Our trajectories of teaching excellence come from reflective practices. This means we need to document and make visible the work we do in preparing our courses and delivering learning. It means reflecting on the outcomes regularly, innovating, improving, and thriving. Evidence of impactful teaching comes from many different data points, the most commonly cited are your own teaching effectiveness statement, your course syllabi, teaching materials you have developed, and student course evaluations.
The key hallmarks of the liberal arts at NYUAD include the following approaches. You can regularly reflect on how you do these things and what effect they have.
In evaluating your own teaching you want to make the work you do visible by effectively describing your efforts, reflecting on impact, and revising when necessary.
The below figure highlights the areas in which you can detail how you pursue the practice of teaching.
Here are some practical next steps you can take in making your good teaching visible:
The Teaching Goals Inventory is a questionnaire tool to ascertain and tabulate the teaching goals that are important to you — this can help you align to your own goals and practices.
End of semester course evaluations are subjected to a variety of factors, which makes them a noisy instrument to measure teacher's effectiveness. Despite all their flaws, they can shed light on areas for potential revision and can ultimately lead to positive improvements. The key lies in approaching them in the right way. In order to identify and distill representative feedback, one needs to consider the course evaluations in context and read them through the appropriate lens.
Before jumping to any finite conclusions from the course evaluations, it is important to consider the significance and validity of the data.
University of Virginia's Center for Teaching Excellence offers guidelines on understanding student evaluation data for both numerical data and written comments on course evaluations.
Midterm course evaluations help students feel more engaged and committed to the course while giving you enough time to make teaching adjustments specific to their needs. They offer ample space for personalization and foster a culture of completion at the end of the semester. Giving students an opportunity to respond to the course in an anonymous format will encourage them to communicate responses that they may not feel comfortable providing in person – including positive comments.
Adapted from The Dartmouth Learning Design and Technology, these five steps guide the implementation midterm course evaluations:
You should speak with the tenure committee Chair about what they expect to see included in your Teaching Statement. In general, you want to review your teaching philosophy and evidence how you enact that philosophy in your course design, pedagogy, and teaching methods. Evidence should be provided about your reflective teaching practices; meaning what have you done to adjust your teaching over the years. How do you incorporate your research into your teaching? Have you been an impactful Capstone advisor? What innovations have you made in your courses? Have you embraced experiential learning? Your teaching statement should make visible the many ways in which you have reached your learners.
An effective teaching statement helps communicate what your teaching philosophy is and how you realize it in your classroom; it offers an authentic representation of your teaching pedagogy and practices. In this video, we offer some tips to help you write strong teaching statements.
A suggested list of what to include is provided here, but this should be reviewed with your committee chair and faculty mentor.
If you have any questions, please email nyuad.facultydevelopment@nyu.edu.
Making your good teaching visible through formal recognition processes can be a rewarding experience and a useful way to reflect on your practice.
The NYUAD Award for Teaching Excellence recognizes outstanding contributions to the educational mission of NYUAD. This award is bestowed on standing faculty who demonstrate excellence in liberal arts education, research mentorship, creativity and innovation in teaching.
The Distinguished Teaching Award (DTA) highlights New York University's global commitment to teaching excellence and is given annually to selected outstanding members of the faculty. Recipients are presented with a research stipend. Only full-time faculty members with at least ten years of service at NYU. Please note that while current adjuncts are not eligible for consideration, current full-time faculty may count past adjunct service towards the ten-year eligibility requirement.