Academic

So What About Teaching?

By Jacqueline Lipton

Brian Tamanaha's comments on my earlier post about faculty scholarship got me realizing that I really had posted it out of context without explaining that I had also been having similar thoughts about teaching and service.  So without further ado, let me at least open the "teaching" conversation as well.

What should the administration do to encourage/facilitate/recognize/reward good teaching?  Obviously, I've already mentioned teaching awards in my earlier post - although many of these are effectively awarded by student groups or alumni.  So they're not really decisions made by the "administration".

Our university has an extremely good teaching support group that offers a lot of opportunities for funding for teaching projects within the university, a number of which have been awarded to my law faculty colleagues.  We also have a (roughly) monthly inhouse teaching interest group for sharing ideas on teaching issues that are specifically relevant to law classrooms.  Many law faculty colleagues also participate in regular university-sponsored teaching support sessions.  So these are the things I assume other schools/universities do by way of "facilitating" and "encouraging" teaching.  In this vein, I've also been at schools in the past that have provided funds and/or teaching relief for faculty who want to develop new teaching projects eg distance education courses.  And I've heard that some schools will occasionally provide teaching and/or committee relief for particularly heavy new class preps.

Should administrations be doing more to recognize or reward teaching initiatives: for example, as Brian implicitly suggests, in appointments and P&T decisions, in salary raises, in lateral hiring decisions etc?  Should teaching excellence play into the availability/amount of summer grants, particularly if those grants would be used for developing teaching initiatives?  (Of course, some faculty get summer money for doing additional teaching over the summer.  Is this "equivalent" to a summer grant for doing research eg money for additional research activity versus money for additional teaching activity over the summer?)

So I'm equally interested in these question as the scholarship questions.  Just didn't have time to post on all of these issues at the same time.  I'm also interested in tangible recognition for faculty service and perhaps a better understanding of what "service" should entail in this respect.  But that's probably the subject for a whole separate post...

Full post as published by The Faculty Lounge on December 29, 2009 (boomark / email).