2010 Faculty Evaluation Plan

Once a faculty member in the Maricopa Community College District gets “tenure” (or is no longer in his or her “probationary” period), he or she has to submit a Faculty Evaluation Plan (FEP), basically a self-study/reflection, every three years. This year was my third year since leaving probation/getting tenure. One of the things I’m trying to do with this FEP is get up an running with a digital professional portfolio. And although I really think I wanted to do it in a wiki, I also really want to get back to my professional identify living in my blog. Thus...the blog wins! The following is very formulaic and is the cover page, what is officially submitted, for the FEP.
FEP Summary
Faculty Member’s Name: Rochelle Rodrigo
College and Department: Mesa Community College, English Department & Center for Teaching & Learning
Date Completed: June 25, 2010 For Academic Year: 2009-10
Faculty Evaluation Team

• Jeffery Andelora
• Naomi Story

Three Required Areas:

1. Teaching, Learning and/or Service (Why I failed the Quality Matters Peer Review and Revising My Teaching Philosophy Part I & Part II)

2. Course Assessment and/or Program Development/Revision (Developing a Writing Certificate Program)

3. Governance and/or Committee Participation at the College and/or District levels (Serving on the Campus & District IRB Boards)

Two Elective Areas:
1. Professional Development (My StrengthsQuest Results)
2. Acquisition of New Skills (I’m Loving MindMeister)

Additional/Related Areas:

1. Service to Community (Writing for EduKid)

2. Disciplinary Service (CCCCs Executive Committee)

Summative Reflection

1. Brief description of my roles and responsibilities as a faculty member:

During the past three years I have taken on a lot more responsibilities related to the role of faculty professional development coordinator. During the 2007-8 academic year, I was completely reassigned to the CTL to function as MCC’s Interim Instructional Technologist while we did a full search to fill the position. For 2008-9 I applied for the faculty developer (I prefer to call is faculty professional development coordinator) position and had nine hours of reassign time to facilitate the New Faculty Experience (NFE) program as well as coordinator faculty professional development activities on campus. For the 2009-10 academic year nine hours of reassign time shrunk to six hours, and I gained more work since we lost our adjunct faculty professional development coordinator position. During the Spring 2010 semester I decided to only facilitate NFE for three hours of reassign time.

As Instructional Technologist, I added teaching CIS236 and CIS237 to my list of courses taught. I also continued to grow the number of workshops, usually about teaching with technology, that I taught at MCC or in the district. I also taught HUM206 for the first time during the Fall 2008 semester. Besides teaching and professional development activities, I continued serving on various committees in the English Department, in the College, and in the District.

2. Focus of the FEP (teaching and course or program development/revision) and a brief statement of rationale and purpose:

For this FEP I focused on three examples of professional self-evaluation, reflection, and growth. First, I submitted my online ENG102 course to the official Quality Matters review process. As is normal, I did not pass the first round of review; however, since I decided not to make some of the changes my peer-reviewers suggested, I did not officially pass the Quality Matters review. I believe the QM review criteria are generally good, like most online/hybrid course criteria; however, I didn’t agree with the interpretation of those criteria with some aspects of my course. I also blatantly did not make two other suggested changes and presented reasons why; however, again, the peer-reviewers and I disagreed on my justifications. Please read my more detailed reflection on this process in my blog posting titled ”Why I failed the Quality Matters Peer Review.”

The second serious reflection and change came about in reaction to working with other faculty for three years in helping them develop online, hybrid, and/or technologically mediated courses. Basically, I simplified my teaching philosophy. This simplification came more at the desire to provide faculty constructing courses with a more streamlined way to think about how/why they are organizing their course; however, it is also helping me continue to rethinking my own teaching practices (both in the traditional academic classroom as well as in workshop settings). In short, my philosophy is now:

Courses need to be organized in modules that provide a variety of content delivery activities, content learning activities, and learning assessment activities; these activities all need to be aligned in terms of their learning outcome as well as in the complexity of skill and thinking.

To read more about my new teaching philosophy, visit the blog posts titled Revising My Teaching Philosophy Part I and Part II

Finally, I’m thrilled that after three years the English department finally submitted our curriculum for a writing certificate program. During most of that time I chaired the Composition Committee whom did the major work during this process. It took us so long because the English Instructional Council wanted us to develop curriculum for a 200 level course that the program would require as well as some type of capstone. The two courses had to be developed, proposed, and accepted through the entire curriculum process before we could submit the writing certificate proposal. We were happy to announce that ENG270: Workplace Writing and ENG297: Writing Program Portfolio were approved by the end of the Spring 2010 semester. And although we’re glad that the district has decided that it needs to “improve” the process for academic certificates, we’re bummed that our proposal is now put on hold until that process has been updated. To read more reflections on this curriculum process, visit the blog posting titled ”Developing a Writing Certificate Program.”

3. Summary of accomplishments and outcomes:

During this three year period I’m most proud of the completion and “publication” of three book length projects: The Wadsworth Guide to Research (co-authored), Rhetorically Rethinking Usability (co-edited), and Motivation and Play: How Faculty Continue to Learn New Technologies (my dissertation). I was also honored that the New Media Consortium refer to my online ENH241: American Literature before 1860 course as an example of “open content” teaching within the 2010 Horizon Report. Finally, I was honored by my colleagues at MCC when I received the Residential Faculty Excellence Award for the Fall 2008 semester.

4. Brief statement of plans to integrate or apply this learning into my work as a faculty member:

The current “learning” I’m integrating into my work as a faculty member is my three part/cycle teaching philosophy. First, I’m increasingly using this philosophy in the workshops I present and while I’m talking to faculty about building and/or revising their courses. I’m also trying to develop and revise my on courses to fit into this philosophy as well. To read more about my new teaching philosophy and how I’m trying to use it, visit the blog posting titled ”Revising My Teaching Philosophy, Part II.”

5. What method and class was used for the student/service recipient evaluation?

I always ask for students and workshop participants to evaluate my teaching/facilitating; however, with online courses it is very difficult to get a high return rate on course evaluations. Similarly, with workshops, all the people who are getting some type of credit for the workshop always complete the evaluation; however, since it has their names attached to it, I question the validity. The evaluations for the workshops are in a variety of locations and I did not hunt them all down to do a comparative analysis; however, usually I get positive comments about my personality and enthusiasm and how that engages and excites the participants. In terms of suggestions for revisions, the comments that I continue to work are generally about providing more support materials and specific examples.

Since the Fall 2008 semester I have collected all my course evaluation data using Google Spreadsheets. I ask the basic questions from the English Department’s Course Evaluation Form that asks students to respond on a 1-5 scale (1 = does not apply to this course and 5 = Excellent). I’m happy to say that all questions except for two had an average score of over 4.0 (the two exceptions: Time in Class, the full class period is used effectively was a 3.73 and Testing, exams cover material on which I expect to be tested was a 3.79). My highest rating was a 4.63 in Knowledge of Subject, the instructor demonstrates a comprehensive knowledge of the subject area of the course. In the open ended questions I would argue my most positive comment was similar to what I get in my workshops, references to enthusiasm and passion. As for negative, I’ve got to get better at turning over grading of major projects/assignments. To read more of my reflections on my course evaluations, read the blog posting titled ”A Synthesis of Course Evaluations, Fall 2008-Spring 2010.”

6. Goals for next evaluation

Survive?! I say that jokingly; however, there is something to it! To stay sane and healthy I have got to try to figure out a way to gracefully and politely say “no” to both “fabulous opportunities” and to some requests for help for which I sincerely do not have the time, nor am I being compensated for; maybe some of the tips and suggestions from my StrengthsGuests results might help. I would also like to start incorporating more self-regulatory and study skills into my courses to help my students become better learners and hopefully successful students. Maybe I can be transparent with my students as an example about self-discipline and self-regulation and talk about my own need to be better about dedicating time and energy in a timely manner to get graded work back to them (as per the results of my course evaluations). I don’t want, nor have the time, to do a huge study correlating incorporating study skills content with retention rates; I just want to try to track what type of activities I’m incorporating into my classes and start keeping better track of my retention rates. We’ll see about this last idea in regards to balancing time, energy, and sanity (back to goal number one).

June 25 2010 | Posted in