Project Team for Teaching and Evaluation

Report | Charge | Membership

The Project Team's final report was completed on March 29, 2002.  Please click "Final Report" to view the report in PDF.  If you do not have Adobe Acrobat reader, click here for a free download.

Charge:

Affirming the Promise: An Agenda for Excellence in the 21st Century describes our primary institutional value: a focus on students and student-learning.  Truman faculty, like their professional colleagues nationwide, are challenged to work in a time of "paradigm shift" from primary focus on instruction to a primary focus on student learning.  Our students' expectations for academic excellence and learning experiences are widely diverse, even as they come to us with academic success.  Instructors encounter learning styles and use of educational technologies that may challenge their habits of instruction but may also enhance their pedagogies.  All too often it appears that student evaluations are the only measure of effectiveness and that the idiosyncratic nature of our disciplinary work is lost in discussions and decisions about teaching and teaching effectiveness.  To support and encourage quality teaching and professional development, feedback and evaluation processes are critical.  Therefore, I am appointing a Project Team on Teaching and Evaluation.

Members of the Project Team will be charged to:

• Review and research the literature on evaluation and assessment of teaching and teachers.

• Come to consensus on principles of best teaching and advising practices that acknowledges and extends to the various disciplines at Truman.  Using campus disciplinary consultants, present models and alternatives for evaluating teaching effectiveness that will recognize the unique and idiosyncratic nature of Truman's disciplines.

• Analyze, evaluate, and describe to the Truman community the appropriate use of formative evaluation to assist faculty in their development as teachers and to develop or enhance good teaching practices for the enhancement of student learning.

• Produce a template for the newly adopted Formative Third-Year Review that might be used by Truman to establish this process across campus.

• Analyze, evaluate, and describe appropriate use(s) of summative evaluation to ascertain the quality of a teacher's practice against the shared University standards of good teaching practices that facilitate and promote student learning.

• Produce a template for a campus-wide "core" summative assessment approach that will allow for divisional autonomy but also University-wide commonality.  This "core approach" would serve as the base-in-common across campus, but it should allow divisions to add to or enhance this "core approach" to meet divisional needs and culture.

• Analyze, evaluate, and describe appropriate use of "reflective practice" as self-assessment.

• Analyze, evaluate, and describe appropriate use of student evaluations.

• Analyze, evaluate, and describe appropriate use of peer and colleague review.

• Disseminate, through Division Heads, the Office of Faculty Development, and disciplines, best practices for evaluating teaching methods, classroom configurations, use of educational technology, mentoring, and advising.

Members:

Discipline Consultants:

Janet Gooch (CMDS), Brenda Higgins (NU), Tricia Brown (SS), Doug Reinsch (MS), Randy Hagerty (SS), Jon Beck (MT), Priscilla Riggle (LL), Dereck Daschke (SS), Michael Blum (BA), Janet Romine (LM), Susan Shoaff-Ballanger (FA), Becky Becker (FA), Bridget Thomas (LL), Mark Hanley (SS), Mike Davis (SS), Werner Sublette (SS), Ray Barrow (SS), Jonathan Smith (SS), Cavit Cooley (JS), Karen Smith (SS), Glenn Wehner (SC), Dan Hite (SC), Ken Hahn (SC), Warren Gooch (FA).

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