Teaching Rubric for Tenure Process

Chad Brassil, University of Nebraska at Lincoln

Program Description

Developed a teaching rubric as a faculty in order to reduce variance among tenure cases.

Program Purpose

High variance existed as to how the teaching file was being evaluated from one tenure case to the next.

Building a rubric as a community allowed different perspectives to be discussed, worked out. It allowed conclusions/consensus to be communicated to all parties involved, i.e. the faculty community and the pre-tenure faculty.

Program Goals

The primary goal was to reduce variance among cases. Secondary goals included 1) de-emphasizing the role of student evaluations in the process, 2) having a system that was open to a variety of different teaching approaches, 3) preventing a perceived lower of expectations so as to accommodate everyone.

Program Activities

1) One or a few people create a draft. 2) Get feedback on that draft from an appropriate committee and/or key people in the department. 3) Hold an open meeting with the faculty for more feedback and to increase buy-in. 4) Bring a now refined draft to a faculty meeting.

It would be helpful for the lead person to read a little bit about rubrics, their structures and their uses.

Notes and Tips

Be open to the idea of major revisions. For example, a major source of variation for us was the degree to which class size should be discussed in the tenure process. The compromise was to remove it from the tenure discussion, but keep it in the annual evaluation process. This accomplished the primary goal of reducing variance, while also finding an appropriate place for that piece of evaluation.

Evidence of Success

We are in the middle of the process, but there appears to be increased satisfaction. The rubric communicates expectations, but still retains flexibility in interpretation. The rubric articulate the minimum, but still fully tenurable, set of expectations. At the same time, it contains bullet points that faculty can pursue to become better instructors. This reduces the need by some to bring those points forward during each discussion (often in the negative) in order to keep the potential ceiling high.

Future Work

We will need to circulate these rubric on a regular basis among the faculty and among the pre-tenure faculty in order to keep the agreed upon ideas part of the conversation. In addition, the rubric will likely require revision in the future.

References and Accessory Materials

The current draft of our rubric is here: http://www.unl.edu/cbrassil/DraftTeachingRubric.pdf