Handbook

DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH GUIDELINES FOR EVALUATION

One-fifth of the tenured faculty, determined alphabetically, and all of the untenured faculty who have begun their second year of service at Colorado State University will normally be evaluated each calendar year in depth in the areas of teaching, scholarship or creative activity, and service.

Although it will remain the duty of the Chair, as the code provides, to "evaluate the professional work of members of the department," two committees will advise him/her on the evaluation of regular faculty. The Evaluation Committee will be responsible for advising the Chair on the evaluation of the tenured regular faculty; the Promotion-Tenure Committee will be responsible for advising the Chair on the annual evaluation of the untenured regular faculty and the evaluation of faculty eligible for promotion. The system followed by both committees must include formal evaluations of teaching, and a review of service and scholarship or creative activity.⁽¹⁾ The labels for performance will be "unsatisfactory," "satisfactory," "quality," and "excellent." Late in the fall semester tenured and untenured faculty will complete the Annual Activites Report form and file it, along with supporting materials, in their performance file.⁽²⁾

Tenured faculty evaluations will cover the faculty members' performances over the preceding five years and will then stand for five years except under two circumstances: 1) Anyone may ask to be evaluated during a year that evaluation is not mandatory for that person. 2) As part of the Chair's annual review of the faculty, he/she may request a formal evaluation for any faculty member before the scheduled year or in secondary teaching areas. Such a request may be appropriate for a faculty member being reviewed for promotion. In either of these cases, the request for evaluation in the current calendar year must normally be made in writing by the second week of March. An evaluation will normally consider the preceding five years and will stand until that person's next five-year or requested evaluation, when all evidence for the past five years will be considered.⁽³⁾

The Chair will choose from among tenured members of the Executive Committee three persons to form the Evaluation Committee for the evaluation due that calendar year. After the initial committee has been selected, the Chair will reappoint at least one person each year, to guarantee committee continuity. The appointments will be made before the third week of September.² The Committee's function will be to advise the Chair each year on the performance of the tenured faculty slated for evaluation. In the event that any member of the Evaluation Committee is scheduled for evaluation, the Chair will participate in the evaluation of that Committee member with the other two members of the Committee.

The tenured faculty will elect from among tenured members of the department five persons, at least three of whom must be full professors, to form the Promotion-Tenure Committee. The Committee has four functions: 1) by assessing the teaching, research, and service of faculty members, to advise the Chair about promotions; 2) to prescribe a method for gathering evidence concerning the professional performance of all untenured faculty; 3) annually to advise the Chair on evaluation and progress toward tenure of untenured faculty; and 4) to make tenure recommendations based on the evidence so gathered. All evaluations and recommendations will require a majority vote. Though the annual evaluations and the recommendations regarding promotion are advisory to the Chair, the tenure recommendation itself is binding; the Chair may approve or disapprove but he/she must forward it to higher administrative levels. Because the chair functions as the communication link between the Promotion-Tenure Committee and the untenured faculty, the Committee will annually furnish the Chair with both its recommendations and the basis for those recommendations. Promotion-Tenure Committee policies developed to supplement these guidelines are subject to the consent of the tenured faculty.

The Chair will review annually the work of both committees to insure that the standards articulated in these Guidelines are applied uniformly to tenured and untenured faculty. The definitions, evaluative procedures, criteria, and labels for both committees are described below.

Teaching. Teaching includes classroom performance, student conferences, local addresses on one's academic specialties (e.g., addresses to LIT, the Department Colloquium, OGSW), and directing theses and independent studies.

The committees will secure evidence of a department member's teaching effectiveness by peer visitation (normally of one course) in the teaching specialty and by administering student evaluations to all of the faculty member's classes during the evaluative semesters while he/she is absent.⁽⁴⁾ Untenured faculty members should also expect peer visitation in secondary teaching areas. The peer visitation may be by a member of the committees or by another member of the department selected by the committees and will ordinarily include more than one visit. A written report of the visitation will be given to the appropriate committee within five (5) working days after the last visit, and the Committee will immediately furnish a copy to the person under evaluation. A faculty member being evaluated may request additional visits and may, of course, furnish other evidence to augment that gathered by the committees, including written responses to peer and student evaluations. If a faculty member wishes to include student evaluations in years other than the year of formal evaluation (for tenured faculty) or in courses other than those being visited, they must be administered by the committees. The English Department will keep the student evaluations on file. Though peer visits are not normally required in one's first semester of teaching, the Promotion-Tenure Committee will take student evaluations and assign peer observers in the second semester. On the basis of the evidence gathered, the committees will judge the teaching to be unsatisfactory, satisfactory, quality, or excellent. "Unsatisfactory" and "excellent" will be rarely applied labels, reserved for cases of obvious weakness on the one hand and outstanding performance on the other. "Satisfactory" will mean competent and professional performance. "Quality" will mean performance notably surpassing competence. The committees will attempt to apply the labels in a consistent manner.

While these committees have been established to evaluate performance, any findings, materials, or reports that can help a faculty member improve his/her teaching should be used to that end. Untenured faculty members in their first year of service are particularly encouraged (though not required) to invite a colleague to visit their classes and to ask advice about effective teaching strategies. Since new faculty members may feel uncomfortable asking for this service from colleagues they don't yet know well, they should ask the Chair to recommend an observer. Such peer visitations are exclusively for improving teaching and are not recorded.

Service. Service assumes student advising but implies additional service on departmental, college, or university committees, including graduate student committees; participation and service in professional organizations; or any other efforts aimed at keeping the machinery and public relations of the department, the university and the profession in good working order.

Each faculty member will furnish the appropriate committee through the performance file with a record of departmental, university, and professional service for the current year.² Merely offering a list of committee memberships, especially when some are extradepartmental, may be insufficient evidence to allow the committees to make a just assessment. The service record should therefore include the faculty member's own statement of specific contribution, along with any existing documents attesting to the quality and extent of the service. Tenured faculty are reminded to keep a running account with appropriate documentation in the performance file. The committees may solicit other testimonials if necessary. On the basis of the evidence, the committees will judge the service unsatisfactory, satisfactory, quality, or excellent. A lack of record or a record of incomplete service will earn the label "unsatisfactory." Competent, consistent service will merit the label "satisfactory." "Quality" will denote service that is characterized by its imagination, its intelligence, its effectiveness, and its noteworthy substance and consistency. "Excellent" will be applied only to the most substantial service that has continually, over the period under evaluation, demonstrated leadership, and improved the programs of the department, the university, or the profession.

Scholarship or Creative Activity. Scholarship or creative activity assumes continuing scholarly or creative work but implies communication of the results of that activity. Evidence of scholarship or creative performance thus includes completed portions of a long work in progress; publication or acceptances, of books, articles, translations, reprints, notes, book reviews, poems, stories, essays, novels, and plays; addresses to academic groups; and scholarly or creative work resulting from participation in professional seminars, workshops in one's academic specialty, fellowship programs, or editing tasks.

By way of the performance file, the faculty member is responsible for furnishing the appropriate committee a five-year bibliography and copies of all relevant publications, addresses, and acceptances. Files should be kept current. Faculty at work on long-term projects should submit finished portions of work in progress. Acceptances will ordinarily be evaluated as publications; thus faculty submitting acceptances will attach official notices of acceptance and will not resubmit acceptances in the subsequent evaluation period when they become publications, except that a copy should be submitted to the departmental library. The committees will read the material furnished and, if necessary, ask outside experts to read it. The committees then judge the scholarship or creative activity to be unsatisfactory, satisfactory, quality, or excellent. The primary considerations will be the consistency, the quality, and the substance of the scholarship or creative activity. Obviously, such qualities are not discovered by counting notes or articles or by noticing where a piece was published. However, a continuing record of scholarship, indicated by continuing results, and the judgment of editors that a work merits publication, translations, or reprinting, serve as evidence the committees must acknowledge.

The committees will apply the labels in the following fashion. "Unsatisfactory" will denote slight evidence of continuous scholarly or creative activity. "Satisfactory" will apply to continuing, competent scholarly or creative activity. No certain amount of scholarship or creative work will automatically insure a rating higher than satisfactory, but any amount, if its merit is judged satisfactory, may receive the label "satisfactory." "Quality" will apply to officially accepted or published work of substantial length and considerable merit. A continuing record of publication of short notes and reviews or a continuing record of addresses to academic groups may also merit "quality" as a label, but only if the notes and reviews or the addresses are, considered together, of high quality. "Excellent" will be reserved for published scholarly or creative activity of high merit.

Overall. The Evaluation Committee and the Promotion-Tenure Committee will recommend to the Chair an overall rating of each faculty member evaluated, as well as the ratings in the three categories of teaching, service, and scholarship or creative activity. A person will not ordinarily receive the rating of "Excellence" overall unless that person is excellent in at least two areas. The "Excellent" rating is for departmental use throughout the evaluation period but need not require the Chair to submit to the Dean a request for extradepartmental consideration.⁽⁵⁾ "Quality" assumes at least quality performance in two areas. "Satisfactory" applies to a competent, professional performance where weaknesses are balanced by strengths. "Unsatisfactory" applies to those who neglect service or scholarship without achieving quality in one of the other areas, and to those whose teaching is judged unsatisfactory, whatever they achieve otherwise.

So long as this system remains in effect, the Chair must take the judgments of the Evaluation Committee and the Promotion-Tenure Committee into account, and the Chair will confer with the appropriate committee before altering any overall rating. The final statement by the Chair will include statements of evaluation by peers, if the candidate so desires. Unless the Chair changes these procedures, they apply as long as the guidelines for evaluation furnished by the Dean of the College allow.

1. Recommendations for promotion will ordinarily not require formal evaluations of teaching other than those required by the regular evaluation process

2. Specific dates will be announced at the beginning of the fall semester, and may be modified by tenure and promotion schedules imposed by deans and vice-presidents.

3. Annual salary increments will be derived from the faculty member's last in-depth evaluation

4. Student and peer evaluation forms will be standardized and will elicit both a narrative commentary and judgments quantifiable according to the evaluative categories in this document.

5. Under the present College system, a few members of the entire College will receive special recognition for "Excellent" ratings. The Chair may nominate persons for this merit; however, faculty members may receive "Excellent" ratings for Department consideration without being nominated for College consideration.