Tenure and promotion and the scholarship of teaching: two conversations or one?

Abstract

Tenure and Promotion processes in colleges and universities balance the traditional importance of teaching, research, and service. The expectations and value of each are important to faculty. The purpose of this paper was to begin or continue a discussion in the College of Education at the University of Wyoming about our own tenure and promotion process and the related expectations for faculty. The information gained from interviewing and surveying members of our tenure and promotion committee produced interesting but fairly traditional results. Most agreed teaching, research, and service are all evaluated in some way but research productions are expected to be publications. A key question in this paper focused on tenure and promotion and the relationship between the scholarship of teaching and traditional expectations of research.

Introduction

The conversation about tenure and promotion and the related expectations happens on most campuses of higher education in the United States. The conversations usually lead to the clarity of the expectations for tenure and promotion decisions. What are the requirements? What will be credited toward teaching, research, and service? Will one of the three traditional areas considered for tenure and promotion be weighted more heavily than the others? What about the scholarship of teaching? Does it contribute in any way?

The profile of the College of Education at the University of Wyoming is like many in the country; faculty positions and resources are scarce with quality people working hard to deliver programs for preservice students, graduate students, practicing teachers, and others. It was no surprise that the quality of the faculty was identified as an overall strength by the National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education (NCATE) during their Standards 2000 review of the college (Haverson, 2000). In addition to the demands of teaching, research and service, faculty perform all the other invisible functions of the job such as assisting students, providing leadership for the college, working with public school colleagues, and traveling to supervise student teachers or interns. In 2000-2001, the College of Education was also assisted by 30 graduate teaching assistants, 15 part-time instructors (some are public school teachers on leave), and 20 staff members who complement and support the work of the faculty.

Tenure and Promotion

Most higher education faculty across the country are evaluated for their work in the traditional areas of teaching, research, and service. The usual expectation is for faculty to make contributions to the university in all three areas, dependent upon the type of appointment, responsibility, and professional expertise. However, research has traditionally been given the greatest weight or influence in the tenure and promotion process followed closely (or not so closely, depending on the institution) by teaching (Cuban, 2000). Cuban explains that even though teaching is considered extremely important (especially when concerns exist) and that the faculty job description percent for research is often times smaller than teaching, research (or publication) activities still have more influence on tenure and promotion decisions. Community and professional service is often given little attention and appreciation, but faculty tend to be involved (maybe by necessity) in many service roles. The paradigm of publications as the definition for research appears to be strong and institutionalized and in fact, some institutions are requiring publication sooner in the tenure track. Wilson (2001), in the Chronicle of Higher Education stated, "The bar for tenure is rising at major research universities and teaching institutions alike. Most departments demand more published research--either articles or books, or both. Some institutions even accelerate the whole procedure, sizing up young scholars years before tenure time and showing them the door if it looks as if they won't measure up" (p. 1).

The tenure and promotion process is of great importance to faculty, but also of great importance to the members of the tenure and promotion committee who have the responsibility to make tenure and promotion decisions. Consequently, the authors interviewed and surveyed the 2000-2001 members of the College of Education Tenure and Promotion Committee to elicit information about our tenure and promotion process. Also, the information learned about the tenure and promotion process should help form guiding questions which may include: Are our tenure and promotion expectations criteria sufficiently clear? Are we entrenched in research defined as publications only? Should our tenure and promotion process be further clarified related to expectations in the teaching, research, and service areas? Is there any research to support the relationship between research activities and a scholarly ability? Should we expect department, college, and university expectations to align? How should service contribute to the scholarship of teaching?

Surveys and Interviews

The members of the 2000-01 College of Education Tenure and Promotion Committee represented each of the seven departments in the college. Each member of the committee had a rank of at least Associate Professor and had been a faculty member at UW for at least nine years. There were four women and three men. Each of the committee members either completed the survey in writing or in a face-to-face interview. After the responses were recorded, the respondents were asked to read them for accuracy and additional comments. In response to the question "What criteria do you follow to personally judge faculty quality and/or merit in teaching, research, and service?", the seven committee members were generally consistent with each other and with University guidelines in the following ways:

1. Effective teaching is based on student ratings and on comments and recommendations by the department head. More emphasis is given to consistency of student comments than the numerical ratings. Most faculty members report that 60 to 65% of their job is teaching. Reviews of research conducted since about 1980 support the validity of student ratings of instruction (Greenwald, 1997). According to Cohen (1981), when the criterion of effective teaching is student learning, students are well equipped to rate their teachers. Others (Feldman, 1988; Hativa, 1996; Murray, Rushton, & Paunonen, 1990) reported that student ratings were stable over time and consistent with ratings of others (peers, self-evaluations).

2. Research is evaluated by examining the number of publications and presentations. They considered the reputation of the journal in which the article was published and the level of organization in which presentations were given (national, regional, local). The job description was used to determine the number of publications and presentations expected. For most faculty (20 to 25% of the job), the committee members looked for one presentation and one publication every other year. Heinemann (1999) discussed the balance between Boyer's scholarship functions of research discovery, integration, service application, and teaching in institutions of higher education. He suggests that, while each institution should include all four components of scholarship, institutions should reflect on their purpose and focus on the type of scholarship that serves that purpose.

3. Service is expected at the college, university, state, and national levels. For most faculty members, service is identified as 5 to 10% of the job. Researchers suggest that the traditional notions of teaching, research, and service should be revisited. They consider the changing roles of faculty and recommend a stronger community service connection (Feingold, R. S., Zlotkowski, E., Fiorentino, L-H., Collier, C. S., Lawson, H. A., & Almond, L., 1997; Olsen, B., 1997). In fact, according to Magner (1997), the Carnegie Foundation suggests that service and teaching be evaluated similarly to research in order to be considered more important in the promotion process.

The committee members elaborated about these three areas. As they discussed them, their definitions of teaching, research, and service began to emerge. They also expressed some concerns in regard to how faculty members in the college do their work and get credit for the work that they do.

The committee members who explained their definitions of teaching, research, and service reported that they judge their colleagues in a variety of ways. With regard to teaching, two issues arose among the respondents. Several committee members stated that teaching should be looked at differently for undergraduate and graduate level courses. One committee member explained this further: the discrepancy in class sizes might lead to larger classes (undergraduate) eliciting less positive evaluations than smaller classes (graduate). Their views are supported in the literature: according to Feldman (1984), students in large classes generally tend to rate teachers lower than students in small classes. Also, Marsh and Bailey (1993) found that graduate level courses were rated higher by students than undergraduate level courses. The second issue that was mentioned by several of the interviewees was the basis for good teaching: some thought that student ratings and comments were most important, others looked for peer and department head evaluations, and several mentioned the importance of instructor self-ratings as a factor to consider. Braskamp and Ory (1994) offered the opinion that "most faculty view student ratings as one important indicator of teaching ability" (p. 101), but certainly not the only indicator.

When the respondents discussed criteria for research, two tensions were identified. The first, and seemingly more important, was that departmental expectations and college-wide or university-wide are not always in agreement. Secondly, several of the committee members based the required number of presentations and publications on the percent of research identified in the job description, while other committee members gave more credence to the quality of the journal (refereed or not, for example) or the nature of the conference (local, regional, national, international).

In the area of service, the committee members identified several concerns. Several respondents said that service is under-valued and that many faculty members provide much more service than 5% (the most common percent reported in the job description). Other respondents described that they looked for service to the department, college, university, community, region, state, and even at a national level. On one hand, the committee members expressed concern about the inordinate service expectation compared to other job expectations. On the other hand, they seemed to place great value on service, particularly to Wyoming schools.

Based on the responses to the questionnaire, the tenure and promotion committee members seem to have very traditional expectations of the faculty member's work in the college. They each seemed to look for somewhat different types of evidence to show effective teaching, scholarly research, and quality service. However, as a group, their beliefs matched very well to the traditional notions of teaching, research, and service described in the University of Wyoming Regulations.

The Scholarship of Teaching

One way to begin this conversation could be to ask, "What is your definition of the scholarship of teaching and what does it mean to you?" Answers would probably differ, but would also have common elements related to the scholarship of teaching: these are the conversations and activities we have about teaching and learning. One might also think that while the scholarship of teaching is important (we all want to improve our teaching), it should not qualify as "real" research. The next section includes how others define the scholarship of teaching, along with the following guiding questions to assist the conversation about the scholarship of teaching and any influences it may have on our tenure and promotion process.

* Does the scholarship of teaching deserve tenure and promotion credit?

* Does the scholarship of teaching effort need to result in publication?

* Is there a relationship between the scholarship of teaching and our tenure and promotion expectations?

* Would the scholarship of teaching productivity be respected at the university level?

* Should we explore scholarship of service?

Scholarship of Teaching Definitions

Most conversations about the scholarship of teaching begin with Boyer's work in 1990. Boyer calls on the "nation's colleges and universities ... to break out of the tired old teaching versus research debate and define, in more creative ways, what it means to be a scholar", and "to recognize the full range of faculty talent and the great diversity of functions higher education must perform" (p. xii). He promotes a need to redefine scholarship, but scholarship is not easily defined let alone redefined.

Boyer argues that scholarship can involve engaging in traditional research, but also requires that the scholar steps back to examine connections, links theory and research, and communicates new knowledge to students. He indicated that scholarship fulfills four separate although overlapping and interconnected functions: discovery, integration, teaching, and application. According to Boyer, the scholarship of discovery is based on the traditional concept of research and remains a vital element of scholarship. Publications and presentations intended to provide new knowledge for academe match this traditional category. The scholarship of integration moves beyond the development of new knowledge to the process of "giving meaning to isolated facts, putting them in perspective" (Boyer, 1990, pg. 18). With the emphasis on disciplines and specialization, a continuous effort must be made to synthesize knowledge from across disciplines. Boyer recognizes teaching as a core function of scholarship. Teaching scholarship is the ability to draw the strands of the field together in a way that provides both coherence and meaning, to place what is known in context and open the way for connections to be made between the knower and the known.

Finally, the scholarship of application moves beyond discovery and integration, to the use of knowledge to address a variety of societal needs. In this type of scholarship the scholar asks, "How can knowledge be responsibly applied to consequential problems? How can it be helpful to individuals as well as institutions? Can social problems themselves define an agenda for scholarly investigation?" (Boyer, 1990, pg. 21). He also differentiates citizenship (serving on committees and other departmental and universities chores) from scholarship in which service activities must be tied directly to one's special field of knowledge and relate to, and flow directly out of, this professional activity."

The scholarship of teaching has acquired new definitions throughout the 90's. Some writers following Boyer's 1990 work talked about teaching scholarship as the mechanism through which the profession of teaching itself advances, through which teaching can be something other than a `seat-of-the-pants' operation (Hutchings & Schulman, 1999). The scholarship of teaching is posing a problem about the issue of teaching and learning, studying the problem through methods appropriate to disciplinary epistemologies, applying results to practice, communicating results, self-reflection, and peer review (Carnegie Academy for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning, 2000). inVISIBLEcollege, through the University of Wyoming Ellbogen Center for Teaching and Learning (Kleinsasser, 2001), initiated a conversation about the scholarship of teaching on our campus. The 2000-2001, the inVISIBLEcollege cohort concluded that the scholarship of teaching is defined as peer critique, reflection, and dissemination and that the scholarship of teaching enhances student learning through ongoing, systematic inquiry.

A scholarship of teaching is not synonymous with excellent teaching. It requires a kind of "going meta," in which faculty frame and systematically investigate questions related to student learning (Hutchings & Schulman, 1999, p. 13). The prospect of peers in our classrooms, observers or collaborators, makes us uneasy. Conversations about teaching outside our classrooms characteristically stop short of what we like to imagine and cherish as the mystery of our effectiveness. Instead, these talks tend to be anecdotal, disjointed stories about good days and bad, tactics that worked and assignments that did not, or finer points our students somehow missed (Bender & Gray, 1999).

Hutchings (2000) discussed three features that characterize the scholarship of teaching and learning. First, the scholarship of teaching and learning is deeply embedded in the discipline; its questions arise from the character of the field and what it means to know it deeply. Second, the scholarship of teaching and learning is an aspect of practice. In contrast to research done by a third party examining the practice of others, this is work undertaken by faculty looking at their own practice (and sometimes the practice of colleagues with whom they teach or share curricular responsibility). Finally, the scholarship of teaching and learning is characterized by a transformational agenda. The scholarship of teaching and learning might then be defined as scholarship undertaken in the name of change, with one measure of its success being its impact on thought and practice.

The Carnegie Academy for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (CASTL) represents a major initiative of The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. The program builds on a conception of teaching as scholarly work proposed by Boyer (1990), and on the 1997 follow-up work by Glassick, Huber, and Maeroff. An ambitious multi-year effort launched in 1998, CASTL's higher education program supports the development of a scholarship of teaching and learning that fosters significant, long-lasting learning for all students, enhances the practice and profession of teaching, and brings to faculty members' work as teachers the recognition and reward afforded to other forms of scholarly work.

Organizational Efforts to Support the Scholarship of Teaching

Some institutions of higher education have initiated programs intended to support scholarship of teaching activities. Some of these may be informal and some may be institutionalized. Kleinsasser (2001) created a framework to visualize different approaches, programs, and activities that support the scholarship of teaching. Her review of innovative scholarship of teaching practices includes several different categories. New approaches to teaching and learning and curriculum such as problem-based learning, service learning, community-based learning, undergraduate research, and learning communities are being practiced on some university campuses. Interest in different outcomes include campus activities such as diversity as an asset, civic education, political engagement, and student self-assessment and self-direction. New models for professional development include centers for teaching and learning like the one at UW, work with graduate students, teaching circles and community building.

Across the country, organizational changes are being discussed and some scholarship of teaching programs have been implemented. For example, Burman (1999) in the School of Nursing on our campus, proposes to expand the boundaries of scholarship through a two-track approach to tenure and promotion allowing for teaching scholarship activities to be valued in lieu of research publications. Also, Saint Mary's College (California) provides services and resources to all faculty in support of teaching and scholarship as part of their faculty development. The program seeks to foster cooperation and collegiality by promoting ongoing dialogue about the complexities of teaching and learning. It offers resources to help faculty members reflect on and achieve their professional goals as teachers and scholars at all stages of their academic career, including opportunities for renewal. And finally, at Montclair State University (New Jersey) a Faculty Scholarship Incentive Program (1999) provides faculty an opportunity to receive tenure and promotion credit for scholarship projects, with credit applied to their workload. Hopefully, our conversation at the University of Wyoming will allow us to expand our awareness and appreciation of the scholarship of teaching and its potential relationship with the tenure and promotion process.

References

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William G. Berube, University of Wyoming Suzanne Young, University of Wyoming

Dr. Berube is an Associate Dean of the College of Education and Associate Professor in the Department of Educational Leadership; teaches graduate courses in principal and superintendent preparation. Dr. Young is an Associate Professor, Department of Educational Leadership.