Academic Cultures: Differences in Evaluating Teaching Excellence, Poster Board #082

The works of Boyer (1990) and Glassick et al. (1997) stimulated dialogue about what constitutes scholarly work and scholarship in teaching; influencing how we teach, how we need to evaluated teaching and potentially how we reward the intellectual contributions of teaching. To do this, teaching excellence must be defined so objective methods for evaluating teaching can be constructed. The methodology of this work included the use of semi-structured interviews with chairpersons of Reappointment, Promotion and Tenure Committees for all colleges across Michigan State University.  Each Chairperson was asked the following  questions: how do you define teaching excellence; how would you measure teaching excellence; and how do you measure teaching excellence (strengths and benefits, as well as challenges and weaknesses of the current methods)? The IRB approved interviews were conducted by individual Co-PI’s, audio recorded, and transcribed with numeral identifiers.  Transcriptions were open coded to identify themes across academic cultures for how teaching excellence is communicated, measured and evaluated.  Results will be presented based on university and unit policy and procedures, with special emphasis on how teaching excellence is evaluated, the importance given to student  versus instructor centric evaluations,  and the importance given to the scholarship of teaching and learning.