DRAFT

Teaching Statement

Department of English

University of Iowa

 

 

Introduction

 

The purpose of this document is to foster a culture of teaching in which the department recognizes, supports, and rewards good teaching.

 

Professional Development of Teaching

 

The English Department supports the development of its faculty's teaching in a number of different ways.

 

Teaching Mentors for Junior Faculty:

 

To support junior faculty members during their first years of full time teaching, the department pairs each of them with a teaching mentor who is a tenured faculty member in the department. Because beginning professors may not be familiar with their colleagues, the chair, in close consultation with the new faculty member, will assign a teaching mentor sometime early in the first semester of the Assistant Professor's appointment. The assigned mentor will serve for an initial two-year period.* At the end of that period, Assistant Professors will be given the option of continuing on with their original mentor or choosing a new one for the remaining years of their probationary appointment. If for any reason--variety, field of specialization, pedagogical philosophy, shared interests--they decide to change mentors, they need only identify a mentor and discuss the arrangement with the chair and the potential mentor. Ordinarily, no tenured faculty member will have more than two junior faculty to mentor at any one time.

 

During the first two years of the Assistant Professor's appointment, the teaching mentor will be available for informal discussions about teaching strategies, skills, materials, and procedures, for classroom observations, and for help with any teaching problems that might arise. Because some new faculty members will come from graduate schools where they have done a lot of teaching or have received extensive pedagogical training, while others may be far less experienced, each mentor's job will be different, and mentors should be responsive to the particular needs and concerns of the individual they are mentoring. To ensure that new Assistant Professors feel completely comfortable approaching their mentor with specific problems or difficulties they might be encountering in the classroom, and to encourage them to engage in open and honest discussions about their teaching with their mentors, mentors during these first two years will serve in an advisory role only: in the first and second-year reviews, therefore, they will not be asked to make public (written or oral) reports on the teaching of the person they are mentoring. Although mentors are encouraged to give candid and constructive assessments of the junior faculty member's teaching to the individual they are mentoring, these assessments should be kept confidential, unless the Assistant Professor specifically requests in writing that they be made public. In the second phase, comprising the last four years of the probationary period, the mentor's responsibilities will include formal peer review as well as mentoring, and the mentor will be expected to submit brief written reports of class observations which will be kept in the Assistant Professor's file for the remainder of the probationary period.

 

Mentors will be expected to observe at least one class per semester, and they are also strongly encouraged to invite the person they are mentoring to visit their own classroom. By giving untenured members the opportunity to observe, assess, and respond to the teaching of tenured members of the faculty, such reciprocal visitation has the potential to alter the dynamic between senior and junior faculty in positive ways, making class visitations less threatening and more natural, eliciting more productive discussions about pedagogy, and reinforcing the notion of "peer" review.

 

*Note: When an appointment at the Assistant Professor level is made to someone who has previously taught at the Assistant Professor rank at another institution, the chair, in consultation with the faculty member, will make the necessary adjustments to this procedure; if the faculty member's tenure-clock is shortened to recognize this previous experience, the initial teaching mentor will in most cases assume an evaluative as well as advisory role.

 

Departmental, College, and University Support of Teaching:

 

Semester assignments and Old Gold Summer fellowships can be used to fund pedagogical projects. Although untenured faculty will ordinarily need to use these awards to support their research in preparation for the tenure decision, tenured faculty are encouraged to use them to develop their teaching by expanding their repertoire of courses, designing interdisciplinary, team- taught, or experimental courses, writing pedagogical essays, etc.

 

To encourage the development of new courses, team-teaching, experimentation with the computer classroom, and other creative teaching ideas, the department supports a competitive summer grant with departmental endowment funds.

 

The Department makes every effort to identify and nominate its exceptional teachers for university and collegiate teaching awards, including the Murray Award for untenured faculty, the Collegiate Teaching Awards, and the Huitt Award. Most of these awards are open to nominations from students or colleagues. In addition, the Associate Chair of Faculty, in consultation with the Chair, annually submits departmental nominations for university and college- wide teaching awards.

 

Evaluation of Faculty Teaching:

 

It is important to recognize that teaching, research, and service are interrelated activities and that it is impossible to disentangle them. Teaching is enriched and enlivened by the active pursuit of research and writing. Many decisions that affect the conduct of classes and the shape of the curriculum come out of service done on the undergraduate, graduate, and honors committees. This section will concentrate primarily on the activities that involve conducting classes and supervising independent work with undergraduate and graduate students.

 

The Department recognizes that its faculty's teaching takes many forms and extends well beyond the classroom. We teach a range of courses at the undergraduate and graduate levels, courses that require daily preparations, a substantial amount of grading, the production of course materials, and regularly scheduled office hours (in accordance with college policy mandating three hours of office hours for every three hours of teaching, plus availability before and after classes). But we also work closely with honors students on theses, research projects, and teaching internships; direct M.A. and M.F.A. theses and Ph.D. dissertations and serve as members of theses and dissertation committees; serve on comprehensive examinations for doctoral students; advise undergraduate and graduate students; guide students enrolled in independent study courses; and write letters of recommendation for their students. When assessing an individual faculty member's teaching, the Department attempts, as much as possible, to take into consideration the whole range of the individual's teaching.

 

It is the professional obligation of all members of the English Department to have their teaching assessed regularly. Assessment is an important way for us to evaluate our strengths and weaknesses as teachers and to gauge the effectiveness of our teaching skills. It is particularly vital that such assessment take place regularly and through a variety of means during a faculty member's untenured years, so that a full record of teaching quality be available at the time a tenure decision is made. It is also important that such assessment not end when a faculty member is tenured, but rather that it continue to be a normal and expected part of the teaching process. The department is committed to teaching of the highest possible quality across the full range of its course offerings.

 

In its assessment of teaching the department uses the following mechanisms:

 

Course-Instructor Evaluation Forms:

 

Because students are the audience for our courses, their reviews are vital. Only they are in a position to respond to the full experience of a course and to the entire process of a semester. In a very real way, student evaluations are to our teaching what published reviews are to our scholarship: public response by our audience to our professional work. As with any review of our work, student evaluations should not be taken as definitive judgments, but as suggestions of strengths and weaknesses, indications of what we might want to build on or change.

All members of the Department use the same course-instructor evaluation form, copies of which are distributed to faculty members before the final week of each semester. Faculty should follow the same procedures for administering the departmental CIE forms. During one class session in the final week of classes, the instructor will distribute the forms and choose a student to collect and return the completed forms to the departmental receptionist in 308 EPB. After assuring students that their responses will not be read until after final grades have been turned in, the instructor should leave the room while students fill out the forms. Before the evaluation forms are returned to the faculty member, they will be xeroxed and a complete set of xeroxed copies will be stored in the faculty member's file for five years, or, in the case of tenured faculty, until the next formal review. For this reason, instructors should require students to use pens, rather than pencils. Faculty members may pick up evaluation forms from the secretary after they have submitted grades for the course being evaluated and their forms have been copied for the file.

 

The department culture has always been strongly against the use of purely quantitative measures of evaluation and has thus resisted using the university's computerized SPOT forms. This choice, however, puts a burden on faculty members to provide a synoptic summary of their course- instructor evaluations in a qualitative rather than a quantitative manner. Therefore, for each course that they teach, faculty members will be asked to write a two-sentence summary of the comments on their course-evaluation forms for their teaching portfolios (see below). These comments can also serve as the annual summary of their teaching forms for their cv.

 

In preparation for their annual reviews in the fall semester, untenured faculty will also be asked to write a brief response to each set of evaluations. In this response they are invited to reflect upon their students' responses, put into context any responses they feel need explanation, and identify any significant changes they might make in the course should they teach it again. Tenured faculty are also encouraged to write similar responses; for their 5-year reviews, they will be asked to reflect upon representative sets of course evaluations which they submit for review.

 

Peer Evaluation of Classes:

 

Research in the field of evaluation suggests that student evaluations and peer evaluations are not generally at odds, and it is a rare case where students admire teaching that faculty observers find weak, or vice versa. This is not to suggest that student evaluations and peer evaluations simply duplicate each other, however. Because peers can offer advice, strategies, and observations that students generally lack the experience or expertise to comment on, the Department believes that it is important to have our teaching observed by colleagues occasionally, either through casual visits or through team-teaching. Peer review is a way for colleagues to experience a faculty member's teaching first-hand and to evaluate its rigor and effectiveness from the point of view of a peer.

 

All faculty members who agree to visit the classroom of a colleague should follow the protocol described below:

 

Class visits should be arranged well ahead of time and should never be unannounced. Before the actual visit, peer evaluators should get a syllabus for the course, find out what the instructor plans to do in the class that will be observed, and ask if there are any particular problems the instructor is encountering with the class or if there is any relevant background about the class the instructor would like to share. Instructors may also want to identify specific issues or concerns they would like the peer reviewer to address.

 

Peer evaluators should arrive in the class they are observing a few minutes ahead of time and take a seat somewhere in the back of the room. They should make a note of how many students are present and, if the instructor conducts a class discussion, approximately how many students participate. In their observation of the class, they may find it helpful to address the following:

 

1. the instructor's preparation and goals (how well prepared is the instructor? how has the instructor organized the class period and how effective is that organization? what is the instructor seeking to accomplish during this class period and how successful is he/she? are the instructor's goals appropriate for the level of the course?);

 

2. the instructor's pedagogical style and rhetoric (how effective, stimulating, and useful is the instructor's mode of lecturing? what kinds of questions is the instructor raising? do these questions stimulate discussion and challenge the students? do they open up the text and address important issues? what kind of a rapport has the instructor established with his/her students, and do the students seem comfortable asking questions, participating in class discussions, engaging the instructor and their fellow students in intellectual discussions, communicating with each other? What kinds of responses does the instructor give to students who answer or ask questions, including responses to student comments that are inappropriate, off the mark, simplistic, or difficult to comprehend as well as those that are insightful and penetrating?);

 

3. the students' level of engagement and familiarity with the readings, issues, and terminology of the course (how engaged are the students in the material of the class? how well have they mastered the text[s] being discussed? how well versed are they in the literature, culture, theory, history, or issues being discussed? do they make connections with other texts they have read or previous class discussions?).

 

After the class, the visiting faculty member should arrange to meet with the instructor to review the class, describe what he/she has observed, identify strengths, and make suggestions for improvement. If the instructor being evaluated is untenured and no longer in the initial phase of mentoring, or if he/she is tenured and undergoing a fifth-year review, the visiting faculty member should then write a brief summary of his observations. One copy of this summary will be placed in the instructor's file, and another copy will be given to the instructor.

 

Teaching Portfolios:

 

In addition to course-instructor evaluation forms and peer reviews, the department relies on teaching portfolios to help evaluate the full range of an individual's teaching. The purpose of the teaching portfolio is to maintain a "thick description" of each faculty member's teaching and thus to provide a record that can be consulted at salary time, during faculty reviews, and for departmental awards. Faculty members will be asked to update their portfolios each spring, in preparation for the annual salary review.

 

Each portfolio will include the following materials:

 

1) a teaching cv, which lists: all the courses the faculty member has taught at Iowa, along with the semester and year in which they were taught and their enrollment; the names of students whose dissertations and M.A., M.F.A., and honors theses the faculty member has directed, along with any awards or book publications resulting from this work; the names of students on whose dissertation, comprehensive, M.A., M.F.A., and honors committees the faculty has served; and any teaching awards or teaching grants and fellowships the faculty member has received;

 

2) a personal statement on teaching;

 

3) syllabi and other course materials for courses taught in the preceding 5 years;

 

4) copies of course-instructor evaluations for those courses and, for untenured faculty and tenured faculty undergoing a fifth-year review, summaries of these evaluations on a cover sheet;

 

5) other relevant material that the instructor wishes to include (e.g., essays on teaching or

pedagogy).

 

Fostering a Culture of Teaching:

 

The English Department is committed to fostering a culture of teaching. On-going support for teaching and teachers in the department includes the following:

 

1. The department maintains a voluntary syllabus bank on the departmental website. Faculty members are encouraged to submit the syllabus and other course materials for each course they teach and to update earlier submissions. By establishing and maintaining a syllabus bank, the department seeks to provide exemplary models for new teachers or for faculty members teaching a particular course for the first time; enable faculty members to learn more about what their colleagues are doing in the classroom; stimulate discussion about diverse pedagogical approaches and strategies; and encourage exchange and collaboration among faculty teaching the same course. This syllabus bank is available only to English faculty.

 

2. The Associate Chair of Graduate Studies, the Associate Chair of Undergraduate Studies, the Director of the Honors Program, and the department's computer consultant collaborate in exploring ways of using the departmental website to enhance the department's teaching mission.

 

3. The department actively encourages team teaching. Team teaching provides an excellent opportunity for faculty members to develop their teaching skills, to learn from one another, and to experiment with new courses and pedagogies. When instructors in English collaborate with faculty from other departments, team teaching also provides them and their students the opportunity to engage in valuable interdisciplinary work that has the potential to challenge conventional ways of thinking and forge new modes of inquiry.

 

4. The department sponsors a yearly teaching colloquia, organized around a different set of issues each year, to stimulate a departmental-wide conversation about teaching.

 

5. The department supports a competitive summer grant with departmental endowment funds to encourage the development of new courses, team-teaching, experimentation with the computer classroom, and other creative teaching ideas.