2(b). Teaching Effectiveness

2.8 (promoting innovation, pedagogy), 2.9 (links scholarship, teaching), 3.2 (faculty ensure academic quality) , 3.4 (faculty development), 4.6 (evaluation for improvement), Questions 6 (disseminating innovation) under Teaching and Learning (2), 1 (creative activity) under Scholarship and Creative Activity (2), and 2 (part-time faculty support) under Faculty and Staff (3)

Introduction

Just as students require support to ensure maximum achievement of educational objectives, those who are delivering instruction require an institutional support structure that enables and encourages them to teach with excellence and effectiveness. An ongoing challenge for top-tier research universities is to elevate undergraduate teaching to an equal level with graduate education and research. Berkeley is no exception. A 1991 survey conducted by the Office of Educational Development (OED) indicated that the perception that the institutional culture favored research over teaching was well-entrenched among the 700 faculty members, department chairs, and deans responding. However, it also suggested that perceptions about how highly teaching is valued at the campus level may not always correspond with the actual value held by members of the Berkeley community. The respondents reported that they valued teaching highly; however, they misjudged how their colleagues viewed the importance of teaching, contributing to an overall perception of a culture that doesn't value teaching.

The campus historically has faced a variety of problems in strengthening the emphasis on teaching: (a) the lack of weight and importance for teaching as opposed to research in faculty career advancement; (b) the lack of campus recognition for the importance of effective teaching; and (c) a lack of structures that support teaching as an important process at the campus level, at the departmental level, and at the level of the individual instructor. To begin to address some of these issues at the institutional level, we have put into place a series of changes that include: (1) reorganizing to support teaching excellence better; (2) recognizing excellence in teaching and educational efforts; (3) working to improve the evaluation of teaching; (4) developing new resources related to teaching and learning; and (5) fostering a culture of on-going instructional improvement and self-reflection.

Reorganizing to Support Teaching Excellence

1.3 (leadership system for high performance), 3.8 (structures support decision-making), Question 7 (leadership fosters teaching) under Teaching and Learning (2), 2 (organization aligned with objectives) under Support for Student Learning (2), and 1 (organization aligned with purposes) under Organizational Structures and Decision-Making Processes (3)

As part of the re-organization of senior administration, the reporting line of the Office of Educational Development (OED), the central campus unit charged with supporting faculty development, moved from the Vice Chancellor for Undergraduate Affairs (VC-UA) to the newly created Vice Provost for Undergraduate Education (VP-UE). Historically, the OED was the only faculty development unit within a student services control unit, and it suffered a disproportionately large 32% budget cut between 1989-90 and 1996-97, as part of general cuts the campus experienced during that period. By bringing OED over to the Executive Vice Chancellor and Provost's control unit, the Chancellor has better aligned the unit's academic mission with the overall organizational structure of the University.

The creation of the Division of Undergraduate Education has involved a reorganization and change of reporting lines for other key campus units charged with supporting and enhancing the quality of undergraduate instruction and learning. Educational Technology Services (ETS) provides a range of technology support services and sponsors the Summer Faculty Technology Program, a week-long intensive program for about 25 faculty. The Center for the Teaching and Study of American Cultures sponsors the American Cultures Summer Institute, providing faculty with peer input in the development of new courses that meet the campus's American Cultures requirement. We hope that these changes in reporting lines will result in strengthening of the campus's efforts to enhance undergraduate instruction and learning.

The reorganization has created new opportunities for collaboration. The Library has recently received a pilot grant from the Mellon Foundation jointly with the Division of Undergraduate Education and the L&S Undergraduate Division to establish a Summer Institute for the Teaching of Undergraduate Research Competencies. In addition to encouraging experimentation with curricula and teaching tools, the project's goal is to create long-term partnerships between faculty, faculty development specialists, librarians, instructional technology specialists, and other campus academic support staff. Staff from units on campus concerned with development for faculty and other instructors have formed a Council of Academic Partners to improve coordination and better publicize their services. The VP-UE has also established a Council of Undergraduate Deans, a parallel group to the long-standing Council of Deans, which includes the senior administrator in charge of undergraduate programs in each of the five undergraduate colleges and those professional schools with an undergraduate major. This group advises the EVCP undergraduate education policies that cut across the colleges and professional schools, including matters related to promoting a culture of excellence in teaching and learning.

The Chancellor's re-organization has also created closer ties between the administration and the Academic Senate to promote on-going inquiry into the processes of teaching and learning. The VP-UE has established regular communication with several key Academic Senate committees, among them the Committee on Teaching (COT). This has led to a major proposed revision of the bio-bibliography, a record of accomplishments submitted annually by faculty and used in merit, promotion, and tenure review, to include information about contributions to undergraduate teaching. For example, in addition to documenting master's theses and doctoral dissertations supervised, faculty will now be asked to detail contributions to supervision of honors theses and other undergraduate research mentoring, activities that historically have not been recognized. Once implemented, these changes have the potential to affect the way contributions to undergraduate education are valued in merit, promotion, and tenure cases.

Recognizing Excellence in Teaching and Educational Efforts

Public recognition is important to fostering a campus culture that supports excellence in teaching. Awards for teaching excellence can be controversial, but they also make visible that which too often takes place behind closed classroom doors. The OED administers three campus teaching awards that are overseen by COT.

The Distinguished Teaching Award (DTA) was initiated to encourage and reward excellence in teaching. Two hundred seven faculty members have received the award since its inception in 1959.

The Educational Initiatives Award is presented annually to a department, unit, or group of faculty in recognition of collaborative excellence leading to the creation of an outstanding program or initiative that has had a sustained impact upon undergraduate education and can serve as a workable model for others on campus.

Presidential Chair for Undergraduate Education. Since 1982, the Office of the President has provided the Berkeley campus with up to $30,000 per year for a faculty member or group of faculty to undertake new initiatives in Undergraduate Education. The Presidential Chair has historically been a successful way for the campus to incubate new and innovative programs for the benefit of undergraduates.

While the awards described above are of long-standing duration, there are several recent indications of renewed institutional support for teaching. This year, the Chancellor increased the cash value of the Distinguished Teaching Award from $3,000 to $10,000. He also doubled the cash value for the Educational Initiatives Award from $10,000 to $20,000. While the financial incentive attached to the award is only a small part of its prestige, the Chancellor recognized that these increases have significant symbolic meaning in demonstrating the level of worth the campus places upon excellence in undergraduate education. In addition to these central awards for outstanding teaching, departments also recognize teaching excellence, such as the Donald Sterling Noyce Prize for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching in the College of Chemistry, and the Earl F. Cheit Awards for Excellence in Teaching in the Haas School of Business.

Efforts to recognize outstanding faculty contributions to teaching are critical, but it is equally important to recognize and support the efforts of other instructors on campus who contribute to the undergraduate teaching enterprise. The Graduate Division plays an important role in enhancing the quality of undergraduate instruction through the Graduate Student Instructor Teaching and Resource Center. The Center recognizes excellence in the teaching done by GSIs and in faculty mentorship of GSIs through three annual programs: the Outstanding GSI Award Program, the Teaching Effectiveness Award Program, and the Faculty Award for Outstanding Mentorship of GSIs. Faculty oversight for the Center's work is provided by the GSI Faculty Advisory Group, a sub-committee of the Academic Senate's Graduate Council.

In Spring 2001, the Deans of Letters & Science also signaled a new level of campus commitment to undergraduate teaching through the establishment of the Award for Distinguished Mentoring of Undergraduates. The cash awards are given to five faculty members in each of the College's five divisions at a public award ceremony each Spring. The College of Letters & Science serves three-quarters of the undergraduate student body, and we hope that the creation of these awards will encourage other colleges and departments to emulate them.

Improving the Evaluation of Teaching

The campus has long publicly endorsed the notion that excellence in teaching and excellence in research go hand in hand. Since 1987, the campus has used the "Policy for the Evaluation of Teaching (for Advancement and Promotion)" and "Recommendations for Administering and Analyzing Student Course Evaluations," as a standard guide to unit heads on the use of the assessment of teaching in advancement and promotion (COT recommendations).

The 1991 Report of the University-wide Task Force on Faculty Rewards, known as the Pister Report (full report available from Cynthia Schrager, schrager@uclink.berkeley.edu), made a number of far-reaching recommendations to ensure that the faculty reward structure for the appointment and promotion of faculty in the professoriate is consistent with the mission of the University. In response to this report, the Academic Personnel Manual section on teaching was amended to require more than one kind of evidence of teaching effectiveness in faculty personnel cases. The University's reward structure is now sufficiently flexible to award proper recognition for excellence in teaching, mentoring, and scholarly contributions such as curricular innovation. However, changing the reward structure does not change the culture of the faculty. At Berkeley, as at many other highly-ranked research universities, getting members of the faculty to place as much emphasis on teaching as they do on research and scholarship requires constant effort and demonstration that teaching is truly valued and will be rewarded, especially by the campus academic personnel committee in the review of merit and promotion recommendations.

More recently, the campus has taken steps toward developing more effective campus-wide assessment mechanisms for the evaluation of teaching. The committee on Budget and Interdepartmental Relations (BIR), which oversees all tenure, merit, and promotion cases, has requested that a uniform numerical scale be included on all departmental teaching evaluation forms (Bogy letter, 2002; Kern letter, 2002). While this recommendation has existed on the campus since 1975, it is not uniformly implemented. By enforcing this recommendation more consistently, the campus will be in a better position to make comparative evaluations across teaching units. COT has endorsed this recommendation and reaffirmed the importance of incorporating multiple measures of teaching effectiveness in promotion and advancement cases, including the opportunity for students to comment narratively on instructors' performance.

Despite the measures described above, the campus culture remains one of de-centralization in the assessment of teaching. There is no uniform teaching evaluation, nor is there a central office responsible for teaching assessment. Moreover, there is a lack of parity in the kinds of evidence that are considered in evaluating excellence in research as compared with excellence in teaching in the tenure and merit review process. Excellence in research is based on multiple indicators: (a) examples of the candidates' own work; (b) evidence of value provided to others; (c) expert evaluation of work; and (d) self-evaluation. In contrast, excellence in teaching is judged almost exclusively on student course evaluations. Although course evaluations provide helpful evidence of students' judgments of value provided, a more rigorous evaluation of teaching would be based on additional evidence that parallels the kinds of evidence submitted for research and scholarship.

With the implementation of a new Human Resources Management System, the revised faculty bio-bibliography forms will be available to BIR and other Senate committees to view on the web. In addition to numerical data, these key committees will be able to look at faculty roles in mentoring, supervising honors theses and capstone experiences, and developing new curricula and teaching tools. In the area of educational technology, Senate and campus committees are developing proposals for incentives to develop new curricula and teaching tools. The confluence of these developments creates an opening for further discussion and exploration of how the Berkeley campus rewards and recognizes excellence in teaching.

Developing New Resources Related to Teaching and Learning

Since the last WASC accreditation, the campus has developed a number of new teaching and learning resources.

Table 2 (b).i: Teaching Resources and Descriptions

Fostering a Culture of On-going Instructional Improvement and Self-Reflection

The campus has several grant programs available to improve teaching and learning, administered by units such as OED, the Service Learning Research and Development Center, and the GSI Teaching and Resource Center. In addition, OED provides a range of individual, confidential consultation services to faculty regarding teaching improvement, including syllabi development, classroom observation, videotaping and feedback, and analysis of course evaluations. The GSI Teaching and Resource Center offers a full spectrum of programs that prepare GSIs for teaching: orientations, pedagogical workshops, classroom observations or videotaping with feedback, and workshops and seminars for faculty on how to provide structured pedagogical mentorship to GSIs.

Beyond the formative evaluation procedures faculty may use in their courses to help track successes as well as lapses, the first set of eight indicators in QUEAP documents the campus commitment "To Strive for and Maintain Excellence in Teaching." Other assessment tools for on-going inquiry into the processes of teaching and learning include: the annual undergraduate education survey sent to all department chairs and undergraduate program directors; and OSR's undergraduate student surveys, including the system-wide UCUES survey in conjunction with SERU-21, Departmental Exit Surveys of Graduating Seniors, and the newly inaugurated Career Destination Surveys conducted by the Career Center. Despite these efforts, undergraduate instruction has not heretofore received the same level of consistent and coordinated assessment as graduate instruction. The planned changes to our program review process will be an important mechanism for addressing these critical issues and fostering a culture of instructional self-improvement campus-wide.

Despite the on-going efforts described above, two recent controversies concerning students engaged in teaching have also pointed to the need to do more to ensure consistently high standards in the delivery of instruction. During Spring 2002, media stories re-focused campus attention on a lack of adequate oversight of student-initiated group study (DE-Cal) courses, coordinated by undergraduates under sponsorship of a faculty member, and reading and composition courses taught by GSIs in English and other departments. These controversies have pointed to the need for faculty to engage not only in pedagogical self-improvement, but also to assume more responsibility for pedagogical mentorship. The campus is now moving to put in place appropriate oversight mechanisms (Special Studies Courses Task Force Report; Graduate Student Instructor Training and Mentoring Task Force Charge Letter).

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Relevant WASC Standard


Standard 2
Achieving Educational Objectives Through Core Functions

• Teaching and Learning
• Scholarship and Creative Activity
• Support for Student Learning

The institution achieves its institutional purposes and attains its educational objectives through the core functions of teaching and learning, scholarship and creative activity, and support for student learning. It demonstrates that these core functions are performed effectively and that they support one another in the institution’s efforts to attain educational effectiveness.