How Not to Reward Outstanding Teachers

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By DAVID G. EVANS

Most colleges and universities give annual teaching awards. Their purpose is typically to acknowledge the importance of effective teaching on campuses where faculty members' main way to earn recognition and promotion is through scholarship.

But while the goal of rewarding good teachers is laudable, the awards can sap the morale and productivity of faculty members who try too hard to receive them. For young professors in particular, paying too much attention to teaching awards is dangerous.

Junior faculty members -- especially those with a marginal record of scholarship -- sometimes believe that winning a teaching award would guarantee them a positive tenure decision. That belief is almost always wrong. In addition, the process of choosing the awards' recipients involves considerable arbitrariness and, sometimes, university politics. The chance of receiving a teaching award is so small that trying to get one almost invariably results in disappointment and cynicism.

My department is in the College of Natural Sciences and Mathematics at California State University at Sacramento, a large public university. The college includes about 100 tenured and tenure-track faculty members, all of whom are eligible for the college's annual Outstanding Teaching Award; other colleges in the university give identical awards. In any given year, 1 percent of my college's faculty will be recognized as an outstanding teacher.

For the sake of discussion, let's assume that 25 percent of the faculty members are excellent teachers (I think the percentage is considerably higher). That means it would take 25 years, the length of a typical academic career, to recognize all deserving faculty members, provided that no new outstanding teachers enter the college in the meantime.

The mechanics of our selection process, which is similar to that at other universities where I've taught, makes the outcome even more arbitrary. The first step is for someone at the university to nominate a professor for an award. Some department heads make it a point to nominate several candidates each year; other chairmen never get around to nominating anyone, although their departments may have many excellent teachers. Some faculty members nominate themselves, but the awards committee, appointed by the dean to choose the recipients, views that approach as self-promoting; therefore, few people who nominate themselves win. Colleagues and students rarely nominate anyone unless they are asked to by the nominee, and thus the committee assumes that most of those nominations are essentially self-nominations.

All nominees submit portfolios that demonstrate teaching effectiveness. The portfolio generally includes a statement of the nominee's teaching philosophy, sample syllabi and exams, and comments and letters from students. It takes a candidate several hours to respond to a nomination, and the process often puts him or her in the awkward position of soliciting letters of praise from colleagues and students. But most nominees are sufficiently excited by the honor that they are willing to go through the ordeal -- although junior faculty members in particular can ill afford the distraction.

The members of the awards committee, of course, have an impossible job because most nominees really are good teachers, all portfolios provide compelling evidence of effective teaching, and no one on the committee has firsthand observation of every candidate's teaching. The difficulty of selecting a single outstanding teacher is compounded by the fact that very different disciplines are represented in the pool of nominees: How can you compare a portfolio from someone who teaches cell-physiology labs with that of someone who gives calculus lectures? Moreover, each member of the committee has his or her own ideas as to what constitutes effective teaching.

The review process inevitably is reduced to a discussion of who has the most letters from students, what department has not been recognized recently, and the history of the nominees, nominators, and departments. The likelihood of a particular nominee's being selected depends at least as much on who else is nominated that year as on his or her own qualifications.

I do not mean to imply that faculty members who receive teaching awards are not deserving. To the contrary, my experience is that almost all the recipients are truly excellent teachers. But so are many other faculty members who never get an award.

By recognizing only one teacher a year, the awards suggest great prestige -- a kind of teaching MVP. And junior faculty members who give in to the desire to become the MVP can find themselves in trouble.

A professor whose goal is to win a teaching award can be tempted to focus on using varied and creative teaching styles, rather than on student learning and its assessment. The abundance of recent literature on teaching styles, with its endless debate about the effectiveness of different strategies, exacerbates the problem. Adopting different teaching strategies is terribly time-consuming. Junior faculty members must decide if it is worth it.

Even if a young professor manages to be nominated, the chance of winning is small. Losing inevitably leads nominees to compare themselves to the winner, who may in fact be no better than the losers, and who usually looks worse to them. Losers often experience bitterness and frustration.

Suppose a junior faculty member does win an outstanding teaching award. The temptation is to assume that tenure is a certainty. After all, how could a university deny tenure to someone who is acknowledged as an outstanding teacher?

But at most universities, tenure is based on scholarship, teaching, and service. If all a professor's tenure eggs are put in one basket, the other baskets will be empty. Empty baskets lead to negative tenure decisions. Moreover, many of the colleagues who vote on tenure will not put much value on the teaching award because they know many other professors who are excellent teachers but who never won it.

Universities should look for other ways to acknowledge the contributions of excellent teachers. Giving awards to a tiny percentage of faculty members, based on ambiguous -- if not arbitrary -- criteria, may be the worst approach. Instead, a college should seek to acknowledge all outstanding teachers using criteria that are explicit and that include direct observation of teaching.

Rather than MVP awards, why not have a teaching Hall of Fame that included all excellent teachers willing to have their instruction reviewed and evaluated by their peers? It might then be reasonable to encourage, or even expect, untenured professors to become members of the Hall of Fame before applying for tenure. But until all excellent teachers are recognized for their merits, junior faculty members would be well advised to put their time and energy into other ways of earning tenure.

David G. Evans is a professor of hydrogeology and chair of the department of geology at California State University at Sacramento.