Innovation in teaching methodology, pedagogical practice, and curricular design is essential for Lehigh to be successful in achieving outstanding student outcomes. Creating, implementing, and testing innovative practices can create student unease and even dissatisfaction. While we want the review, promotion, and tenure (RPT) processes to reward faculty adoption of innovative approaches in teaching, some faculty perceive that lower scores on student evaluations of teaching can negatively impact decisions on their RPT, even if these scores result from innovative approaches that enhance learning. This challenge points to the importance of ongoing work to develop clear measures of student outcomes that can be used in the faculty RPT process, but here we propose a simple and quickly implementable approach to reducing the perceived “risk” taken by faculty when they work to innovate their approach to teaching and learning.
We are creating a formal system by which faculty can reduce the risk that poor student course evaluations that occur due to adoption of innovative practices will become a problem in RPT decisions. Faculty are not required to adopt this approach, and faculty trying innovations in the classroom should be given credit for this in the RPT process, whether or not they go through the process described here.
If a faculty member is planning on developing or adopting an innovative educational approach in a particular course and they have concerns about the potential for poor student course evaluations, they can propose to have the course evaluations from a particular course offering not be included in their promotion and tenure dossier. This request must be made in advance of the time when the innovation is being implemented; it cannot be made retroactively after a course has been taught.
To eliminate these data from their dossier, the faculty member must:
- Commit to teaching the course at least twice and gain the agreement of their department chair to teach it at least two times within three years.
- Engage the Office of Educational Innovation and Assessment (OEIA) at least one month prior to the course being taught and describe:
- A summary of the objectives of the innovation. Specifically, the summary should address: What aspects of student learning will be enhanced by the innovation? And how will these aspects be assessed?
- A description (<1 pg) of the innovation being implemented and the goal of the innovation. If there is evidence of the effectiveness of the innovation from prior work (published or unpublished) links to this evidence should be referenced.
- Include the description of the innovation and the assessment as part of their RPT dossier.
If these conditions are met, then at the time that a RPT dossier is being created, the faculty member may choose to not have the course evaluation data provided for this course. But it can be included if the faculty member prefers.
This effort to enhance adoption of and experimentation with innovative teaching approaches also points out the importance of assessment of student learning and going beyond the question of student satisfaction. While student satisfaction provides useful information, using student feedback as a singular measure of course quality or instructional quality is problematic for many reasons, an issue well-documented in research. As a result, OEIA is supporting approaches that center student performance outcomes--what students have learned (knowledge) and what they are able to do (skills)--as an additional data point relevant to course quality.