I'm not a department chair, but I've had this discussion with a number of department chairs around campus.
UWF is also a unionized campus. The collective bargaining agreement does provide for chair observation of classroom teaching with appropriate advance notice. This applies to online classes as well as face-to-face classes. The mechanism for an online class visit would be to have the chair visit the class, which is accomplished through the guest instructor role (appropriate notification would come when the chair requested guest instructor status before the term began and the course opened). UWF has been participating in the Quality Matters work for online courses, which entails having a trained reviewer visit the online course and evaluate the quality of pedagogy using the QM rubric. If you haven't seen this rubric, it is worth a look. With a few exceptions that deal specifically with the technology of delivery, the QM rubric would be equally useful for evaluating the pedagogy used in face-to-face classes. I run a peer mentoring group for teaching in which faculty visit one another's classes to make observations and offer formative feedback. Peer mentors are always from a slightly different discipline to keep the focus on teaching. Faculty participants in this program who teach online courses use the guest instructor role to visit one another's online courses. They uniformly report that this is a mutually beneficial activity. We meet twice a year for general discussion of teaching. These meetings are always a delight, filled with great insights and comments about teaching strategies. Some of these partnerships have persisted for nearly 3 years now, with mutual classroom observation and feedback occurring every year. I think it is unfortunate that more chairs do not make appropriately-structured classroom observations (appropriately structured is a key qualifier here - there are better and worse ways of doing these). These observations would provide much more useful and compelling evidence about the quality of teaching when chairs write annual evaluations and comment on the quality of a candidate's teaching in a tenure and promotion letter than simply relying on the numerical ratings from the typical course evaluation. In an institution that has a culture in which chairs never enter another faculty member's classroom for observation unless there is serious concern about a problem, faculty would be understandably paranoid about a request for a visit. But in a culture that values teaching and recognizes classroom observation and formative feedback as a mechanism for nurturing high-quality teaching, people are much more welcoming of classroom observations by peers and even chairs. For those interested in the observation process, check out the Teaching Partners pages on the CUTLA web site (uwf.edu/cutla). Claudia Stanny --- 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=7961 or send a blank email to leave-7961-13090.68da6e6e5325aa33287ff385b70df...@fsulist.frostburg.edu
