"Christopher D. Green" [email protected]> 15-Jun-10 12:55:41 PM >>
The reason this study (the course evaluation part) interested me is that I teach statistics. I am one of very few tenured faculty that teach it where I am. Most of the sections are taught by contract faculty. Although I have never seen any of these other people teach (a matter that should concern us... why do we so rarely see what our colleagues do in the classroom? what a great source of ideas that would be.), ____________________________________________________________________ Several years ago we noticed that the adjuncts were not teaching quite what we expected in many courses such as stats and research methods and intro. This was of concern when we considered why students in the upper division labs seemed to have so little background knowledge when they got to our upper division lab, which is our capstone course. So we sat down as a department and set down standards/criteria, well, basically a checklist of topics we expected our students to know in each lower division course. This was very good for us because we learned that even among our relatively small faculty we were not all covering the same material (I was very surprised that our developmental folks did NOT cover many stage theories such as Erikson or Kohlberg, or infant development in the intro sections and that the clinical folks did not cover much in the way of psychopathology other than the highlights in intro, all of which has "freed" me up from being so focused on "content" in intro); similarly we found out that some of our stats adjuncts were not covering correlations! and so on.....so now that we have a set of standards this all works better. Of course the students don't seem to remember any more once they arrive in the capstone, but that's a different story ;) Also, every semester we have one tenured/tenure track person evaluate every adjunct. It's a huge inconvenient chore but it allows us to provide feedback to the many people who are very junior and trying to find a full time position and it allows us some degree of quality control. In addition, some of the adjuncts are very good and we have learned from observing them. All in all it's been a very good relationship even if it is a huge inconvenient chore. We individually meet with the person before the observation, collect up a bunch of material such as syllabi and sample exams, then do the observation and then have another session talking about it with them. Pretty much the same thing we do when we evaluate our tenure track junior faculty. (Have I mentioned it's a bit of a chore?) Anyway, I highly recommend either or both of these exercises. I think we have developed a much better working relationship with our adjuncts this way. They are not just those folks who show up at night and that we never see because we all teach during the day. Annette Annette Kujawski Taylor, Ph. D. Professor, Psychological Sciences University of San Diego 5998 Alcala Park San Diego, CA 92110 [email protected] --- You are currently subscribed to tips as: [email protected]. To unsubscribe click here: http://fsulist.frostburg.edu/u?id=13090.68da6e6e5325aa33287ff385b70df5d5&n=T&l=tips&o=3118 or send a blank email to leave-3118-13090.68da6e6e5325aa33287ff385b70df...@fsulist.frostburg.edu
