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Branching Paths: A Novel Teacher Evaluation Model for Faculty Development
According to Theall (2017), “Faculty evaluation and development cannot be considered
separately… evaluation without development is punitive, and development without evaluation is
guesswork” (p.91). As the practices that constitute modern programmatic faculty development
have evolved from their humble beginnings to become a commonplace feature of university life
(Lewis, 1996), a variety of tactics to evaluate the proficiency of teaching faculty for development
purposes have likewise become commonplace. These include measures as diverse as peer
observations, the development of teaching portfolios, and student evaluations.
One such measure, the student evaluation of teacher (SET), has been virtually ubiquitous
since at least the 1990s (Wilson, 1998). Though records of SET-like instruments can be traced to
work at Purdue University in the 1920s (Remmers & Brandenburg, 1927), most modern histories
of faculty development suggest that their rise to widespread popularity went hand-in-hand with
the birth of modern faculty development programs in the 1970s, when universities began to
adopt them in response to student protest movements criticizing mainstream university curricula
and approaches to instruction (Gaff & Simpson, 1994; Lewis, 1996; McKeachie, 1996). By the
mid-2000s, researchers had begun to characterize SETs in terms like “…the predominant measure
of university teacher performance […] worldwide” (Pounder, 2007, p. 178). Today, SETs play an
important role in teacher assessment and faculty
development at most universities (Davis, 2009).
Recent SET research practically takes the presence of some form of this assessment on most
campuses as a given. Spooren et al. (2017), for instance, merely note that that SETs can be found
at “almost every institution of higher education throughout the world” (p. 130). Similarly,
Darwin (2012) refers to teacher evaluation as an established orthodoxy, labeling it a “venerated,”
“axiomatic” institutional practice (p. 733).
Commented [AF7]: The paper’s title is bolded and centered above the first body paragraph. There should be no “Introduction” header.
Commented [AWC8]: Here, we’ve borrowed a quote from an external source, so we need to provide the location of the quote in the document (in this case, the page number) in the parenthetical.
Commented [AWC9]: By contrast, in this sentence, we’ve merely paraphrased an idea from the external source. Thus, no location or page number is required. You can cite a page range if it will help your reader find the section of source material you are referring to, but you don’t need to, and sometimes it isn’t practical (too large of a page range, for instance).
Commented [AWC10]: Spell out abbreviations the first time you use them, except in cases where the abbreviations are very well- known (e.g., “CIA”).
Commented [AWC11]: For sources with two authors, use an ampersand (&) between the authors’ names rather than the word “and.”
Commented [AWC12]: When listing multiple citations in the same parenthetical, list them alphabetically and separate them with semicolons.