Assistant Professor
The candidate for promotion to Assistant Professor is expected to have met or to have exceeded the following standards:
For promotion to the rank of Assistant Professor for those individuals with a master’s degree or a newly acquired doctoral degree, major emphasis will be placed on evaluation of teaching performance. Portfolio documentation should contain evidence of good teaching evaluations by Chairpersons as well as solicited and/or unsolicited letters of support from both students and faculty peers.
Teaching, scholarship, and service rubrics will act as guidelines for faculty members to quantify their movement toward the requirements for promotion and tenure. By the end of third year, faculty members should meet minimal competencies in every category on each rubric. One commendable ranking should be achieved on each of the rubrics by the third year. When the Promotion & Tenure Committee reviews faculty documentation, typically in a faculty member’s 4th year, they will make recommendations of where the faculty member is doing well and areas that need work.
a. Teaching
Examples of contributions and evidence that reflect satisfactory teaching performance may include but are not limited to:
- Demonstration of growth in person-to-person teaching effectiveness and distance teaching effectiveness as evidenced by at least average teaching effectiveness evaluations from one’s Chairperson, from peers and from students. Additional evidence should include descriptions of the ways these evaluations affected subsequent teaching.
- Contributions to program and course development.
- Outcome-oriented course syllabi and evidence of outcome attainment.
- Contributions to teaching core skills including strategies used to improve students’ writing and research skills.
- Use of current technological resources for instructional purposes including computer applications.
- Use of student evaluation strategies that result in a pattern of grades that reflects a span of student achievement and controls grade inflation.
Accurate and constructive advisement to students on academic and career directions as reflected in estimates of time spent in advisement, and in evaluations by randomly selected advisees.
b. Scholarship
Scholarship expectations for promotion to Assistant Professor parallel the major emphasis placed on teaching. That is, portfolio documentation should include evidence of the scholarship of teaching, including such things as examples of fostering critical thinking, stimulating active learning, creating intellectual commitment and the like. Revisions in course syllabi that reflect research and other professional literature may be offered as evidence of the scholarship of teaching. In addition, there should be evidence of continued development in one’s field of specialization such as formal degree study, attendance at workshops, seminars or conferences, clinical practice, professional performances.
c. Service
Service expectations for promotion to Assistant Professor are that the faculty member is an active contributing member of groups that provide service to the College, to one’s discipline, to one’s community.
Service expectations may include but are not limited to:
- Dependable attendance at meetings and knowledgeable contributions to the work of college committees, Division committees and projects;
- Membership in and attendance at meetings or conventions of professional organizations;
- Evidence of service to a community group.