussing the three aspects of teaching mandated for Phase I. All members of the department were invited to the meeting; about one-third of them, representing rather accurately the distribution of professorial ranks among us, attended it. Here is a brief summary of our deliberations.

Evaluation of Teaching

Since 1986 the History Department has used two instruments: a machine-readable form soliciting responses to five questions in Part III (Instructor) and nine in Part IV (Course Content); and a questionnaire soliciting information about the respondent and eliciting open-ended responses to three questions. These are administered at the end of the semester, usually at the last class meeting. We identified several problems with this system. (1) At that point students are in no mood to assess the course carefully and thoughtfully, nor can instructors do anything to react to those students' opinions and suggestions. (2) The open-ended questions (strengths of the course, suggestions for improvement, inclination to recommend it to others) are too generic to be of much help. (3) If instructors themselves collect the forms, as many of them do, the possibility of abuse -- reading open-ended comments immediately, recognizing handwriting, and penalizing those who are critical -- presents itself.

Solving the second and third problems will be relatively simple. On whether the first problem is serious and so, how it should be addressed, opinions differed. Some of us use and profit from a midterm evaluation conducted by the Teaching Resource Center; others have no interest in doing so. Clearly, therefore, the Department can publicize the opportunity of but cannot require a midterm assessment.

Development of Teaching

The History Department neither conducts any sort of peer review of teaching nor mandates the keeping of teaching portfolios (of which some had never heard). A few of the most vocal participants in the discussion objected vociferously to instituting any formal type of mentoring system, calling it "condescending," a "conflict of interest" (the mentor will later become the protege's judge), and "an infringement of academic freedom." Some asserted that effective informal mentoring is in fact taking place, but this hypothesis requires verification. One of the three of four people present who had participated by invitation in the Lilly program argued strongly in favor of a formal mentoring system, which requires a genuine commitment as opposed to a value expression of good will and matches people, not necessarily of different ranks, from different departments.(Not surprisingly, junior people kept silent during this phase of the discussion.)

That senior people can learn from as well as providing help to their junior colleagues -- and for that matter, their rank-mates -- all appear to agree. Many supported the suggestions that we form a list of those willing to host their colleagues in classes, establish a pool syllabi, and meet occasionally in a teaching workshop. These modest initiatives, a first step in the right direction, will come into being very soon.

Rewarding Good Teaching

It is clear to all that with such small amounts of money available for distribution in raises, History Department chairs cannot provide significant financial rewards for good teaching. Nor can recipients of infinitesimal raises calculate what if anything they are being rewarded for. At least in the immediate future, therefore, rewards must come in different forms.

In the unanimous view of those present, immediate upgrading of the shockingly substandard and depressing physical environment in which we are forced to work is an urgent priority -- not so much a reward as an entitlement necessary for good teaching. From our long list of complaints, here are few examples. In Randall Hall, our headquarters, floors and stairs are pockmarked with holes, and rusted-out fixtures dangle from single screws in the bathrooms. Elsewhere on Grounds, we routinely find ourselves assigned to classrooms with broken chairs and no hooks upon which to hang maps, and to so-called seminar rooms without tables. Assistance in the financial support for preparing and using materials like overhead transparencies, not to mention products of cutting-edge information technology, are sadly lacking. Our awareness of the huge gulf in quality between facilities in other schools of the university and those available in Arts and Sciences renders us our morale on this score particularly low.

Awards for good teaching might make some difference if they were based on criteria in addition to student evaluations, which tend to reward crowd-pleasing professorial performance before an audience of passive listeners rather than pedagogy that demands engagement and hard work. Furthermore, conferring awards on departments, not individuals, would contribute significantly to making the evaluation of teaching more sophisticated, serious, and useful to all concerned.

Finally, in the longer term, we call for reduction in the size of classes and particularly of discussion sections. This change would enable us to earn the intangible reward of knowing that we were reaching and really teaching, rather than merely processing, our students.