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10 The language of teaching excellence: Describing pedagogical expertise through a framework of care

Beth Buyserie

“The time of your candidacy for tenure or promotion is not the time for professional humility.”

–Ronald B. Toll, “Reviewing the Teaching Portfolio: Considerations from a Provost/Vice President of Academic Affairs”

 

Introduction

During my 20 years of college-level teaching, I have engaged in countless conversations where instructors communicate their passion for teaching, their commitment to student learning, the depth of their disciplinary expertise, their continued pedagogical innovations, and their thoughtful reflective practices. Yet often these same teachers confide that they find it quite challenging (sometimes nearly impossible) to write about their teaching for promotion—not because they are not strong teachers, but because the language expectations for documenting teaching accomplishments can be formidable. For example, at my particular institution, teaching-centered instructors are specifically directed in our role statements to “demonstrate excellence” in our primary role of teaching. As the headnote indicates, this task is “not the time to be modest” (Toll, 2010, p. 116)—yet this well-meaning advice is not always easily applied. To be clear, expecting excellence in teaching is not the issue, nor is being an excellent teacher; however, explicitly stating that you are excellent can be a difficult barrier for some teachers to overcome. Many teachers have shared with me that writing a self-assessment for promotion that meets this directive of excellence feels like “boasting,” which directly contradicts their pedagogical and often personal commitments to student-centered classrooms, collaborative learning, and meaningful reflection. In some cases, teachers have expressed to me that they would almost rather not go up for their well-deserved promotion than write a narrative using the self-promoting language that they feel the university expects.

Because a significant number of these teachers are also from backgrounds that are frequently marginalized or underrepresented in the academy, including women, first-generation teachers, and teachers of color, finding new language to express one’s deep commitments to teaching—and having that language be recognized and valued by promotion boards—is imperative for any institution committed to teacher equity and retention. As research has shown, rates of promotion and tenure for instructors of color, first-generation instructors, women in STEM, or women to the rank of full professor are still not comparable to white male faculty and other instructors with more institutional and societal privilege (e.g., Bartels et al., 2021; Durodoye et al., 2020; Krebsbach, 2022). Compounding this issue is the fact that research faculty are often the ones evaluating the promotion dossiers – and from my experience, instructors, particularly those who are untenured or who are contingent (i.e., non-tenure-track), understandably may have little confidence that a research-centered full professor will understand or appreciate their pedagogical innovations.

Due to these tensions, teaching-centered instructors who question “self-promoting” language often benefit from an alternative framework as they craft their promotion dossiers, one that foregrounds a more critical and caring approach to documenting teacher excellence. In this chapter, I draw from feminist and critical scholarship (hooks, 2003; Ryan et al., 2016; Waite, 2017) to define a pedagogy of care. For context, the term “pedagogy of care” was used frequently during the pandemic to refer to the various forms of care teachers should show both to their students and to themselves during a highly stressful situation. Many scholars also cite bell hooks (2003), who describes pedagogical care as critical, compassionate, and having high standards. As hooks explains, “committed acts of caring let all students know that the purpose of education is not to dominate or prepare them to be dominators, but rather to create the conditions of freedom” (2003, p. 92). In applying pedagogies of care to the documentation of teaching excellence, I hope to provide a framework that supports teachers as they describe their deep commitments to student learning.

My goals in this chapter are twofold: one, to provide alternative language options for teaching-centered instructors to document their pedagogical commitments and innovations utilizing a pedagogy of care; and, two, to provide recommendations for promotion boards that may help enhance equity while reading promotion dossiers of teaching-centered instructors. I begin by outlining my pedagogical background, which includes excerpts of my teaching philosophy. Next, I discuss the language of care, a term I use to gently push against and reframe the institutionally-expected language of excellence—a word that can be challenging for many teachers to use without feeling as though they are boasting (despite the fact that they are indeed excellent teachers). Next, I offer advice on how to organize the teaching portfolio around a care framework; I supplement my recommendations with sample tables from my own teaching portfolio that visually organize my teaching accomplishments. Finally, I conclude with recommendations for promotion boards, arguing that they have a responsibility to educate themselves on how instructors from various disciplines might document their excellence in teaching.

My Pedagogical Background

Before I recommend ways of applying pedagogies of care to a teaching dossier, I want to highlight how my pedagogical background can be helpful for an interdisciplinary and multi-rank audience. Teaching—and enhancing the scholarship and praxis of teaching—has been my long-term passion. For 15 years, I served as a contingent Lecturer and Assistant Director of Composition at Washington State University (WSU). In this role, I drew on my secondary education training to mentor both new and experienced teachers on their teaching of writing. Now, six years later, I serve as a recently tenured Director of Composition for Utah State University (USU), where I mentor all teachers in our writing program. I also regularly work with interdisciplinary instructors in a number of writing- and pedagogy-related roles, and many of my university presentations are designed for interdisciplinary audiences. In both positions, teaching has been what USU would call my “area of excellence” for my role statement, though I now have research as a secondary area of effectiveness. As a writing program administrator, much of my research focuses on the scholarship of teaching through the lens of critical pedagogies, which includes pedagogies of care. I recognize that individual teachers are often already committed to the work of pedagogical care, or educational equity. As such, my research explores how writing programs can build on teachers’ commitments to critical pedagogies of care to enhance both student writing and teacher pedagogy.

I also have significant experience in documenting teaching for multiple audiences. Over the last two decades, I have conducted over 600 classroom teaching observations; after each observation, I provide both new and experienced teachers with feedback on how to formatively evaluate their teaching, recognize their strengths, and identify ways to improve their teaching to enhance student learning. During each conference, I seek to support teachers as they orally document their pedagogical goals and student achievements. With teaching as my focus, I have also been promoted three times, twice as a contingent instructor at WSU and once as a tenure-track instructor at USU. I have prepared two separate dossiers for these promotions, and I have both formally and informally mentored multiple instructors on crafting their own promotion materials. Because of my pedagogical focus, I have received several teaching awards, including at the university level—and while I am reluctant to use the term “excellence,” I am deeply honored to have received awards that recognize my commitments to and expertise in teaching.

Because this chapter is about language, I highlight my choice in the previous paragraph to use the phrase “deep commitments to and expertise in teaching,” which is a phrase I use to document the level of teaching expected of me by my institution. Throughout this chapter, I provide possible language models that teachers might use to document and describe their teaching. I will also periodically describe my rationale for these language choices. For example, the phrase “deep commitments to teaching” allows me to communicate both the great pride I have for my profession, as well as my recognition of its critical responsibility to student learning. More importantly, the phrase “deep commitments to teaching” also requires me to think carefully about the ways I enact my commitments in the classroom—and to seek out additional opportunities for growth. In this, I document my teaching and student learning in ways that center a pedagogy of care for quality teaching, both in my promotion materials and in my everyday discourse with students and fellow teachers.

Yet these accomplishments are not my whole story. Here I draw from the opening section of my teaching philosophy to provide readers with a deeper sense of who I am as a teacher—and to highlight the ways in which part of my personal background continues to shape my pedagogical choices and priorities:

Teachers share their stories.

I have always been a teacher. I taught my brother to write, my sister to read, yet I entered college without a high school diploma. Navigating college as an underprepared student was overwhelming, but my writing teacher encouraged me to tell my story; my history teacher stressed that I had important ideas; my math teacher affirmed that if I could do math, I could teach others to write. Due to their support, I am deeply committed to writing within disciplines and the transfer of writing to various academic, professional, and community contexts. I teach to give back to the community, to give back to students who, like me, do not enter college fluent in the language of academia. I approach teaching conscious of my story, using my experiences to honor students as whole persons with complex stories of their own.

Part of the challenge for many teachers is communicating not just what we do in the classroom, but why we do it: why we care about teaching and our students, even as higher education is scrutinized and legislated in ways that make it more challenging to enact pedagogies of care for all our students. As a teacher, I cannot effectively teach my students or mentor fellow teachers without sharing why I do what I do, the deep stakes that teaching has for me, the way it shapes my identity. And so now that you know part of my story—and why each day I reaffirm my commitments to teaching—I turn to the heart of this chapter on the language of care.

The Language of Care

In my administrative and pedagogical mentorship, I offer teachers alternative language to help them document teaching excellence in ways that affirm their commitments to student-centered classrooms. In my work with teachers, I have begun reframing the language of excellence to one of care, an approach that teachers dedicated to teaching often appreciate. To begin, I ask teachers the following questions to help them reconsider how to document their teaching. Below I briefly extrapolate on each of the key questions I use to frame our conversation.

Why Are You a Teacher? Why Do You Care about Teaching?

These are the key opening questions that often help teachers reframe the purpose of documenting their teaching. Yes, we document our teaching for many important reasons: to enhance student learning, to meet accreditation requirements, to earn a well-deserved promotion. However, dedicated teachers often need a deeper reason to begin drafting a teaching portfolio. A teaching portfolio is more than an opportunity to earn a higher salary: it is an opportunity to learn more about our teaching, a space to reflect on why we became teachers in the first place. With these opening questions, I ask teachers to consider why they teach—and why they continue to learn more about their teaching.

As teachers share what they most care about, I listen carefully to the words they use and how they frame their narrative. Often, their stories focus on their students, both what they want their students to learn and why their students matter to them. I also encourage them to reach out to other colleagues, as each time they share their story of teaching with a new audience, they verbally express what matters most to them, which helps reframe not just what we include in a dossier, but why.

As teachers craft or revise their teaching philosophy, I recommend sharing the story of their teaching with a fellow teacher or trusted mentor. Of course, not everything shared will end up in the final teaching portfolio—but talking with a trusted colleague about shared commitments to teaching can be an important way to begin reframing the dossier from simple self-promotion to a deeper engagement with ways of caring about teaching.

Why Do You Care about Students and Student Learning?

This question allows us to consider not only student learning, but also students’ academic, mental, physical, and social wellbeing. Many teachers understand both student learning and wellbeing to be intricately connected, and scholars such as Imad provide teachers with specific language to help us connect student learning to care for their wellbeing (Imad, 2021; Stachowiak, 2020). Many instructors have developed pedagogical methods, such as collaborative assignments and mental health check-ins, that demonstrate their intersecting commitments to student learning and wellbeing; explaining these care-based methods to a colleague allows teachers to document how their role as a teacher goes beyond mere teaching of course concepts. This is also where committed teaching instructors can provide evidence that they are meeting the institution’s commitments to care for students’ mental and physical wellbeing in concert with student learning.

How Do You Know Whether Your Students Are Learning?

After discussing why they care about student learning, we then move into a conversation about how they as teachers know that students are learning. This conversation includes both formative and summative assessments, including student-teacher dialogue, student reflections or other meta-cognitive assessments, in-class activities, writing prompts, groupwork, oral communication, tests, and quizzes. As teachers identify their teaching methods and assessments, I ask them to provide me with specific disciplinary examples that a teacher outside their discipline might not inherently be aware of. With each example, the teacher identifies a potential piece of evidence to include in their dossier. This process may seem intuitive, but for teachers who are not experienced with documenting their teaching for evaluation, their everyday teaching methods may seem too “ordinary” to include in promotion materials. In reality, however, these methods and assessments represent how the teacher connects their teaching philosophy to their methods, and then their methods to student assessment (Read, 2019).

What Commitments to Teaching Do You Share with Your Students? When You Mentor New Teachers, What Language Do You Use to Describe Your Pedagogy? How Can You Teach a New Reader about Your Pedagogical Innovations?

The three questions I ask here are essentially about audience—and I use them to help teachers think about a more familiar audience for their teaching. In reality, the audience of the teaching portfolio is often a central promotion committee, a group of individuals who the teacher may never have worked with or met. Additionally, writing for promotion is a high-stakes activity that can be deeply intimidating. Ideally, this committee is chosen because they are highly respected scholars and teachers who have long-term commitments to serving the institution. Nevertheless, their charge is to evaluate our teaching, a fact that can block many teachers’ ability to effectively describe our teaching.

To help mediate this fact, I ask teachers first to identify an audience of students, the audience both most familiar and, for many teachers, the most important. Sometimes, I ask teachers to describe their first day or week of class to me. How do they introduce a new group of students to the content of the course? What language and methods do they use to communicate the importance of the course learning outcomes with their students? What examples do they use to connect the course content to the students’ lived experiences? In this, we are practicing naming the teacher’s pedagogical commitments. As De Courcy notes, “excellent teachers are characterized by their ability to co-construct learning with students” (2015). Whatever a particular teacher deeply values—be it co-construction of learning, student-centered classrooms, critical pedagogies, or project-based learning—naming their commitments to students provides a meaningful start to writing the teaching dossier.

In addition to the learning outcomes, I ask teachers what they do to create meaningful community. How do they let students know that their ideas will be both respected and meaningfully engaged? How do they communicate the type of professional relationship they want to have with students? For example, when students question why they need to learn the content, what response do they give? Thoughtfully considering these questions allows teachers to recall that they have significant expertise in communicating their content, learning outcomes, and teaching philosophy to an outside audience.

I also ask teachers to think of an audience of new teachers, a teacher they want to mentor, or a teacher outside their discipline. In identifying this new audience (one less intimidating than the promotion board), I ask teachers to again recall the way in which they explain key concepts to an interested audience. What do they most want a new teacher to know about the craft of teaching? How do they explain the significance of their content to a teacher outside of their discipline? These questions allow the teacher to think meaningfully about where they are relying too much on insider discourse and consider what they most want a new reader to know about their teaching. What this conversation does is rely on a teacher’s greatest strength: teaching. Reframing the promotion dossier from purely an evaluation into an opportunity to teach other dedicated teachers about one’s pedagogy can make a stressful process more meaningful.

Who Has Influenced Your Teaching?

Every dedicated teacher has been influenced by a community of great teachers, both those that they know personally and published authors whose teaching-based scholarship has profoundly shaped their teaching. As instructors, we regularly need to revisit the wisdom of these fellow teachers. Not only do they remind us of why we became teachers, but they provide meaningful models and specific language for how we might also communicate the specifics of our teaching philosophy, methods, assessments, and revisions.

Below is an example from my teaching philosophy that highlights how key scholars have influenced both my teaching methods and the ways in which I communicate key course concepts to students:

Teachers learn from and with their students.

As a teacher, I draw from Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1970), bell hooks’ A Pedagogy of Hope (2003), Stacey Waite’s Teaching Queer (2017), and Malea Powell’s “Learning (Teaching) to Teach (Learn)” (2006). Collectively, these scholars emphasize a student-teacher relationship built on dialogue and collaborative exchange of knowledge. . . . As a teacher, I am part of our community, and I also learn every time we discuss, write, and research. While I have a responsibility to draw from and share my disciplinary expertise as I lead the class, I tell my students that much knowledge can only be generated collaboratively. I intentionally design our in-class activities and formal writing assignments in ways that allow all of us, including myself, to question what we know and why we know it, to research multiple and varying perspectives, and to synthesize our experiences so that the entire class can learn more about writing. . . . Writing, despite its solitary nature, is best understood as a collaborative activity. Though we occasionally read and write for ourselves, we more often write for an outside audience and purpose. Just as we learn from each other in the classroom, we strive to learn from and with others in a larger community and to apply our knowledge to multiple contexts.

As teachers begin or continue working on their dossier, I recommend re-reading key excerpts from the pedagogical scholars that most influence their teaching. Whenever the daily life of teaching or external pressures to teacher expertise are hardest, re-reading key scholars allows me to reaffirm why I teach—and why I continue teaching even during adversarial times.

How Do You Enact Your Dedication to Student Learning and Equity in Your Classes?

This last question is both near to my heart and currently makes my heart ache. As a writing program administrator, I have had the opportunity to serve on many hiring committees, and so I have had the privilege to read numerous teaching and diversity statements. Unfortunately, diversity statements are now highly politicized, and not every institution is permitted to require them. While the complexities of this decision are beyond the scope of this chapter, I do want to highlight the importance of ensuring that any commitments to student equity and educational justice are grounded in pedagogy. While I do not agree with unilateral bans on any teaching genre, I have read some diversity statements that at times conflate resistance to social oppressions with quality teaching—which I do not believe is an effective way to document one’s pedagogy. Instead, I urge teachers to always ground their commitments to equity in both their disciplinary content and their teaching methods. Below is an example from my own teaching philosophy that I hope illustrates one way to connect critical theory with pedagogy:

Teachers apply critical theory to enhance their pedagogy.

My methods for my graduate composition pedagogy course connect theory and critical pedagogies from both rhetoric & composition and cultural studies, as my background is in both disciplines. Our readings weave critical scholars on antiracist pedagogies, queer theory, decolonial scholarship, and critical disability studies with the teaching of composition to emphasize that teaching writing is not neutral but is deeply connected to power and identity. I weave these critical theories into our everyday activities so new teachers might apply these concepts to their own teaching, if they choose to. For example, I emphasize summary as a rhetorical move key to any critical pedagogy, as students must first rhetorically listen to an author—and their lived experiences and counternarratives—in order to accurately represent their argument. I also draw on queer theory, albeit often implicitly, to help undergraduate students question artificial binaries (e.g., yes/no or pro/con) and instead seek multiple perspectives in their research and written arguments.

As a reader of teaching statements, I care deeply about student equity and how instructors enact their commitments to educational justice. And given the current context, I emphasize that there are multiple ways that teachers might design their courses to ensure that all students can successfully engage with course material. Teachers also have a variety of linguistic choices they can use to describe their commitments. However, I emphasize that a simple commitment to educational justice is not enough. As teachers share with me their deep commitments to student equity, I intentionally ask them to provide examples of how their commitments enhance student learning. In an era of enhanced scrutiny, our responses are necessary both to document our teaching—and for the continued benefit of students.

Organizing the Teaching Portfolio Around a Care Framework

As important as the above conversations are to the process of creating a teaching dossier, it is not enough simply to identify what you care about as a teacher. As the title of this book emphasizes, teachers have to document their innovations in teaching. At times, it can feel as though teaching is not as highly valued by the academy, particularly if we teach at a research-intensive university. I am fortunate to currently teach at an R1 institution that also deeply values and rewards excellent teaching. Regardless of our context, we can utilize our pedagogical expertise and teach our audience more about teaching through our teaching portfolios. Here is where both the language and the organization of the teaching portfolio comes into play. In order to quickly highlight my teaching accomplishments, I make meaningful use of headings and tables to communicate information. In this section of the chapter, I provide three examples of how teachers might communicate their pedagogical commitments and expertise to an outside audience.

Summarize the Impact of Your Teaching for an Outside Audience

Knowing where to begin the teaching portfolio can be overwhelming, but readers need a document that clearly communicates the scope of a teacher’s assigned courses, its goals, its impact on student learning, and its relationship to the broader curriculum. I recommend including a table, similar to the one below, early in the teaching portfolio to provide readers with the necessary information. (Note: The appendices referred to in each table refer to my full teaching dossier, not the appendices for this chapter.)

Table 1

Classroom-Based Teaching Responsibilities

Course

Description & Goals

Students Taught & Frequency

English 6820: Practicum in Teaching English

The composition pedagogy practicum all incoming English Graduate Instructors (GIs) take as they begin teaching English 1010. This course provides GIs with the theoretical and pedagogical background to develop as composition teachers (refer to Appendix A for syllabus and calendar).

12-15 Master’s and Ph.D. students each Fall

English 1010: Writing as Inquiry

A required Communication Literacy 1 (CL1) general education course providing undergraduate students with an introduction to rhetorical awareness, critical thinking, information literacy, and composing processes in writing (refer to Appendix B).

23 undergrad students; Spring 2021

English 2010: Research and Argument Across Perspectives

A required Communication Literacy 2 (CL2) general education course building on English 1010 emphasizing research, argument, synthesis, and multiple perspectives (Appendix C).

23 undergrad students; Spring 2022

English 6890: Studies in Writing and Rhetoric

An advanced graduate course exploring queer and antiracist pedagogies from a variety of disciplines (Appendix D).

8 students; Spring 2023

English 7920: Directed Study

A reading course exploring connections between writing program administration and theory (Appendix E).

1 student, on overload; Fall 2020

Communicate Teaching Outside of the Classroom

In addition to classroom teaching, teachers engage in a significant amount of teaching that reaches beyond the classroom. Because this is not teaching in the traditional sense, teachers must use alternative methods to document the ways that they enhance student learning and teacher development beyond the scope of the classroom. To do so, I recommend including an overview chart that communicates this additional teaching, including program curriculum revisions, new course proposals, teacher mentoring, professional development, assessment, and interdisciplinary collaborations. Below is an example of how I document these types of activities for my dossier:

Table 2

Teaching Responsibilities: Composition Program-Focused Teaching & Mentoring

Teaching Activity

Description & Goals

Audience & Frequency

New English Graduate Instructor Orientation

I lead a weeklong composition pedagogy orientation to prepare new GIs to teach English 1010; introduces rhetoric and composition, outcomes, formative assessment, and lesson planning  (Appendix F).

12-15 incoming English GIs each August

Compositionist Conference

I chair this half-day, peer-reviewed conference for English 1010 & 2010 teachers; themes connect social justice to composition (Appendix G).

~40 English teachers in August

Professional Development Sessions

I lead interactive professional development sessions for all English 1010 & 2010 teachers; sessions focus on equity, social justice, and course outcomes in teaching composition (Appendix H).

~30 teachers, monthly during Fall & Spring

Teaching Observations and Mentorship

I supervise approximately 110 English 1010 sections and 150 English 2010 sections each year. These courses are taught by ~60 Lecturers, Graduate Instructors, and Adjunct teachers, all of whom I mentor. My mentorship includes observing their classes and providing dialogical feedback on their teaching (Appendix I). I also provide ongoing and day-to-day mentoring.

~15 teacher observations each semester + daily mentoring for all teachers as needed

Pedagogy Groups

As of Fall 2020, the Composition Program hosts small pedagogy groups to provide new GIs with space to share resources, ask questions, and collaboratively negotiate challenges. I lead one of three groups each semester.

~5 English GIs each semester

Graduate Committees

I regularly serve on Master’s and Ph.D. committees in English and outside departments (Appendix J). I also chair Master’s thesis committees.

~4-5 MA & Ph.D. students yearly

Development of Outcomes

I co-created program- and university-level outcomes that continue to guide all English 1010 & 2010 courses and all Communications Literacy (CL1 & CL2) & Communications Intensive (CI) courses (Appendix K).

All CL1, CL2, & CL2 teachers; ongoing

English 1010/2010 Curriculum

In collaboration with the Associate and Assistant Directors of Composition, I design and revise the English 1010 & 2010 curricula for GIs (Appendix L).

New GIs; ongoing

Distinguish Between Teaching and Service

As the Director of Composition, I am asked to serve on many committees—and unless I am careful to contextualize these activities, readers might inadvertently think that most of my work falls under administration or service. However, I cannot be promoted on my administration or service, so I am careful to distinguish what counts as teaching and what counts as service. At times, I count my service on a curriculum revision committee as service and frame the curricular work I did for the committee as evidence of teaching outside of the classroom. Whenever appropriate, I recommend that teachers reframe teaching-related service as teaching.

Table 3

Teaching-Focused Service

English 1010 & 2010 Outcomes Revision

In March 2020, I began the large task of revising the English 1010 and 2010 Outcomes (Appendix K), a project inspired by our institution’s accreditation mandate to formally assess the courses. My committee, which I chaired, selected four main outcomes for both courses: Rhetorical Awareness, Critical Thinking, Information Literacy, and Composing Processes. These outcomes derive from the Council of Writing Program Administrator’s Outcomes Statement for First-Year Composition and the Framework for Informational Literacy, thereby aligning our institution with national conversations on writing. However, we also considered how power and equity are communicated. For example, we now emphasize that students write for a variety of audiences, research multiple perspectives, question traditional notions of credibility, and seek counternarratives. Teacher feedback indicates that these outcomes guide their curricula design.

CL1, CL2, & CI1 Outcomes

In 2020-2021, I co-chaired the University-level CL1, CL2, & CI Assessment Taskforce. In order to meet accreditation requirements, we sought input from instructors from multiple disciplines to design a sequence of CL1-CL2-CI Outcomes, creating a more intentional connection between all written- and oral-intensive courses, as well as providing interdisciplinary instructors with guidance on teaching written and oral communication (Appendix K).

Highlight Administrative Teaching

In addition to distinguishing service from teaching, I recommend that anyone with an administrative component also consider how their administration intersects with teaching at the programmatic or department level. For example, because the majority of my teaching serves all the teachers in the Composition Program, I strive to ensure that all aspects of our program intentionally build on each other and that teachers have multiple opportunities to dialogue, learn new theories and methods of teaching, and share resources. Table 4 below highlights the programmatic overview of how I address key aspects of teacher development and innovation in each area of our program.

Table 4

Programmatic Overview of Teacher Learning

Composition Program: Areas Where Teaching Concept is Implemented

English 6820** (New GIs)

Monthly Professional Development* (All teachers)

Compositionist Conference** (All teachers)

Small Pedagogy Groups* (New GIs)

Observations & Mentoring (All teachers)

New GI Orientation** (New GIs)

Concrete activities for teaching writing

X

X

X

X

X

X

Opportunities to talk with other teachers

X

X

X

X

X

Connecting theory with practice

X

X

X

X

Reflection on pedagogy

X

X

X

X

X

X

Connection to course outcomes

X

X

X

X

X

X

Curriculum development

X

X

X

X

X

Classroom management

X

X

X

X

Connections to educational justice & equity

X

X

X

X

X

X

*Implemented or reinstituted by me as Director of Composition.

**Significantly revised by me as Director of Composition. (For more details on revisions, refer to Appendix L).

Recommendations for Promotion Boards

While instructors who care deeply about teaching will hopefully benefit from the above strategies and advice, I also want to provide several recommendations for promotion boards. After all, the above strategies will have little application if the readers of the teaching dossiers do not understand how teaching-centered instructors are framing their pedagogical innovations.

First, promotion boards need to recognize that the most marginalized and contingent instructors may have a challenging time following well-meaning advice about not being modest. This means that promotion boards may need to educate themselves on the various ways that disciplinary instructors document their excellence in teaching.

Additionally, I urge promotion boards to include teaching-centered instructors on promotion boards in some capacity. From my experience, promotion committees typically consist of tenured research-centered full professors. There are obvious reasons why these tenured instructors need to serve on the promotion board—but the exclusion of teaching-centered instructors, including teaching-centered contingent instructors who have been promoted, also increases possibilities for inequity. To help counteract potential bias, include at least one (preferably 2-3) teaching-centered instructor to serve on the promotion committee. If necessary, these instructors could provide guidance only on cases related to teaching-centered promotions—although it would be ideal if they were to give feedback on the teaching portions of research instructors to communicate that teaching is also valued at the institution. Even a consulting capacity would be helpful.

Finally, promotion boards and institutions must signal that they are taking care when evaluating teaching-centered dossiers. Even though research-centered instructors can obviously have great expertise in teaching, the perception of many untenured, teaching-centered instructors is that tenure-track instructors will naturally privilege research—which can make contingent instructors feel from the beginning as though their portfolio may not be as impressive as a research-centered portfolio to the promotion committee. There are justifiable reasons for this perception, so the academic institution should make intentional moves to signal to teaching-centered instructors that the promotion board values—and has the necessary expertise to evaluate—teaching-centered portfolios.

A Final Reminder: Support the Dedicated Teachers Around You

Each time I observe a group of new teachers, they are understandably nervous. While I cannot remove their concerns over being evaluated, I emphasize that each time I observe someone teach, I learn more about the craft of teaching. Ideally, a teaching dossier is an opportunity for both teacher and reader to learn more about teaching. However, teaching is not a solitary activity, and so all teachers—both new and experienced—need support as we tell the story of our craft and describe our pedagogical expertise through the language of care.

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Toll, R. B. (2010). Reviewing the teaching portfolio: Considerations from a provost/vice president of academic affairs. In P. Seldin, J. E. Miller, & C. A. Seldin (Eds.), The teaching portfolio: A practical guide to improved performance and promotion/tenure decisions (4th ed., pp. 109-117). Jossey-Bass.

Waite, S. (2017). Teaching queer: Radical possibilities for writing and knowing. University of Pittsburgh Press.

1 Communications Literacy 1, Communications Literacy 2, and Communications Intensive, three of our institution’s required general education courses. These courses emphasize written and oral communication.

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