AY 2019/2020 Year-End Report

Our Faculty Learning Community goals at the start of the year included:

• Continuing to build community and connections among faculty from all Arts and Sciences RAPs
• Continuing to develop appropriate assessment measures to determine if we are meeting our student learning outcome goals by working with the CU Teaching Quality Framework initiative
• Continuing to Investigate evidence-based teaching and learning practices

By engaging in these activities, the current sense of rigor and teaching excellence in the RAPs has been strengthened, has become more cohesive, and will be collectively communicated and continuously cultivated in this community. While some of these goals have been met, there is also more work to be done.

Work Accomplished  & Proposed Metrics

Peer Evaluation: The Peer Evaluation Protocol that we completed during AY 2018/2019 was used during AY 2019/2020 by several of our team members and their faculty. We gathered feedback from both faculty and directors. Some of that feedback was incorporated into revisions by the end of the year and some, including offering an alternative to the Qualtrics format, will be addressed in AY 2020/2021. We then turned our attention to creating a draft of Peer Evaluation Procedures that will be presented to the Directors at the beginning of the next academic year. In light of the sudden move to remote instruction due to the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, we also created an addendum to the Peer Evaluation Protocol and Procedures addressing considerations when evaluating a remote class.

Student exit survey questions: At the end of AY 2018/2019 we agreed upon a set of year-end questions that all RAPs could incorporate into our year-end surveys. We recognize that each RAP might wish to add additional questions, but proposed that all A&S RAPs include these ten common questions. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, plans to implement the use of these questions were put on hold. In the future, we would like to revisit using these questions for RAP/FYAE students as they exit our programs.

Faculty year-end reporting: We continued to discuss the idea that faculty be asked to do a year-end report or questionnaire, mainly as part of programmatic assessment but which also might play a formative role in individual assessment. A prototype of this questionnaire is currently in draft form which includes more open-ended or qualitative questions as well as quantitative ones. The idea behind this reporting is both to assess how well we are reaching the stated goals/student learning outcomes at the program level, and also to give faculty additional reflection on the “multiple measures of teaching” as they prepare for FRPA, merit pay reviews, and reappointment notebooks. 

Faculty Teachings Statement Guide: This year we also shifted focus to the self-voice by creating a guide or set of recommendations for writing a Teaching Statement as we are required to do for our reappointment dossiers every three years. We looked at our RAP student learning outcomes alongside the TQF rubric to determine which elements of the evaluation were best suited to this kind of self-reflective statement. We paid particular attention to the kinds of things that might be hard to measure using peer evaluations or student questionnaires or FCQs. What we created is a sort of menu or list of components of effective teaching that could form the focus for an individual instructor's reflection and writing of the statement. We also added some resources to this guide to help faculty reflect on ways their teaching may have changed or adapted during the move to remote teaching as a result of the pandemic.

Making use of information already collected by the University: We would like to have a better sense of what data is already being collected, or could be collected, at the university level about our students. What information, in addition to retention rates, GPA, etc. is available to us, and do we have the ability to gather any additional data once our students leave the RAP? We know this is an area the directors have already been working on and we believe that this information should be more widely discussed with RAP faculty. 

Future Plans

At the end of AY 2019/2020 the RAP FLC we discussed both what maintenance of the completed work would look like and some possible thoughts on how to make the measures we already more productive in the future. One remaining big goal of the RAP FLC would be to find ways to connect the work we are doing here to our FRPA process in a more effective way and to continue to support improving the "multiple measures of teaching" by which we, and our programs, are evaluated to reflect the balance of student, peer faculty, and self-evaluation.