Hello, Fellow Faculty,
Here’s a brief report on our JCAC meeting 4/21; if you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to contact me.
In attendance: Chris Byrne, Jill Lund, David Shapiro, Gina Lorenz, Rosemary Sutton, Terrence Hsiao.
This meeting was a “study session” to talk about how CIEs are used (or not) by the Deans and Administration in making evaluations of faculty, especially associate faculty. It was prompted by questions that have come up over the years, (and perhaps especially last year, during the Priority Hire process), and a general lack of clarity about what happens to CIEs after they are completed—who reads them, for instance, and what, if anything is done with the information they provide.
Rosemary facilitated the meeting, and she wrote on the wipeboard some points to consider. These weren’t all necessarily meant to be points of agreement, just point for spurring discussion.
- We all share a common interest in high quality teaching and learning
- Belief: student input is useful as one indicator of teaching quality—and/or popularity contest
- Student input can provide useful information, but it has costs associated with it
- High response rates for CIEs provide more useful information about quality teaching
- Some protection of faculty from possible misuse of CIEs is important
- Deans should have a consistent use and interpretation of student input
We spent about an hour and half talking about these points. #1 was, of course, not contentious, nor really were #4 and #5; the others though gave rise to a lot of discussion.
We wondered together about the usefulness of student input generally, although, there was general agreement that students can provide information that helps us be better teachers. Not surprisingly, we explored whether CIEs do provide useful information, raising the sorts of questions that we, as faculty, have explored together for years. Perhaps the most important point was the idea that there are costs—pedagogical, financial, and probably most importantly, emotional—in the use of CIEs.
There was a shared understanding that the kinds of responses that faculty get on CIEs is highly determined by issues not directly related to the quality of one’s teaching, including gender, race, age, whether a class is required or not, subject matter of the class, etc. Rosemary indicated that she is very familiar with the literature on student evaluations and recognizes these factors.
We, (that is I), asked point-blank whether CIEs are used to making staffing decisions and connected this question to how they were used in the Priority Hire application process. No precise answer could be given, I think, because the process, as is often stated, is “holistic.” But as we explored this, Rosemary proposed that it is her intent to develop a series of workshops for the incoming Deans and Associate Dean (and current Associate Dean) to get clarity and consensus on how to use CIEs as part of this holistic process.
The general idea will be to develop a set of scenarios that the Deans and Associate Deans will explore together, in meetings with interested faculty, to create some guidelines and principles that we all can agree to. The timeline for this depends on the hiring of the new administrators, but I believe can expect to hear more in the coming weeks or months. It may be something that happens as part of the new administrators’ initial training and/or something that continues pre-fall and into next year.
To me, the prospect of this is very hopeful; it promises to be highly-inclusive and really consistent with our commitment to being a learning college. I came out of this meeting feeling very good about next steps and optimistic about getting a clearer picture of the role of CIEs in faculty evaluation for all parties involved.
(I realize that this is a fairly editorialized rendering of the meeting; I hope it captures the main thrust of our discussion. I’ll be happy to try to answer any more specific questions should anyone have them; Jill and/or Chris may be able to offer additional insights, too.)
Cheers,
Dave Shapiro