The Public Affairs Faculty Manual: A Guide to the Effective Management of Public Affairs Programs by Bruce D. McDonald Iii & William Hatcher

Author:Bruce D. McDonald Iii & William Hatcher [McDonald, Bruce D. Iii & Hatcher, William]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780367893361
Google: 5RrGygEACAAJ
Goodreads: 48635297
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2020-01-15T12:56:50+00:00

Evaluation of Teaching

While research productivity continues to be the primary criterion for tenure decisions in public affairs programs (see The Volcker Alliance, 2017), effective teaching matters. However, there are challenges to adequately and fairly assessing teaching performance. Student course feedback is insufficient (see Boring, Ottoboni, & Stark, 2016; Hornstein, 2017) and prone to bias against women and teachers of color (Anderson & Smith, 2005; Punyanunt-Carter & Carter, 2015).

Critics have long noted that student feedback forms should not be used to constitute summative judgments on college teaching effectiveness, yet they are still routinely used to inform annual performance reviews and promotion and tenure decisions. Student course data are typically not representative (due to less-than-perfect response rates), have questionable measurement reliability, and do not provide a valid measurement of teaching effectiveness, yet we still treat them as if they do meet such standards (Hornstein, 2017).

Direct observation of teaching has been touted as a better tool to use to assess teaching, but peer visits also have their problems. Who should make the visits? More senior faculty members are typically expected to visit, but they also vote on promotion and tenure issues, and this presents a power differential not lost on the junior faculty members who are visited. Also, the peer visitors may not be comfortable offering critical feedback since they know the report goes into the official files. Thus, they may be incentivized to not go “on the record” with information that may be used against the junior faculty members.

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