Evaluating, Improving, and Judging Faculty Performance in Two-Year Colleges.

Evaluating, Improving, and Judging Faculty Performance in Two-Year Colleges by Richard I. Miller, Charles Finley, and Candace Shedd Vancko. Bergin & Gravey, Westport, Connecticut. 2000, 181 pages, $55.00 Hardback, ISBN 0-89789-692-0.

It is quite gratifying to find a book devoted specifically to the evaluation and improvement of community college teaching. Although an enormous body of literature on faculty evaluation and development exists and much of it is relevant to community colleges, the authors correctly note that "the literature pertaining to research and teaching evaluation [relies] almost exclusively upon data from four-year colleges" (p. ix). Despite the applicability of much of this research, the diverse mission of the comprehensive community college includes institutional dynamics not found in four-year institutions. Community colleges pride themselves on being first and foremost teaching institutions. Moreover, the comprehensiveness of their mission coupled with their open-door philosophy means that their diverse offerings include transfer, career, and developmental curricula. It may be unreasonable to apply standards generated from studies of four-year college faculty to the evaluation and professional development of community college faculty--especially those teaching in developmental or career programs.

Miller, Finely, and Vancko have attempted to provide readers with a comprehensive and "practical book--one that combines research and practice--that also provides useful ideas and approaches whether they be conceptual frameworks, research theories, and practices, or how-to-do-it approaches to improving teaching and learning" (p. ix). In this they have succeeded. Miller, Finely, and Vancko provide throughout the book and in nine appendices several forms, checklists, how-to-do outlines, and procedures, all potentially useful for community college leaders and faculty interested in developing a comprehensive yet practical faculty evaluation and development plan.

The chapters in Miller, Finely, and Vancko's book take us through a logical sequence for conceptualizing, developing, and implementing faculty evaluation and development programs for community colleges. They begin by suggesting how to assess the institutional climate for evaluation and development, move to a discussion of how to define good teaching and use this definition to develop a faculty evaluation system, describe how to use the data from faculty evaluation to assist faculty to improve, and conclude with a chapter on how to make faculty personnel decisions.

Chapter 1, dealing with assessing the climate, makes several critical points. First, the authors state that

   While every college has staff evaluation, an evaluation system is much less
   common. Most often a system is not a system, but a series of parts that are
   loosely integrated. A `system' can be defined as a number of components,
   ... that are linked together synergistically so the sum is greater than the
   parts. (p 13)

The authors follow this definition with the promise that the components of a system will be discussed in later chapters. Although the components are discussed, it is unfortunate that the authors do not offer any suggestions on how we might integrate these components into a system. Perhaps this shortcoming is a tacit agreement with the quote from Ratcliff on page 26 stating that there is no empirical proof that systematic faculty evaluation contributes to superior teaching.

The titles of Chapters 2 and 3, "Focus on Teaching" and "Improving Part-Time Teaching," are somewhat misleading. Although Chapter 2 does emphasize the need for a community college to define good teaching in a way that acknowledges the differences between academic disciplines, the chapter is more focused on the principles and components of a faculty evaluation system. A strength of this chapter is the authors' acknowledgment that community colleges should do more to encourage faculty to engage in scholarly activities. A weakness is that other than citing the work done at Miami-Dade Community College, Miller, Finely, and Vancko provide little insight into how we might go about defining good teaching.

In Chapter 3, after a brief discussion of adjunct faculty evaluation, the authors go on to discuss faculty mentoring each other and faculty advising students. The section on mentoring is noteworthy for the list of considerations (first offered by St. Clair in 1994) for developing a mentoring program. It is also refreshing to see Miller, Finely, and Vancko acknowledge that student advisement is a critical component to teaching. The authors do return to the issue of managing adjuncts at the end of the chapter by repeating Gappa and Leslie's (1993) 43 recommendations for managing part-time faculty. Considering the increasing reliance of community colleges on adjunct faculty, I was somewhat disappointed with the chapter's truncated discussion of evaluating and developing adjunct faculty.

The heart of the book is Chapters 5, 6, and 7, which deal with the design and implementation of faculty evaluation and faculty development systems. Quoting a dissertation by Zitlow (1988), the authors list the seven most important components of a faculty evaluation (p. 46):

   Classroom teaching
   Chair evaluation
   College service, including committees
   Dean evaluation
   Personal attributes (cooperation, attitude)
   Professional preparation (degrees, licenses)
   Student academic advising

Miller, Finely, and Vancko do an admirable job of discussing the necessary conditions for each component to be effective. They provide the reader with several forms and how-to checklists that they have culled from the literature. The sections on student evaluations and classroom observation by chairs or peers could be quite useful to administrators trying to persuade skeptical faculty of their value.

In Chapter 5, "Focus on Improving," Miller, Finely, and Vancko make the following point: Despite the fact that most community college faculty could benefit from participation in faculty development activities, only the better teachers, for the most part, participate in voluntary programs. Unfortunately, the literature the authors cite is often quite dated and most of the research was completed at four-year institutions. In the next chapter, "Designing and Implementing Professional Improvement Systems," the authors do offer a conceptual framework for evaluating and improving teaching. Nevertheless, despite the inclusion of "implementing" in the title, the chapter provides no advice on how individual community colleges might adapt the model to their needs.

Chapter 7 provides the reader with many of the philosophical assumptions that Miller, Finely, and Vancko believe should support any faculty evaluation and development system. The chapter also includes a rationale for two annual performance reviews--one summative and one formative. The title of the final chapter, "Moving into the Twenty-First Century," suggests the authors will try to peer into the future. The chapter contents, however, seem more related to issues that have been prominent and extensively debated in the last 25 years of the twentieth-century rather than the future. They discuss post-tenure review, evaluation of distance learning courses, and student accountability for their own learning. All these issues have been extensively researched and debated for some time. Although these debates are likely to continue well into the twenty-first century, the chapter offers few new insights. The authors tend to concentrate on the potential for increased cheating by students and the need to compensate faculty for the extra work involved in distance learning.

Evaluating, Improving, and Judging Faculty Performance in Two-Year Colleges contains some useful how-to-do lists, forms, and advice for community administrators and faculty interested in developing and implementing faculty evaluation and development systems. I am hard-pressed, however, to recommend this work. It tends not to live up to its promise to provide a system for faculty evaluation; instead it offers a discussion of the components of such a system. Moreover, most of the how-to advice, forms, and lists of considerations for implementing the various components offered in this work are from the existing literature. Furthermore, a glance at the references reveals that much of the cited literature is more than 10 years old. Considering that faculty evaluation is one of the most researched issues in higher education, this is surprising. Those interested in one or the other of the components might find it more valuable to read the original literature and perhaps some additional recent sources.

John P. Murray is an associate professor in the Department of Higher Education at Texas Tech University in Lubbock, Texas. [e-mail]