5.
Recruiting and rewarding outstanding educators
The core of excellent education is outstanding teaching. University support
for faculty instructional development should be accompanied, therefore,
by efforts to recruit, recognize, and reward faculty who are outstanding
educators within and outside the classroom. This is the most important
responsibility of department chairs (and the senior faculty of the department)
and Deans.
a) Faculty recruitment: It begins with faculty recruitment,
when interviews should incorporate serious consideration of teaching in
the form of a breakfast conversation about undergraduate education, a
"teaching colloquium," guest lecturing in a class, or another
opportunity. Most applicants for Assistant Professor positions are interested
in becoming skilled educators, and discussions of teaching during the
interview process aid recruitment efforts by indicating that teaching
is important and will be supported by a department that also values research.
Departments should seek to hire faculty who are proficient educators or
show exceptional promise of becoming so.
b) Promotion and tenure: The quality of teaching should
also be central to faculty promotion and tenure decisions. Assessments
of teaching should incorporate the student voice (in course evaluations)
but more, including careful peer assessments of the intellectual content
of the course and the instructor's discussion of student learning and
evidence for improving it. When promotions are based primarily on teaching
excellence, external evaluations of a teaching portfolio are also necessary.
Now that there are multiple means of reliably evaluating instructional
effectiveness, there is no reason that the scholarship of teaching should
not be taken seriously in promotion and tenure policies. Departments should
seek to tenure and promote faculty who are excellent educators.
c) Department program review: The teaching climate of
a department is more than the sum of its constituent faculty. It consists
also of the extracurricular opportunities for learning available to undergraduates
(especially majors), the support for instructional skill among graduate
student teaching assistants, the quality of undergraduate advising, opportunities
for supervised research, internships, and practica, the assignment of
faculty and TAs to introductory and advanced courses, and many other decisions.
We believe that only when the overall climate of teaching and learning
is assessed in a department can it improve to serve students better, yet
there are few existing opportunities to do so. We recommend, therefore,
that future Academic Program Review external teams include at least one
member who is an expert in teaching within the field. The APR would be
expected specifically to address the teaching climate of the department,
identifying strengths and recommending areas for future improvement, along
with the other topics typically discussed in the team report.
d) Distinguished Professorships for exemplary education: As faculty
careers evolve, the profile of faculty responsibilities naturally changes
to accommodate changes in interests, capabilities, and opportunities.
Although a tenure decision is based on strengths in both teaching and
research, promotion to full professor may be based primarily on outstanding
teaching (or research), consistent with the "multiple profiles"
of faculty responsibility earlier discussed. For a few, their teaching
becomes truly exemplary. These are the colleagues who are recognized with
distinguished teaching awards but, strangely, there are no distinguished
professorships that recognize instructional excellence and leadership.
This is an anomaly for an institution that values outstanding teaching.
Distinguished professorships offer public recognition to exceptionally
meritorious faculty, identify role models for other faculty, and communicate
to the campus and the larger community the qualities that are most highly
prized by the university. We invite the University Foundation and its
donors to endow a series of named professorships to be awarded to faculty
who exhibit instructional excellence and educational leadership comparable
to the research achievements currently recognized by existing endowed
professorships. We believe that distinguished professorships can be awarded
to outstanding educators who have been recruited to UNL from other universities
(comparable to the Othmer professorships), but can also be awarded to
exceptional educators currently on the UNL faculty who have assumed exemplary
leadership in education.