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School of Nursing

School of Nursing faculty have engaged in a series of discussions about teaching. The first of these was at a meeting of the entire faculty in November, 1996, and continuing discourse about teaching was done in division meetings in December and January. These discussions tended to focus on recommendations for strategies which would enhance the quality of teaching. Following is a summary of those conversations:

  1. Incentives for Excellence in Teaching:

    2. There was strong consensus among participating faculty that incentives the School offers to faculty should be linked to successful teaching. The most obvious of these faculty incentives are salary, promotion and tenure. Teaching should be a very significant criteria in the process of annual faculty evaluation, and excellence in teaching should be appropriately linked to increases in salary. In addition, excellence in teaching should be clearly delineated as an expectation for promotion and tenure, and be weighted significantly among the major criteria used for promotion and tenure decisions.

    Additional awards to recognize excellence in teaching should be offered by the School of Nursing. Among the advantages for the School in creating such an award is the implied statement that good teaching is considered to be important and the concomitant creation of an atmosphere in which teaching is valued. The existing Innovative Teaching Award offered by the SON Alumni Association provides support for a faculty member who plans the development of a creative new approach to teaching. In order to complement that award, a new award could be created by the School that recognizes and rewards quality teaching retrospectively. In this way, the School could acknowledge and reward faculty who consistently demonstrate high quality teaching.

  2. Evaluation of Teaching:

    3. Evaluation of faculty should recognize that excellence in teaching includes not only performance in the classroom, but also encompasses instruction and precepting in a wide variety of clinical practice settings. In addition, teaching includes mentoring of graduate students in scholarship, practice and research, and serving as a role model for less experienced faculty. These multiple roles of the excellent teacher should be addressed in the processes of faculty evaluation and in the consequent decisions about salary, promotion, tenure and rewards.

    The School of Nursing has a well developed plan for student evaluation of classroom and clinical teaching. In addition to student evaluations, peer evaluation should be more widely used and recognized as an inherent part of the evaluative process, and also as a means to provide constructive feedback that can serve to improve teaching performance. An additional recommendation is to work with the UVA Teaching Center to obtain and use appropriate tools to guide the peer evaluators through this process.

  3. Developing Faculty Teaching:

    4. Discussions focused on ways in which the School of Nursing can create an environment that fosters the development of excellence in teaching.

    The components of such a supportive environment would include development of junior faculty, incentives that encourage quality teaching among all faculty, and enhancement of quality education through synthesis of the faculty roles of teaching, service and research.

    Mentoring efforts would support the pairing of faculty in a way in which senior faculty would assist junior faculty to develop into accomplished and effective teachers. Ideally this pairing would occur voluntarily among faculty who find mutual benefit and satisfaction in working together. These two individuals would periodically attend one another's classes and, as a result, would engage in constructive dialog about the process of teaching. Such dialog may include strategies for addressing the learning needs of diverse student groups, innovative approaches to education, and methods for enhancing teaching effectiveness.

    The School of Nursing recognizes that development of competence in teaching is not limited to the classroom but must also provide support for faculty teaching in a variety of clinical settings. Mentorship efforts, incentives and a supportive atmosphere address the unique needs of faculty and students in a range of clinical situations in acute care, long term care, and community health settings.

    Excellence in all aspects of the faculty role is enhanced when teaching is integrated with service and research. Efforts to develop more effective teaching provides an atmosphere that encourages faculty discussions about strategies for accomplishing such integration, and in which there is creation of incentives for faculty to merge these roles.