Standard 5: Faculty Qualifications, Performances, and Development

Faculty are qualified and model best professional practices in scholarship, service, and teaching, including the assessment of their own effectiveness as related to candidate performance; they also collaborate with colleagues in the disciplines and schools. The unit systematically evaluates faculty performance and facilitates professional development.

Significant Evidence: Professional Education Faculty, Faculty Vitae, Faculty Evaluation Form, Faculty Handbook, Current Grants, Faculty Productivity Data

Element 1. Qualified Faculty

In the 2002-2003 academic year, all full-time faculty members have earned doctorates except one. She is doctoral candidate completing dissertations and is in temporary position. Faculty who teach methods courses also have public school experience at the level appropriate for the methods courses. All but two part-time faculty and adjuncts have earned doctorates. The two exceptions are an experienced classroom teacher with a master’s degree and a specialty in social studies methods and a doctoral candidate finishing her dissertation and an accomplished Spanish instructor who teaches foreign language methods courses in our licensure program. Of faculty in tenure-track positions assigned exclusively to the Professional Education Unit, 48 are tenured and 19 are untenured. (See Professional Educational Faculty.)

Clinical faculty are well-qualified; all are tenured and licensed in the discipline they are teaching. In spring 2003, there are 208 cooperating teachers involved with the preparation of candidates. As indicated in Section 3.1, cooperating teachers meet the VACTE-ATE VA Standards. Those designated as clinical faculty have received extra specific training and are a part of a school clinical faculty team, headed by a team leader. Cooperating teachers, though familiar with supervision and Virginia Tech’s program and as fully credentialed as clinical faculty, are usually not clustered in schools with a number of student teachers and, therefore, have not had the opportunity to participate in the Clinical Faculty Consortium, which is a three-university joint project. (Data on the degrees, experience, and race of cooperating teachers will be available onsite.)

Element 2. Modeling Best Professional Practices in Teaching

The Professional Education faculty believe that they should model the best practices in teaching and engage in self study. Such a belief is consistent with the conceptual framework in that faculty are part of the community of learners who reflect on their practice and learn from each other, professional education candidates, and school partners as they work to improve their instruction.

Results from the Educational Benchmark, Inc. survey data indicate that the 2002 initial preparation completers expressed a high degree of satisfaction with the quality of instruction they received in professional education courses. The mean rating of 5.69 on a 7 point scale on Quality of Instruction ranked the Virginia Tech professional education faculty first in comparison with the six selected peer group institutions, ranked third in comparison with the 20 Carnegie universities, and fifth in the entire EBI database. We are especially proud that candidates perceive faculty as exemplary models for teaching.

Professional education faculty have also been highly successful in receiving major university awards for teaching excellence. The Academy for Teaching Excellence manages the review process for the three university-level teaching awards. Professional education faculty are eligible for two of them. Three W. E. Wine Awards are given each year in the university. Current professional education faculty who have won the Wine Award are Jerome Niles, Patricia Kelly, Judith Shrum, Rosary Lalik, Kusum Singh, James LaPorte, Andrew Stremmel, and Susan Magliaro, who also is an Alumni Teaching Award recipient. When faculty are nominated for one of the awards, their dossiers are reviewed by a College committee that selects one dossier to send forward to the University Wine Award committee. The College also selects two faculty members for the College Certificate of Teaching Excellence. That nominee goes forward to compete for the three university Alumni Teaching Award winners each year. Department of Teaching and Learning faculty who have won a College Certificate of Teaching Excellence in the past five years are Kathleen Carico, Peter Doolittle, and Billie Lepczyk.

The Faculty Handbook (4.10.0) requires that student evaluations must be administered in one course per semester by untenured faculty and one course per year by tenured faculty. Faculty who are considered for teaching awards must show a record of evaluations for all classes and other substantive information regarding the quality of teaching. On yearly merit evaluations (Faculty Activity Reports) faculty need to support their teaching performance; therefore, the majority of them provide evaluation data for most of the courses they teach. The process for student evaluations of faculty was set up by the Faculty Association. Students administer the evaluations with the faculty not present; they submit the completed evaluations to specific secretarial offices, which submit them for processing to the testing and evaluation center. Results are sent to faculty along with all evaluation forms that have written responses as well. A printout of the results is sent to each faculty member at the beginning of the following semester. In addition to a printout of individual results for each class, the data are presented so that faculty can see how they rate in relation to others in the department and in the college as a whole. The intent of student evaluations is to provide feedback to improve teaching. As faculty prepare their dossiers for promotion and tenure, most also ask for peer review as a further way of supporting their teaching.

Currently, graduate assistants who teach have two ways to prepare for college teaching. Although our graduate assistants bring public school teaching experience into their advanced preparation, college teaching is a different venue for which they need to prepare. One way is to take a one-credit, pass-fail option course offered through CEUT. In addition, our education psychology program offers a three-hour college teaching course that graduate assistants from across the university take. The Unit does not require graduate assistants to take a course in college teaching, but individual advisors encourage it.

Element 3. Modeling Best Professional Practices in Scholarship

Eighty-six faculty hold positions in the Unit that require scholarly productivity. In the 2001-2002 academic year, faculty reported on their yearly Faculty Activity Reports the following scholarly activities (data from the online Professional Education Data Entry System; aggregated unit productivity data).

Scholarly Production: Totals

Books	10
Chapters	46
Refereed Articles	107
Other articles	52
Research reports	30
Other publications	50

Total 295

Professional Presentations: Totals

International Conference Presentations	45
National Conference Presentations	162
State Conference Presentations	65
Local Conference Presentations	38

Total 310

Although journal editorships and review boards are part of professional service, such activities are directly related to the scholarly reputation of the faculty members within those professional organizations. The following data show that the Unit faculty were active in this area of scholarship in 2001-2002:

Editorships and Editorial Review Boards

International Journal Editorships	7
National Journal Editorships	6
International Journal Editorial or Review Boards	24
National Journal Editorial or Review Boards	56
State Journal Editorial or Review Boards	4

The past year, for example, James Garrison was for many years the editor-in-chief of Studies in Philosophy and Education, an international journal focused on the connections between these two areas. He remains the “Advisory Editor” of that journal. David Hicks was guest editor of Social Education (vol. 17, #1), is an international journal published out of Ball State. David Hicks and Carl Young, both assistant professors, are section editors of Contemporary Issues in Technology and Teacher Education (CITE Journal), an international online journal published by the Association for the Advancement of Computing in Education (AACE), an international organization that sponsors SITE, an international technology and teacher education conference. Peter Doolittle is guest editor of an upcoming issue of Journal on Excellence in College Teaching for the International Alliance of Teacher Scholars focused on online learning. James LaPorte is editor of Journal of Technology Education, a journal co-sponsored by the International Technology Education Association and the Council on Technology Teacher Education.

Faculty are active in writing proposals and receiving external grant funding. During the current academic year, faculty from T & L and ELPS are principal investigators on over $7,767,714 in active grants. Additionally, faculty have sought and received over $26,000 in internal grant funding, which often serves as start up for projects that ultimately position them for external funding.

Examples of books written by faculty and refereed articles will be available onsite in the team’s workroom.

Element 4. Modeling Best Professional Practices in Service

Professional education faculty serve on a range of committees within the departments that comprise the Unit but also provide active leadership at both the college and university levels. The primary work of professional education is done at the program level. Secondary education faculty, elementary education faculty, and career and technical education faculty meet to plan courses, special seminars for the candidates, and discuss projects for the future of the programs. Foundations faculty have representatives that meet with these programs. This program-level work is the heart of the learning community for faculty, where they share and plan to meet programmatic needs. Faculty also serve on curriculum committees at the department, college, and university as well as promotion and tenure committees at those three levels. Professional education faculty serve in the University Faculty Senate as well as officers in our College Faculty Association with its many committees. (Click here for CHSE Faculty Association web site.) The current faculty president of the College is Peter Doolittle, a Teaching & Learning Department member. Susan Magliaro chaired the Graduate Dean’s Search Committee during the 2001-2002 academic.

Additionally, education faculty are looked to by their professional organizations and state and local educators as a source for assistance. The following chart shows the extent of faculty service during the 2001-2002 academic year (unit productivity data).

Service to Professional Organizations and the Educational Community

Workshops for educators at the international level	7
Workshops for educators at the national level	13
Workshops for educators at the state level	16
Workshops for educators at the local level	58
International offices held	6
National offices held	48
State offices held	16
Local offices held	17

Element 5. Collaboration

Secondary and elementary professional education faculty collaborate with colleagues in the College of Arts & Sciences and with public school partners to fulfill the three broad goals of the PT3 grant. Among the specific objectives where these collaborations are most evident are (1) developing an Integrating Technology into Instruction Academy (ITIA), where educational faculty, Arts & Sciences faculty, preservice teachers, and school partner faculty develop strategies and materials for integrating technology into their course content, (2) using technology to connect the University with partner schools through authentic field applications of technology, and (3) develop a structure in which preservice teachers can demonstrate their mastery of skills set forth in ISTE standards and their ability to apply their technology skills to solve instructional problems, i.e. electronic portfolios. In an early capacity-building PT3 grant, electronic portfolios that reflect national and state content-specific standards was the focus. Arts & Sciences faculty met with secondary faculty to study the standards and discuss how candidates might develop portfolios that demonstrated meeting those standards. Additionally, A&S faculty and secondary faculty participated in an Academy, where they explored software that could be used to enhance instruction. Ensuring that our initial preparation candidates were in school settings that promoted the use of technology was another thrust of the capacity building grant. To that end we partnered with two high schools, and their faculty who had student teaching interns and our secondary faculty worked together in training sessions. Those activities have continued with the PT3 implementation grant, which also has goals targeting communication and articulation of technology solutions for instructional problems.

Although most of the teacher preparation programs involving Arts & Sciences are graduate programs, the Teaching in the Sciences and Humanities (TESH) faculty meet with A& S faculty to discuss education programs. They also informally act as advisors for undergraduate students who know they want to apply to the graduate programs in education to insure that candidates have the content requirements for the disciplines they will teach. Foreign language has a joint appointed faculty member with T& L, Dr. Judith Shrum. Although not a joint appointment, Gwendolyn Lloyd teaches two mathematics courses specifically designed for candidates who will enter the elementary education programs. Vernon Burnsed, in the Music Department, also teaches music education courses, serves as the advisor for music candidates, and works with TESH where the music education program is located.

The Unit is engaged in a variety of on-going collaborations with public schools. Some are grant related, such as the Training and Technical Assistance Center (T/TAC) that increase the capacity of schools, school personnel, service providers, and families to meet the needs of children and youth with disabilities and those at-risk for school failure; the Institute for Connecting Science Research to the Classroom (ICSRC) which brings together faculty, corporate leaders, and K-12 educators with common interests in enriching science and math education; Local Systemic Change in Teaching K-5 Mathematics is a partnership between Virginia Tech and 27 elementary schools to achieve whole-school reform in mathematics through the implementation of a problem-solving NCTM-Standards based curriculum. Other collaborations address specific needs, such as the SOVRAC Leadership Academy, where trained school division personnel join with professors to provide a two-day performance-based evaluation of twelve administrative skills of prospective school administrators.

Faculty and candidates collaborate with schools where field placements are made to offer services to teachers, parents and community members. For example, candidates teach computer skills to teachers and parents in after school hours at both Price’s Fork Elementary and William Fleming High School. The Online Book Club is a recent collaboration of three faculty, two doctoral field supervisors, and clinical faculty from Roanoke City Schools, who select common books to read and use the Internet to discuss them both in real time and in threaded discussions. This online book club establishes a virtual learning community as well as introduces clinical faculty to new uses of technology. One of the books selected in Spring 2003 is Crossing Over To Canaan: The Journey of New Teachers in Diverse Classrooms. This initiative is part of a service learning grant that the faculty received from Clemson University. For several years, Kathleen Carico has collaborated with two middle school teachers, one locally and one in northern Virginia, in a WebPals project that connects her adolescent literature classes with middle school students who are reading the same books. They use real-time discussions as well as e-mail.

Other collaborations reflect specific faculty interests and/or programmatic and curricular emphases (some of these are described at CHSE/K-12 Collaborations on the Center for Teacher Education web site).

Element 6. Unit Evaluation of Professional Education Faculty Performance

Faculty are evaluated by both peers, students, and administrators. Each year faculty submit a Faculty Activities Report (FAR) that follows the same guidelines and format as a promotion and tenure document, except that the FAR reports teaching, scholarship, and service activities for the academic year. Department heads conduct a one-on-one annual performance review with each faculty member. To support teaching, untenured faculty are required to submit the results of student evaluations for at least one class during each semester and tenured faculty for one class per year. Student evaluations are distributed, collected, and submitted for analysis by students. Individual results (with student written comments as well) are sent to each faculty member and as well as department and college overall data analysis for comparison. While faculty do use these evaluations to help support the effectiveness of their classroom teaching, the intent of student evaluations is to provide feedback for self-improvement.

Promotion and Tenure Guidelines (Section 2.8 in the university Faculty Handbook) details the process for peer and administrative performance evaluation. Each College must also have its guidelines for implementation (CHSE P&T guidelines). Untenured faculty undergo two-year and four-year reappointment review following P&T guidelines. Reappointment is based on their progress toward promotion and tenure. If a tenured faculty member’s annual performance falls below minimum standards, then the Post-tenure Review process is implemented. Those guidelines have been developed by the Professional Education Unit, as required by the university handbook.

Element 7. Unit Facilitation of Professional Development

“Learning for All,” the core of our conceptual framework, is reflected in the faculty’s view of themselves as participants in the learning process. The University and the Unit provide excellent opportunities for faculty to expand their knowledge and develop skills in a variety of ways.

Professional education faculty are supported to present their research at professional meetings. Untenured faculty are provided additional travel support by both departments in the Unit. Faculty can apply for one-semester study-research leave with full salary or a full year with half salary (Section 2.15 in the University Faculty Handbook describes the procedure.) For example, George Glasson used a study-research leave in Spring 2002 to complete work on a Earth Systems Connections curriculum development project and to collaborate with the Department of Geological Sciences on a Nanoscience curriculum development project. In other recent leaves Kathy Cennamo focused on research and writing in the area of instructional design, Tom Gatewood investigated ways to infuse NBPTS standards into a master’s degree program, Susan Magliaro was a visiting professor at Vanderbilt University, learning about the work of the Cognition & Technology Group, and Betty Heath-Camp conducted a state-wide needs assessment of provisionally licensed CTE teachers that led to the development of on-line courses to meet the critical demand.

The University Center for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching (CEUT) was originally established to demonstrate the importance that a research university places on undergraduate teaching. Under the direction of Dr. Terry Wildman, from Teaching and Learning, the Center offers programs for improving instruction at all levels. Professional education faculty are active in participating in workshops as well as delivering programs for other university faculty. For example, in the 2002-2003 academic year, Peter Doolittle developed five different workshops for CEUT: Self-Regulated Learning; Fair, Appropriate and Defensible Grading; Teaching Strategies I, Direction Instruction; Teaching Strategies II, Inquiry; and Teaching Strategies III, Creativity. Susan Magliaro regularly teaches a seminar for graduate assistants who teach throughout the university. CEUT newsletters provide a look at the range of workshops as well as the numerous study groups available to faculty. CEUT also provides Instructional Enhancement Grants “to support faculty as they conduct research on their own teaching, develop new materials and strategies for existing courses, and redesign learning environments for students.” For example, education faculty have received grants for “Development of Cross-Curricular Teaching Strategies: An Internet Resource Project,” “Creative Dance CD-ROM,” “Research Design at a Distance,” and “Adding Global Perspectives to Curriculum in Higher Education and Student Affairs.”

The Faculty Development Institute (FDI) has played an important role in helping faculty in the Unit to develop high levels of technology competence. FDI is a University program dating back to 1994. Winner of the 1997 Hesburgh Certificate of Excellence, the Institute offers workshops in ten distinct tracks from “New Faculty Orientation” to “Instructional Design Strategies for Learning” to” Creating Digital Video, Audio, and Multimedia.” For example, over 70 workshops are offered in Spring 2003. Instruction generally runs for 4 days of intensive, hands-on experience. The FDI is offered to all faculty every 4 years and, upon completion, the faculty member receives a new computer. The FDI is part of a comprehensive strategy, the Instructional Development Initiative, which also includes student access to computing and technology enriched classroom facilities, which has as its goal to transform courses and the curriculum. FDI provides numerous workshop as well as access to Element K self-paced software training.

The Center for Innovation in Learning (CIL) supports faculty development of technology mediated instruction. Professional education faculty (Barbara Lockee, et al.) received a series of grants to develop the on-line master’s program for instructional technology. In the 2002-2003 academic year, Susan Magliaro, Jane Abraham, and Peter Doolittle received a CIL grant to develop a computer-mediated community of learners that links candidates in educational psychology classes to classroom teachers to share analysis of video cases and discuss the ways that theory and practice work together to create successful learning environments for students. Both grants reflect one of the essentials in the conceptual framework, i.e. building communities of learners in a variety of ways. The Institute for Distance and Distributed Learning (IDDL) also provides assistance to faculty as they develop courses and adapt their teaching strategies for distance education (Distance Learning for Instructors).