Love them or hate them, Student Evaluations of Teaching (SETs) are a fact of life in academia. The Harvard Business School Christensen Center for Teaching and Learning would like to invite you to a PDW at the Academy to explore how student evaluations of teaching (SETs) can be used for faculty development (Saturday, August 8 from 10:10am-12:10pm at the Hyatt Regency Chicago).
SETs are commonly used for other purposes, such as performance appraisal of faculty, promotion and tenure decisions, teaching awards, and course selection by students. The literature on those more common uses is both extensive and growing. In contrast, research on the use of SETs for faculty development is considerably more limited, perhaps reflecting the fact that such developmental perspective is also relatively rare in practice. Individuals and institutions often pay lip service to the potential of SETs for faculty development, but look only at the summative score and use it mostly for performance appraisal and rewards. Some don't even read student comments; others discount their validity; and many read them selectively, filtering out either the positive or the negative.
In this PDW we will:
a) Offer you a forum to discuss your individual and institutional experiences with SETs;
b) Share the quantitative, qualitative and procedural approaches we use at the Christensen Center for Teaching and Learning to help Harvard Business School faculty draw on SETs for their own development as teachers in different stages of their academic careers; and
c) Engage in an active exercise of analyzing evaluation puzzles, where we will examine data from concrete SETs (disguised to protect confidentiality), and work together to tease out their underlying meanings, identify developmental opportunities, and outline processes for pursuing those opportunities.
We will be delighted to welcome you to this PDW, and please feel free to pass along information to anyone you think might be interested. No pre-registration required, but please arrive early because there seems to be a strong interest in this workshop and space will be limited.
See you in Chicago,
Willis
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Willis Emmons, Ph.D.
Senior Lecturer
Director, C. Roland Christensen Center for Teaching and Learning
Harvard Business School
Loeb House 104, Soldiers Field
Boston, MA 02163
Tel: (617) 495-6851 Fax: (617) 495-0806
Christensen Center Administrative Coordinator:
Clare Flaherty (5-3659) cflaherty@hbs.edu
http://www.hbs.edu/teachingandlearningcenter/