uh, well, having been thru just this process, let me tell ya, it won't work, particularly if you tie teaching bonuses etc to student evaluations and use them in the least critical way possible--that is, never take a gander at the research on evals. i'm all in favor of student evals and long ago worked with my high school student council to get NYS to use them in reviews of teachers (no go, of course!). but the problem is that student evals are only one kind of data and are impacted by all kinds of factors--from question construction to perceptions of instructor/dept to gender of instructor, etc. too often they are used as the lone indicator of a teacher's performance. there are many other ways and we fought hard to get the admin to see that peer evaluations were another 'data point' but, alas, to no avail.
so, what it engenders is a senior fac who, by and large, end up catering to the consumers. not across the board but if the fac are feeling overworked and threatened and already had a bad attitude, this is one way to game the system.
kelley
At 12:10 PM 6/6/01 -0700, joanna bujes wrote:
>At 02:33 PM 06/06/2001 -0400, you wrote:
>>So supposing that you were a very senior academic administrator
>>interested in getting the senior faculty of an Ivy League university
>>re-engaged in teaching. How would you go about doing it?
>
>
>1. make it a requirement.
>
>2. make it sexy: give a lot of airplay, kudos, and social status to those
>who do a good job teaching.
>
>3. give bonuses for senior faculty teaching freshmen courses
>
>
>...and before they become "senior faculty"
>
>4. don't hire assholes...to begin with. At UC Berkeley there were a couple
>of senior professors who always made it a point to teach freshmen: Alain
>Renoir and Julian Boyd immediately come to mind.
>
>5. make it an important part of tenure review
>
>
>Joanna B.
>
>
>