Evaluating Faculty Performance: A Practical Guide to Assessing Teaching, Research, and Service (review)

Public officials continue to call for accountability in higher education. Much of the discussion about accountability centers on financial matters, primarily tuition and financial aid. This discussion has only recently begun to focus on holding institutions accountable for student learning outcomes and faculty performance; but it is this latter category—faculty performance—that Seldin and his associates address in Evaluating Faculty Performance: A Practical Guide to Assessing Teaching, Research, and Service.

The purpose of the book is to provide practical information that will allow higher education administrators to build climates conducive to faculty evaluation. Although Seldin’s book is written with academic administrators primarily in mind, one need not supervise faculty members to gain from a reading of this book. Seldin couches the rationale for evaluating faculty performance in terms that faculty members can buy into: a fair approach to performance-based pay decisions and information to improve overall performance (and, thus, student learning). Anyone who has participated in evaluation in higher education understands that getting those who are being evaluated to “buy in” can be the most difficult, and most important, aspect of the evaluation.

Seldin assembled an impressive group of 14 contributors (including himself), who represent teaching faculty members, academic administrators, and faculty development specialists. Each author contributes to a diversity of perspectives, experiences, and institutional types. Importantly, and unlike some books on this topic, the contributors are comprised almost exclusively of individuals currently doing the work under consideration in the book. Higher education faculty members may not recognize many of the names on the list of contributors, but a review of their credentials establishes their expertise and credibility on the subject.

Iam struck by the comprehensiveness of this book. The authors address an array of strategies, some common and some quite innovative, ranging from student ratings of teaching effectiveness and teaching portfolios to self-evaluation through narrative writing. The book covers all aspects of faculty performance: teaching, research, and service. Although one might be concerned that such comprehensive coverage would lead to superficiality, Seldin and his contributors provide an in-depth and nuanced treatment, exploring appropriate uses of the different types of data collected by the various techniques.

Although the teaching, research, and service framework would serve as a natural outline for this book, the chapters are not organized accordingly, which I find a minor inconvenience. Structurally, grouping chapters that address like topics would have created easier flow in reading as well as allowing the book to serve as a quick reference guide following the initial reading. I could envision an administrator picking the book off the bookshelf in search of tools and strategies specifically related to the evaluation of teaching, for example. A different order and organization of chapters would facilitate such a use.

This very minor critique aside, I found the content of the book to be useful, informative, and practical. Reinforcing the book’s practical emphasis, Seldin and his colleagues offer many hands-on examples, tools, and strategies useful in improving faculty performance in teaching, research, and service. Administrators, deans, and department heads will find the chapters related to laying a foundation and building a climate of evaluation, the use of innovative techniques to assess faculty performance, and the summary recommendation chapters filled with ideas, strategies, and tools readily implementable at any campus.

Of particular note is the authors’ attention to the intentional use of evaluation data for specific purposes. The authors clearly delineate throughout the book (but especially in the chapters by Todd Zakrajsek and David Fite) the applicability of certain strategies and techniques for specific purposes.

Zakrajsek’s chapter, for example, details the data and data-collection techniques most appropriate for use in improving teaching performance; Fite, similarly, outlines data and data-collection techniques a propos of faculty personnel decisions. Perhaps more importantly, these and other chapters outline the obstacles and pitfalls in applying data collected for one purpose to...