Hello, how are you? I'm all right trying to juggle my kids after school stuff. You know what that's like? I'm sure I think I just made sure I could share because I'm doing this on my new laptop. So I think we're ready to go. And then I will hit the record button shortly after. It looks like we need to get started started when more people are here. You recording right now from what you're recording? Oh, great. Okay, I'm not it was set to record. Okay. Okay, good. All right. Well, Karen's in way ahead of us. All right. Well, let's see, we have a few more minutes. I guess we're doing well. Okay. I guess I could technically pause the recording. The library, it stems from the work that was established by the library and the working group. And after the recommendations are put forth from the working group and the faculty ad hoc committee on Student Values of teaching was formed. You already know some of our committee members are here. But we have many members in different schools and colleges so that each can contribute a unique insight into what teaching excellence looks like in their departments. As you see, we have some current and former numbers. If you go to the website that Kevin posted, you'll be able to see who can contact in your respective school if you would like to reach out that way as well. As I said, our committee is working on the recommendations from the working group on student course feedback that I guess presented the recommendations in 2021. Their advice was to develop a common student ratings of instruction or an SRI instrument to collect student feedback that is focused more on learning opportunities and established best practices. Rather than being focused on student satisfaction with the course and instructor. They also recommended that we develop a teaching quality framework that adequately and consistently accounts for all the work that goes into excellent teaching. They recommended that departments also review their PN T and merit metric policies in light of the issues identified in the report. As well as they recommended to explore the feasibility of adopting a third party SRI tool with powerful reporting features. What we've been working to do is to establish a clear shared understanding of what constitutes teaching excellence. To bring transparency to evaluations of teaching throughout the university. Therefore, we would make much of the invisible labor of teaching visible and valued. We're also working to establish shared principles for evidence of teaching excellence, particularly expected sources of evidence. And eventually, to develop recommendations for survey questions. But not quite yet, that's coming later. What we're also working to do is to not impose complete and total consistency and uniformity across the entire university and at every level. Every department is going to have its own needs. But these recommendations are general recomendations' the university to consider. We're also working when teaching is evaluated and by whom. That is also something that the departments will decide not to change, whether some activities belong in teaching or service and not make quick, immediate changes. As we said, if it's adopted, there will likely be a multi year phase in period that could be about three years or so. We do not recommend or require that everyone do everything described in the framework because the needs of each department will be different. Finally, we will not hold detailed discussions about the student surveys. This first step must be finalized with the creation of the teaching quality framework. We will definitely have open hearings. We will request your feedback when we get to the student evaluations of teaching phase. The next steps for us are to hopefully, in the next couple of months, create a senate resolution that would approve the framework and adopt it as the university's framework for teaching excellence and how teaching is evaluated. We have solicited feedback from the university through our open hearings, through our mailings. We will at this stage, also work with the Executive Committee, the Coordinating Committee and the P and T committee to finalize their recommendations as well. We've been working with many different units. Then we hope to to facilitate the alignment of processes and policies about teaching evaluation with the framework. As I said before, adopt a suitable phasing period, perhaps three years, for changes to be made. We will charge the committee to continue working to develop and test student survey questions. Questions we hope to develop in 2024, 2025. And report back to the Senate with final recommendations for fall 2025 or so. We've created a list of defining characteristics of teaching excellence with categories on how to provide evidence for each they are first, learning goals, content and alignment, teaching methods and practices, achievement of learning, culture of belonging, reflection and iterative growth. Then for faculty with appropriate work loads, teaching excellence may also include involvement in teaching service, teaching scholarship, or teaching community and mentoring and advising students. We will go on each of these in a little bit more detail, but first, how do you provide evidence? There are three categories. There'll be self reporting, which most of us do on our annual appraisals. And when you go up for peer review or when you go up, first notion, we report on what the work you've done that will continue. What might be new for some departments is peer evaluation. This is obviously can be done through peer review, mentoring and things like that. If your department has not been working actively with peer review, there are resources like faculty affairs tall that can provide guidance on how to to provide peer support and mentoring. This might be a new step. This is actually the biggest change for most faculty that haven't yet obviously done peer evaluation. Then we will still solicit feedback from students because their perspective is important. Although we are looking to change perhaps how that is incorporated into this process. I'll let Kevin take it from here. Yes, before we talk about each of the specific characteristics, because there's a lot of detail in each of these, I think it might be good for us to pause here, see if there are any broad questions about the process or questions about the proposed three sources of evidence that Meghan just had on the previous. I don't see any hands so far, Kevin. All right, Okay friends, let's talk about each of these characteristics. I think it's important to preface this, revisit some of the things that Megan mentioned on previous slide that's talking about what we're trying to do with all this work. What we're trying to do is make explicit a lot of the things that are done in teaching and a lot of the most faculty already do in compiling teaching dossier, whether that's for promotion, whether that preparation for annual appraisal or just for their own reflection and practice. Most of what we're talking about here is not new. I hope that very little or none of this catches folks off guard. What we're trying to do, again, is trying to make this all explicit, transparent for everybody across the entire institution. Make sure that everybody is working from the same page. Make sure that everybody has access to the same information, same kind of messaging about what it is that a PNT committee, particularly the university level, is looking for. What are our common shared expectations. But again, we expect, and absolutely support departments, schools and colleges and programs putting their own spin on things to flesh things out, to decide that more emphasis should be placed here and less on there. That is, of course, the way the university policy like this is implemented. And we totally expect and support that to happen if the university adopts this as our common framework, our common definition of teaching excellence, and our common language around what is expected for faculty to be documenting and providing whenever they are asked to provide evidence of teaching excellence. So we have seven characteristics that we've identified through looking through the literature. We've also relied somewhat on other institutions that are already doing this work, but there are already several years ahead of us, particularly folks north of the border in Canada. There was a court case several years ago that really pushed a lot of them to think hard and really begin working on this ahead of most of us in the US. So we've even brought someone down from Canada several years ago. I think she may have been the last university white speaker before the pandemic because she was here like the first week in March of 2020. She talked. And then the world changed and we got away from this work, but we got back to it after Kevin, could I interrupt for one? Absolutely. We do have a question. Beth, would you like to ask your question to Kevin or would you like me to read it? Okay. Here we go. I think some faculty I've talked to have questions about how appropriate workload works for a person who wishes to engage in teaching focus, leadership, or teaching scholarship. Would that be teaching workload or research creativity workload? Not sure. This is something that your committee has discussed? We have discussed this and our intention is to not change the status quo that exists. I know that this is a decision that different individuals make depending on their workload and their career aspirations. This is a decision that different departments encourage support and allow in different ways, with people making different decisions about what falls in which bucket. Our intention is not to change that process. Our intention solely is to give common language to folks who want to put this in the teaching bucket. Folks who are supported by their departments, who have negotiated with their chair saying clearly this is my work clade and this one being evaluated on. Again, we're not trying to change that part of the process, we're just trying to make sure that it's accounted for in this work. Does that answer your question, answer the concern that you have Beth or some of your colleagues have expressed to you? It does. I think I think so. Yeah. I understand. It's a really difficult issue and a lot of people seem to bring it up that I've talked to a in my travels around campus, this might be something that needs a little bit more attention by different group or something. I just wondered if your committee had decided one way or the other on that. I appreciate your stance. I don't want to push you to do it, derail what this presentation is focusing on. Thank you. Yeah. Our decision is based primarily on the fact that we don't think that we were charged to change this. We weren't charged to engage in the work of figuring out what is teaching and what is service and make that decision for folks. I'm actually glad that we weren't asked to make that decision because as you know, it is a complex decision with people on both sides. If you were to say that there are two sides of this issue, there are many more than two sides. I'm glad that we were able to not get into that particular body of complicated. We've got our own set of complicated work to engage in. Okay? No more hands that I see, Kevin. Awesome. Okay, friends. Well, please keep the questions coming. That's what we're here for. We're here to answer questions to help you engage in things that maybe we haven't thought enough about. Maybe we're going in the direction that you think we should be going in a different direction. Or if you really like something that we're doing, make sure that that is emphasized in some way. All those things are really helpful for us. Very useful for us. We've absolutely been making changes to our documents as we've engaged over the last 22.5 years with others in one or two slides. I can give you a couple of examples, specifically of some things that we have changed in just the last couple of months. Okay, so as I said before, we got seven characteristics we've identified through our engagement in the liter, not just engagement in the literature, but also seems to make sense to us. This is something that we think makes sense for all of us. And I say all of us, I'm the only non faculty member on the whole committee. For all the faculty in the committee, they say that this makes sense for their teaching and we'll probably work for their colleagues. As we just discussed with Beth's question, the last two characteristics that we'll get to, we've set those aside knowing that those are things that are not part of the workload of every faculty member. So we don't want people to think of that they should be engaged in, say advising. If you don't have advising load, some folks are not asked to advise students. That's totally okay. So we want to make sure to set those aside. As you can see, this is the way that we're thinking about each of these characteristics. Where we have a description in this particular presentation, we've got these described as questions. You could easily change these into statements. And then we have the list of the three sources of evidence with some examples of what kinds of evidence could those people, could that group of people or that individual provide. That seems to be relevant to this particular characteristic. This characteristic care about learning goals and content. Annotated syllabus seems to be a tool that really could provide a lot of good information about what are you teaching and how are those things aligned, What are your goals and how is the contents of your course, how are the activities in your course aligned with those goals and aligned with the broader goals of your program, the university, Something like an emptated syllabus or teaching materials. Examples of those seem to be things that would work. These are meant to be examples, not exhaustive lists. So these are meant to kind of get folks thinking about it, but not to say that if it's not on here you can't provide it. That is absolutely not the intention, and I hope that is not the case. Let's take a look at our next characteristic, making teaching methods and practices. Oh gosh, there's inconsistency. Our slides, our last slide, had these questions and now they are statements thus proving true what I said that changes from questions to statements, they say the same thing. That's not important. What I want to point out here is the last statement, that's the one that's in yellow. That statement has been added, I don't even think that is. If you look on the PDF on the website, that's not on there because we added this in just the last month or so as we've been collecting further feedback. Specifically, some of this came out of some of the open hearings that we had last semester. This particular statement was really encouraged by our colleagues on the Coordinating Committee in the Faculty Senate. This was a really good suggestion that they had. We've heard it from other folks here. We're not just taking suggestions from one person saying that we need to do that. It was accorded with other things that we've heard. That is what we chose to do. And it's a great example of the feedback that we receive and are trying to incorporate. Again, if you have questions at any point about any of these characteristics, I don't think it's a good to use of our time for me to read them all to you, but happy to pause and spend time on each of them in case there's something that comes up with that particular characteristic. We do have a thankful person in the chat for noting annotated syllabi as a demonstration of teaching. Yeah, you can certainly see if you've worked with Tall in the past, I think you can see the hand of Tall or at least things that we're very supportive of throughout parts of this document. That is something that we do see and do find to be very powerful. Okay. Is you have a question? Yes, Yes, I do. Somehow my video is not working. But the question is that especially in natural sciences, the way we get around the teaching responsibilities is by calling the research that also includes teaching. Part of the research is teaching, for example, my load would be 50% and then 30, 20 Tea and service teaching be somehow included in the traditional classroom teaching and therefore evaluated. Separate from research? I'm not sure I'm quite following your question. It's a question of workload or question. It's a question of definition. Majority of research is basically teaching the students who are working on the research with you. We are teaching even if we are in the lamb. Yeah. If it's okay with you'd like to table that. Because I'm hoping that characteristics six. Yeah, characteristic six I'm hoping addresses that. Where we get into mentoring and advising, and working closely with students, we're hoping that a lot of that should be captured there. If it's not, then let us know and we can start a brainstorm and see what do we need to do. What I'm hoping it's captured there. Thanks. No more hands at the time, Kevin. Okay, Megan, Achievement of learning here. I'm the assessment guy in the teaching center. I think of this as the assessment characteristic is really talking about what do you know about students learning would be another way of thinking about this. It's not just about what students learn, but also what are you doing to elicit that? What kind of activities are you doing, are you And responding to feedback from students. Those are some of the kind things that we think about here. Okay, next, culture of belonging is this is a characteristic. We got a lot of help from many colleagues across the university on how do we construct and word the specific characteristic. We know it's very important, but we would make sure that we capture what the university's priorities, the language the university is using around this. And make sure that we are reflecting that we've got a lot of help from many different colleagues across the institution and some of the statements that are included here. This is also a good example, feeling that the third sense appropriately accessible, you'll see the word appropriate or appropriately in many of the characteristics. That is us trying to make sure that what we are proposing is going to work for everybody across the institution. We don't want to be making recommendations that people think have to be done by everybody or would be done in the same way. We're trying to communicate through words like that, that this has to be interpreted in the context of your specific situation. What is appropriate for a class of 15 students may not be appropriate if you're teaching a section of 150 students. What is appropriate in a face to face class may not be appropriate for a class that is an asynchronous taught online primarily through canvas. What's appropriate for a lab course may not be appropriate for a lecture course. We're trying to use words like that to signal to people, to reinforce that there's still interpretation that needs to be done. That is the work that we need to engage in to make sure that this is going to work for us in our particular situation. Okay, Megan, next, this characteristic is really trying to get at how engaged are you in not just documenting what you do as a teacher, but also documenting how much you change and grow, how much you reflect. This is, again, I think more than many of the others is really getting at the idea that's Meghan mentioned a little while ago about making some of the invisible work of teaching visible. We know that this is work that many people engage in. This is work that many people or all people really should be engaged in. So we want to communicate the value of this work, would also make sure that the work is recognized and rewarded. That really is something that flows through this entire document. We want to recognize the work that is done when people engage in excellent teaching. Clearly, this one has a lot more evidence from yourself. Okay. Next one, Megan. Okay, so this is another one where we are proposing a little bit of a change based on feedback that we received in just the past month, month and a half. This is also the first characteristic, that is if you were to look at all the characteristics together, not just in the way Arandom on these slides individually the full document. This is the first characteristic that comes after the statement about faculty with appropriate workload may do these other things. So this is the first of those because again, not everybody is expected to engage in this kind of work. In my experience, this is expected of a lot of CT faculty, but there are some tenure track faculty and some tenured faculty that this is not part of their department's expectations for them. We make sure that the document recognizes that. And again, is not trying to force people to do or say things that are not in alignment with their workload and their practices. But you see we added in here specifically curriculum development was the specific topic of discussion from about a month ago with coordinating committee. They wanted to make sure that that is recognized specifically in here. And that's a great addition. This is also an example of a characteristic where we couldn't think of a really good place in many cases where students provide a lot of input. In a lot of ways, this characteristic is really about capturing the things that occur outside of a classroom. Outside of our typical experiences with students. Not to say that students could not provide input. There may be some cases where students could. If you are engaged in say, a Sddle or a deeper, some education research projects with students, then you may have some students that can provide some input here. But there's going to be a lot of this work where students aren't really directly involved. You're working with your peers directly. And your peers could be here at UD, they could be nationally or internationally working on education within your discipline. Okay. And I think we got one work to this. Yeah, here we go. Okay. This is the one that I was hoping would include be able to capture some things that are not just traditional teaching for credit teaching, this gives us some of what Ma was saying. I hope there's other characteristics that also address some of the teaching that occurs outside of the traditional classroom. A lot of that we think of as mentoring and advising. But again, our hope is that the language here is flexible enough that would also accommodate other kinds of relationships that you may have with students that you may not call mentoring or advising. But they are still in a teaching relationship, just like we had in the last one. We struggle to think of how students can provide input. Obviously here, students can provide a lot of input. You see that? We've just got a lot more examples here. Whereas conversely, peers may not provide very much input because peers are often not very involved. Your faculty, peers are not very involved in your mentoring and advising. So I think that's our last characteristic, Megan, And answer. Yeah, that is our last characteristic. That is the last big prepared slide that we have. We're happy to answer questions if there are things that have come up. If there are things that you think of that you would describe as teaching that have not been captured in any of these, we would really like to hear you, Jim Morrison. You have a question? Yeah. Interesting presentation, Kevin. This is a very important topic. Just a couple of comments, just throwing these out. One is the credibility of the sources for your data. Peer reviews seems to be credible sources. These are peers, hopefully from tall and so forth that are available. Also, your self appraisal when it comes to students. The intriguing aspect, Kevin, is the most important part of this determining teaching excellence in the past. Most of the comments that come to me are, I would call the abuse of the system we have in collecting data that many students evidently don't see any importance of filling out the form at the end of the semester. And you get classes that have 25% response, 50% response. That's an interesting part that I think has to be addressed. Because what I ended up doing was having a class session where everybody in class had to fill out the form just to get everybody's view. But maybe that's not the best. I just did that as an alternative. But the credibility, the question I get, are students really capable of knowing what's effective teaching or not? Students have different motives. Students have different learning styles. Some come to every class. Some miss 34 classes, some come to very few. You have this whole range of students coming in. The intriguing aspect is it's important to have their input. It's so important to have their input. It's important to have their input. Yet to get credible input that's not manipulated by the faculty and not manipulated by the students. And also represents true what's happening in class. I just throw that out. I think that's the most important element in this whole process. The second aspect is with artificial intelligence coming into play. Now be interesting to find out how AI is going to be implemented or be used as a tool for both the faculty, the peers, and the students in terms of determining teaching excellence. This is the new kid on the block. I'm not sure what impact it's going to have on teaching excellence, but it could have influence anywhere from self assessment to peer assessment, to the student assessment. Not only what it is, but how we determine what teaching excellence is. I'm just throwing these out because I know you have a difficult challenge present method for student surveys really has to be looked at very carefully. Yes, I think that we're definitely on the same page there, Jim, about really thinking about what, what kind of information can students ethically and responsibly provide to us? What kind of questions should we be asking students? That is a typical downfall of some of the instruments that some institutions use, that some units use, that they ask students questions that students are not equipped to answer. There's a question that I see here on surveys that we use here at UD that's a question about rate the faculty members level of knowledge or how knowledgeable is the faculty or something along those lines. And I'm sorry, but I would say in my professional and personal opinion, that in most cases, the students are not qualified to answer that question. By definition, they are students, they are novices, they simply can't answer that question. So what we're going to focus on when we get to that part, and you can look at our website, that we've got drafts of the Dsmssermidserms surveys. But we're thinking a lot about two things, and we eventually are able to turn our attention full time to the surveys we'll be thinking about. One, what are the kind of questions that we can ask students? Um, and second, we're going to think a lot about what kind of questions can we ask that are aligned with the teaching quality framework, say that we've created this definition, now let's make sure they're asking questions that are aligned with that and there are questions that students are able to answer. Now part of what that means is that there are some parts of the framework that we're not going to to ask students questions about in there. Because we're going to decide that they're just not the appropriate source of evidence, they're not able to make that kind of judgment. In those cases, the evidence is really going to be coming from peers or from the individual faculty member from no self evaluation, self reflection, and feedback in there. So I think we're thinking about a lot of the same things, Jim, as far as students, as far as AI goes. Gosh man, that's a whole other discussion that we can spend a couple hours on. I can tell you that we played around a little bit in tall with some of the currently available tools and seeing how well can they be used to summarize survey responses from students. So we got some mid semester surveys from faculty with whom we've worked in the past. And I've tried dumping that into these tools. And the short answer is, the tools I don't think are there yet. I'm hoping they will be there at some point. But they're not there yet. There are some significant and concerning shortcomings to the current set of available tools, but it's changing every day. It's changing extraordinarily quickly. Kevin, we don't have another hand up. Lindsay has raised an important issue. I think the issue, how are we planning to apply this framework? Are you anticipating it being sort of laid out? And you get scores in each one of the six or seven categories and all that because her question involved overlapping criteria in the first three categories. Lindsay, if you have anything else to add, please feel free to speak up. Thank you. No, I was just a little thinking about how a department might take this criteria once you handed out. And they might say, okay, in order for someone to be promoted, for instance, we need them to have demonstrated consistent reflection in three or four categories or something along those lines. So that if you can't pull those categories apart distinctly, is that going to cause a problem? I don't think any of us can really answer what it calls a problem question. I think we could speak to the overlapping nature of many of the characteristics that is an accurate observation. I think that's absolutely true. Thinking about this in a survey context, or a measurement context, for example, we're not going to be able to create a survey instruments or even a rubric of any kind that is going to be a psychometrically perfect instruments. Because of the overlap that exists I, if we were able to spend a lot more time in resources, perhaps we could figure out a way to create characteristics or factors that are completely non overlapping. But ultimately, where I've come down on this myself, thinking a lot about really the psychometrics of the survey instruments that we will be working to develop, is that the practical reality of this process, I think imposes some restraints, is going to make a psychometrically perfect or even psychometically good. That's not really the word I'm looking for. There are tradeoffs that way. Say there are trade offs that we have to make for the practical realities of this. For example, we want to keep the survey instruments short. We don't want to have survey instruments that are so long that students we dissuaded from completing them. Because we have to remember that students have to complete these or they're asked to complete these for every class they take in a semester. So that could be 345 times there to complete the same survey instrument for these different courses. Um, and that's a trade off, we know that's a trade off. And talking about reliability, reliability of the specific questions, and then talking about the overall reliability of the entire instrument. So we know that we're making some tradeoffs. We're just trying to make sure that there are intelligent, worthwhile, tradeoffs. But I think your core observation that there's overlap is absolutely correct. I'm not sure that we could ever really get away from it just given the complicated nature of teaching and the context in which it takes place. I would have stopped at any point of Megan or if other folks in the committee who've been working on this with us for several years ever want to speak up and maybe offer alternative opinions or just different ways of phrasing what we have thought about And said the committee I would love to hear from to clarify, you're not looking for this to be transferred into a rubric to rate a teacher. I don't think so. I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of units would want to engage in that work. I think it might be come down to more holistic rubric that uses each of these as a characteristic or criterion. Perhaps with some additional things that would be added there based on the specific priorities and interests and eficies that unit historically what has concerned their discipline. But I think again, we have to also remember just the scale at which this work has to occur that imposes some practical limitations on those of us who would like to make it really rigorous. Because it is important, it should be rigorous a lot of ways, but all be workable for every faculty member. Every educator member that chairs and directors have to look at this stuff every year. For every faculty member, has to go into dossiers for PC committees at multiple levels. There's a lot of things we're trying to balance, and this is how we ended up where we omit. Okay. Other questions or comments for Kevin? I know that Best and Christine are both here and they're working on some descriptions of promotion criteria. Particularly, I think for CT faculty, I guess I would just like to ask all of you are all working together or I think there's a lot of people working on similar issues. And I know that a concern of mine is that these merit metric documents need to be revised. And how is the work of you all, and Christine, and best committee going to, you know, be reflected in those documents? So any kind of commentary you might have on how we might be able to get all these ideas together would be much appreciated. Yeah, we did talk to Beth and by we actually Meddle campus year ago, last summer. I'm sorry, this time has ceased to have meaning for me. So is yes. Yes, we've got notes. We take very good notes in the committee. I just do on the top of my head, that's why we take good notes in the committee. But we have specifically met and talked and worked with Beth and Toby as chairs. I don't know if the Saxon committee that you're thinking about, Vicki, I think it is to make sure that we are coordinating our work, not necessarily that we're trying to make sure that we're using all of the The same language. Make sure that we're going about it in ways that makes sense for the different charges that the different groups have particular. Make sure that we're not contradicting or undermining the work of the other group. Make sure we're not pulling in different directions. So we have worked with them and specifically been incorporating some of the drop materials into the framework. I could show you if you had full access of our documents and there's some of the specific things that we've looked at and talked about in the committee to make sure that we're using similar language as what that other group is doing. Fantastic. Thank you. Other questions, Comments? Kevin, is there anything in particular you would like feedback on from the group? I think the only thing that's been weighing on our mind, something that Meghan mentions in her slides, is about the making peer feedback some of information from peers, making that a formal expected part of the process for everybody. We do expect that is going to create some new work for some people and some units who may not be as organized and systematic about that as other groups. There are a lot of departments and schools at the University of Double who do a fantastic job with that. They have mentoring systems that are set up. There's feedback provided to folks, especially at crucial parts in somebody's career, so a lot of attention paid, especially for new faculty. But then also points in different points in your career. There's a lot of work that goes on, but frankly, there are some units who don't do that as well. That is not an emphasis. And so we are very much aware that for those units, if this were adopted, it would change some of how they operate. So I think we as an institution, need to be mindful of that, make sure that we are also providing appropriate support. As Megan mentioned, I think that there are some units on campus that are well poised to provide good support for units that may want to change how they go about that work. But ultimately it's work that needs to be done within the unit. If it's not being done now, then it's going to need to be done. So in some kind of absolute sense, it would be creating more work, new work for those folks. You could argue that's work they should have been engaging in this whole time. I think that's true. But regardless from their perspective, which is valid, it's work that wasn't being done. It's not work that has to be done. So how do you divide up the hours and the day, the weeks and days of the months and years to accommodate for this maybe unexpected new requirements? A new request, we're mindful of that. I think that's probably the biggest single change that would come about through adopting the framework or those particular units. Beyond the classroom observation, you're looking for a more robust peer review process or peer feedback process on teaching or for those who don't already engage in something like that. Yes. But again, there some folks who are already doing a great job and there's quite a few people for whom adopting the framework would change very little. Especially as you're putting together your dossier. Almost everything we've written into the framework is the same advice that you get if you attend any of the spring panels that are put on by faculty affairs and put on by tall or different groups. You go by advance, put on some panels throughout the year. And a lot of the same advice that you get, again, we're trying to make sure that this is being transparent and available to everybody, not just those who know to go to that panel. We are available to go that you happen to be in a unit where they're getting good mentorship. I want to make sure this is available for everybody. What in the rest of you think do you all think you'd be in a position to be able to provide your feedback if requested? Christine, Christine is complimenting you, you're getting hearts and claps. So for all your good work, what do the rest of you all think about? The possibility of being able to access the peer feedback or get peer feedback to put with your dossiers. Does that worry anyone else? Okay, well maybe all worry list now, Kevin. Okay, maybe we do have some good mentorship starting. All right. Other questions? Other comments? Anybody else? Oh Jim, you've raised your hand again. Yeah, yeah, this is an intriguing topic and I guess Kevin and your committee, according to what I've been reading about. Universities and their role. This comes back, Kevin, to the AI question. The feeling is that in the future our students, we really need a new set of core skills that haven't been emphasized in the past. Because the emphasis really has been on technology, the technical skills, that's what gets the job. And that was what the market wanted students graduating from universities that had command of the technical skills like software engineering and coding and so forth. However, AI evidently is going to be doing what software engineers have been doing all along. They're going to take over the coding jobs. I, there's going to be a shake up I guess, in the employment to get back to the university and teaching excellence. The argument was that we should, in our classes, having faculty focus on what they call the seven key core skills that our graduates are going to need. For example, one is innovation, it's a skill, how do you innovate? Two is how do you build relationships in diverse work groups, right? That's a skill. How do you work with people from different parts of the world and get things done? Three of course, conflict management, there's seven skills proposal is that when you're evaluating teaching, especially trying to get student feedback that's credible, you ask them specifically, how did you grow? How did the teacher help you handle conflict? How did the teacher help you be innovative? How did the teacher help you build relationships? How did the teacher help you take leadership over project that becomes the basis of teaching excellence, Where no matter what your field is, whether it's the arts, film or anything, you still can teach the same thing. And the same in science, in technology, or in business. And Stephanie is in business, you can do the same thing in business no matter what your area is. That becomes the core of teaching effectiveness. Because if you're going to sell a teaching, we should be teaching what the students need. The trouble is it's hard to be specific in terms of what is that need. I just went on chat CBT just myself, to ask what is teaching excellence? How do you measure it? And you get some interesting responses, right? It all comes down to how students use AI tools to achieve their objective. I just want to throw that out when we're trying to determine the metrics, I guess for teaching excellence. If we could come up with maybe something that reflects responsibility for every faculty no matter what subject you're teaching, right? That you are focusing on these key skills. And it makes it simple because everybody knows, you know, conflict management, right? I mean, it's there. And the other aspect was that the feeling was, Kevin, that the teachers, most of our teachers, our faculty at the University of Delaware and elsewhere, are really not trained in teaching. They're trained in research. They're trained in getting relaying research to other people right. And getting them to do research because of the diversity of the classroom and what's going on that the teachers are going to really need exceptional help, guidance to do this, to achieve teaching excellence. Right. It's going to be hard for them to do it on their own. Like what you just said Kevin AI is that's just one of those tools, right? We don't really know right now how to approach it, but I'm not capable, I know of AI and I know it has potential and I see some of the outcomes, but I'm not really an expert enough to really take advantage of it and everything I do. I'm just throwing that out, that this may be a moment that you may want to consider reinventing. I'm teaching excellence from the viewpoint of a core. What's that teaching core that we can excel in in teaching? I'm just throwing that out. Yeah, Jim part, a lot of what you're talking about makes me think. I spent many years on the Senate's General Education Committee. It really sounds like this may be a moment in time when the university may want to revisit general education. What are our expectations and requirements for all undergraduate students? Or you can even open it up to all students or talk differently about grad students and undergraduate students. It sounds like that this might be a moment in time when the university really needs to engage in that kind of thinking. Lindsay, let's see that you've got your hand up friend Kevin. Just going back to the peer feedback, I was wondering if you could help me understand how you guys are defining peer feedback to maybe try to get an idea of why some groups may not be willing to engage in that. Are we defining peer feedback is only coming from, say, faculty that are a level above in terms of promotion? Or are we defining it as someone in your field or are you guys choosing to use it? I don't think that here. I'm going to paste in chats, the definition that we have in the framework. I note that it is intentionally broad because again, we're thinking about what's going to work for everybody at the university. And every discipline that we offer will offer in the near future. And make sure that things are broad enough to encompass all of that. And also broad enough to provide the necessary flexibility for units. We're certainly not thinking about things like, oh, you have to be one rank above somebody, provide them feedback. If a particular unit wants to do something like that, I suppose they could. That certainly does not preclude that, but it's not something that we are recommending to be a university wide standard. So I hope that answer is part of your question. I know it's satisfactory for me to say that it's not terribly well defined, but I hope that you can have some sympathy for the challenges of writing university level policy to make sure that things work for everybody. We're also not saying that this needs to be just course evaluations. Just course observations that are certainly valuable, important. A lot of people find it to be very helpful. But I don't, and I think the committee is saying that that is the only thing that's valid or that is the thing that everybody should do. There are other forms of peer feedback that are also equally valid, equally important. Again, we will be supportive of the idea without putting straight jackets on anybody and saying, this is the way you have to go about it. I think it's more important for us to say that you need to go about it in a way that makes sense and is actually producing useful information and results for you and your colleagues. And then make sure that you talk about that. Whenever you are talking to the university and say a dossier, does that help Or is that unsatisfying mismatch? That's definitely helpful. I was just wondering, coming from I actually was part of the committee that wrote our evaluation and promotion documents at my former university. And I know that one of the things that happened with peer feedback was, for instance, if he had massive turnover and so he didn't have as many assistants versus associates. It caused massive workload issues. If you were requiring that step above also in terms of requiring it from a chair, for instance, that caused problems. And so that's why I should clarify that in terms of figuring that out. Yeah, Yeah, that totally makes sense to me. And I'm also obligated as a tall staff member to say that I know the expectation is not that everybody would come to stall and ask for a class observation. We would love to do that for you, but you just don't employ nearly enough of us to actually do that kind of work. So we're happy to help. Happy in particular, to help set up good processes for the faculty in a unit to help you figure out what is a good way to go about it. Help you establish a template or multiple templates you can use actually provide the feedback, sustainable processes for you and when there is a case where somebody really needs help when there's something going on and there of course, we're happy to step in and provide help in those situations there. We just can't do that for everybody all the time. Well, sorry everyone. I had a little power outage, but I'm back. Other questions for Kevin? Questions or comments or for Megan or for anyone else on the committee? All right. I'm not seeing anything further. Any more input you all would like Kevin in particular? No, this has been great. Very appreciative. All right. Well, we thank everyone so much for taking your time to come and we certainly thank the committee for their tireless labors. There's nothing more difficult than defining good teaching. I don't think so. Yes. Claps all around. Thanks, Diane. Okay. All right. Well, thank you all for coming. And we will keep you all very much apprised of what's going on as this particular framework moves through the Senate processes. Thank you. Oh, hey Kevin and Megan, can you hang on a quick sec? I have a question for you. Sure. As long as you remember to stop the recording, Okay? Yes, yes, yes, yes. Okay. Let's
Faculty Senate Open Hearing - TQF
From Karen Holden February 22, 2024
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Zoom Recording ID: 98452631161
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Meeting Time: 2024-02-22 07:49:41pmGMT
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