UCAP Meeting of 01/11/2001 2000-2001 agenda status: approved Agenda:
Meeting of Thursday, January 11, 2001 10:15 a.m., Board Room, Administration Building 1. Approval of Agenda 2. Approval of Minutes of the November 30, 2000 Meeting 3. Comments from the Chairperson 4. Comments from the Assistant Provost 5. Discussion with the Provost: Modes of Evaluating Teaching Provost Simon 6. Update on Joint UCAP-ICTC Subcommittee Activities Jeanne Wald 7. Roundtable Attachment: November 30, 2000 Draft Minutes Please phone or E-Mail Robin Pline (353-5380; pline@msu.edu) if you cannot be present. 1.11.01UCAPagenda.doc
minutes status: approved approved at meeting of 01/25/2001 UCAP Minutes for meeting held on 01/11/2001 University Committee on Academic Policy Minutes January 11, 2001 Present: Henry Beckmeyer, Roy Black, Joseph Chartkoff, Craig Duskin,
Winston Wilkinson Minutes Prepared by Joseph Chartkoff 1. Meeting was called to order at 10:20 am. 2. Agenda was approved 3. Minutes from the meeting of September 28, 2000, were approved with two modifications: 1) on Page 2, Item 8, line 5, the term “anecdotal” was substituted for “antidotal”; 2) in the same sentence as noted above, wording was changed to “…underscore the overall impact of finals scheduling upon…”. 4. Comments from the Chairperson: Chairperson Wald declined to comment at this point on the agenda. 5. Comments from the Assistant Provost: Assistant Provost Steidle first extended thanks to everyone in the campus community who coped with the major snowstorm which fell during the first day of Final Exams Week (December 11, 2000). Exceptional efforts given by students, staff and faculty enabled the University to avoid cancellation of final examinations with the myriad complications that would have resulted.
The Early Warning System for freshmen has produced positive results. This past semester, fewer letters needed to be sent out to freshmen who were not progressing satisfactorily than in the previous year. At the same time, of those who did receive letters, a higher percentage than previously ended their semesters in good standing. The University Undergraduate Research and Arts Forum will be held on Friday, April 6, 2001 from Noon to 5:00 pm at the Student Union. Faculty are encouraged to advise their students to participate and to attend. This coming Monday (January 15, 2001) will mark the University’s formal celebration of Martin Luther King, Jr., Day. Under current policy, classes are cancelled for the day, but the University will be officially open. The scheduled events for the day are announced in the Friday, January 12, issue of The State News. a. What assistance would be provided by the Administration to promote the evaluation and enhancement of teaching? b. Would teaching be made more important in the evaluation of faculty performance, and if so, how? c. Would teaching units be provided with additional resources to support improved teaching and teaching assessment? d. Would efforts, authority and resources for the enhancement of teaching and teaching assessment be handled centrally or be decentralized? e. How would the issue of fairness in teaching evaluation be handled? f. How would diversity in teaching or learning styles be accommodated? g. Would teaching quality be handled in a positive fashion or in a fashion of avoiding penalties? h. Would accommodation be made to recognize changing professional priorities among faculty as they grow older, or would aging faculty become increasingly disenfranchised?
b. One element of these changes involves the concept of annual evaluation, building upon tenure and promotion criteria, which has been underway for several years. Annual evaluation policies take into account shifting faculty emphases in their careers. Faculty can be recognized for how well they carry out the workload they had agreed upon with chairs, rather than by a single prototype applied to all faculty. Professor Black asked at this point whether all unit heads were required to do annual evaluations. Provost Simon replied that they were, though there was still variation across the university on the extent to which this was being done. In addition, the evaluation of faculty was a significant section of the agenda of the Faculty Work Life Committee. That committee encouraged the Provost to have UCAP work to help improve faculty evaluation procedures. (In response to a question as to whether teaching assistants were able to provide evaluations of the faculty they assisted, the Provost replied that such evaluations were conducted by some units, but that the practice is not a University policy nor widespread within the University.) c. The Provost noted that the University would continue to support Lilly and Faculty Seminar programs, which addressed issues of teaching quality. d. The Provost also noted that, starting this past summer, incoming unit chairs and directors were required to attend orientation seminars on policies, including faculty evaluation, because of the unevenness in evaluation and other practices that exists across the University. This effort is an attempt to address the considerable differences that exist among units as to their missions, responsibilities and constituencies. To a large extent, this debate resembles the tensions in the American federal system between states’ rights and national governance. The university community is by no means unified on such issues as how central policies and strategies are seen compared to what issues and practices are best left to units, with unit control but administration provision of the tools. She noted that the Administration has not mandated any uniform evaluation practices for instruction, but that such efforts have been undertaken with regard to University Outreach, with positive results. She feels the key to dealing with evaluation issues on campus will be through conversations with the deans, to promote variation in the recognition of excellence in terms of the diversity that exists among programs, and relative to the goals set forth for the units—that recognition of excellence needs to be not only honest, but also as appropriate to each niche the units are trying to fill. e. At present, evaluation applies to three areas, with quite different degrees of adequacy in measurement. One area is research, for which standards and criteria tend to be fairly clearly expressed, measured and recognized in terms of publication in appropriate refereed journals, measurement of impact of publications in terms of the citations of the work appearing in the works of others, success in obtaining external funding to support research, the number of graduate students supervised and number of graduate degrees completed under the faculty’s supervision. Another area involves Outreach activities, where regularization of standards is being attempted but still is in its early stages. Yet another area is teaching, in which the means for evaluation are least clear and least widely shared. How do we determine what constitutes excellence? The practice of having peer visits to classrooms is not common. The working assumption seems to be that the amount of other scholarly productivity is a proxy for teaching quality, with the unspoken assumption that those who publish new work bring it into their courses, and that those who do not publish new work do not update and enrich their courses. This assumption is unsupported by any evidence and needs to be abandoned. Instead the university needs to become involved in better assessing what it is that demonstrates the scholarship of teaching, what measures the outcome of effective teaching, and what measures results in terms of effective student learning.
g. Professor Black raised the matter of portfolio balance among the faculty of a unit, and how faculty with different balances or emphases among the areas of research, teaching and outreach would have their various contributions evaluated, especially with regard to teaching performance. Provost Simon commented that, under current practice, units do not know what goes on in the classroom as a rule. They do not have effective assessments, for example, of how much students have learned from a course compared to what they knew before they began the course. There is no decision about whether to look at outcomes assessments, scholarship input by the instructor, or other factors. In addition, faculty have perceptions about what the importance is of what they invest in teaching and what is recognized about their teaching effectiveness that may not be in concert with actual practice. At the same time, units not only vary in how they weigh criteria, but their criteria evolve over time. h. Central administration has the ability to educate unit heads about these matters, and also may be able to take away excuses for unit non-recognition of faculty performance. Central administration does not have the authority to impose unit criteria and methods, which, in the final analysis, reflect faculty judgments and values. Central administration already has in place the means to educate chairs and directors. The question therefore is one of how to most effectively take away excuses. i. Professor Sticklen commented that units see two routes to improve quality. One is through efforts to become a top-ten or top-twenty-five unit in their disciplines. This path lies pretty exclusively in the domain of research, so the teaching quality issue is not germane. The other route is through budget resources that go to the department. This is the path that can be manipulated. The Provost responded by noting that top-ranked departments do not say that they do not do teaching well, so the situation may not be as disconnected as it was presented. Professor Black noted he was aware of some top departments that in fact discount undergraduate teaching by relying heavily on adjuncts to teach those courses so that the regular faculty can concentrate on research, grant-getting and graduate education. Professor Chartkoff compared the level of teaching assistant support at MSU with that at the University of Michigan to suggest that institutional investment could have alternate ways to support the quality levels of undergraduate education. Provost Simon replied that a key area for focus could be large-class instruction, and that the reward of faculty innovation in large-class instruction that succeeded in improving the quality of that form would be particularly appropriate. j. Ms. Riddle suggested that an innovative approach might be to do additional course evaluations of such courses a year after they were taught so that students could reflect back on the impact and significance of the course. She also commented that in the College of Engineering an earlier emphasis on undergraduate education was being replaced by increasing emphasis on grant-getting and research, leading to growing alienation among faculty who have been committed to the importance of teaching. Provost Simon noted that teaching loads in the College of Engineering were similar to those elsewhere in the University, so it wasn’t being de-emphasized. On the other hand, the Board of Trustees has expressed concern because the faculty of the College of Engineering is less productive that colleagues at other universities in using external funding to support their research time. The Board is concerned with the extent to which General Fund resources are being used to subsidize faculty research, a pattern not allowed at many peer institutions. It accentuates the problem of what the University should do in the face of scarce resources. For example, she said, state funding has provided for no new program funding for the past seven years, and tuition increases have to be concentrated where students are concentrated, so investment flexibility is severely limited. k. This discussion led to the Provost’s charge to UCAP. Provost Simon asked UCAP to bring together as many ideas as possible about how teaching excellence can best be promoted, evaluated, and rewarded within the context of this institution. She asked UCAP not to devote extensive time and effort to this task, but rather to discuss the issue in the near future and share its ideas with her. l. Professor Imig raised the problem of how best to have an impact on faculty thinking. Provost Simon asked for UCAP’s help and contributions, as a faculty-representative body, and pledged the efforts of her office to help change community values and perceptions. Ideas put forward immediately around the table included Ms. Riddle’s suggestion to re-sample student course evaluations a year later and Professor Chartkoff’s suggestion to expand recognition of teaching excellence through college-level annual teaching excellence awards. 8. Chairperson’s Summary: Upon the conclusion of Provost Simon’s discussion and her departure from the meeting, Chairperson Wald summarized the charge given to UCAP in preparation of the Committee’s agenda for its February meeting. a. UCAP’s charge is to address the promotion of teaching excellence and the recognition of teaching effectiveness through evaluation beyond what currently is gained through the use of SIRS surveys. The Provost has asked for a prompt response from UCAP and not an extensive research report. UCAP’s message needs to communicate intended values, both to the central administration and for communication with the faculty in general. b. Another part of this charge involves policies and programs that the central administration has already adopted or developed, and of which the faculty need to be more fully and widely informed, both for the substance of the resources and to aid the administration in sending its message about the significance of teaching. c. UCAP needs to develop more ideas about how to enhance the significance of teaching in professional responsibilities, and also to better inform the rest of the faculty about the importance of teaching. d. A significant part of the challenge is the need to figure out how better to communicate with individual faculty in our world of expanding bureaucracy. e. UCAP needs to shed light on experiments that might be done to better assess the effectiveness of teaching. It needs to pool ideas about how best to highlight efforts, such as focusing on large lecture classes. At the same time, given the Provost’s charge, UCAP needs to limit its current effort to ideas. f. UCAP needs to discuss how better to get feedback from both faculty and students about teaching quality on the existing forms apart from other efforts. 9. Agenda Item Six, concerning joint UCAP-ICTC Subcommittee activities, was tabled until the next meeting. 10. The meeting was adjourned at 12:15 p.m. |
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