Dear Louise,
Check out this page
http://teaching.berkeley.edu/dta-guidelines.html
which describes the very good (and lengthy) procedure used by U.C.
Berkeley to choose recipients of the Distinguished Teaching Award.
By the way, you might want to see if you can increase the $$. At Cal, the
award is currently $10,000 for the University-wide award, and at least
$1,000 (I think more) for the Social & Behavioral Sciences award. At
UMass in 1991, it was $3,000 for the University wide award and I presume
that has increased since then. I've heard that the university-wide award
at UC Davis is $30,000 but don't have confirmation of that.
Martha Olney
On Tue, 7 Dec 2004, Louise Marshall wrote:
>
> I am on a committee charged with developing an annual award for
> teaching excellence. There are about 35 full-time faculty members in
> the department (not just economics), and the plan is to recognize one
> full-time faculty member each year. There will be an individual
> plaque, a permanent department plaque with each year's designee
> inscribed, and $500 in cash.
>
> We're having real trouble finding a procedure. Some teachers we think
> are probably excellent teach only a few students, so a voting-type
> procedure on the part of students doesn't seem good. Few colleagues
> actually have any idea of what goes on in other professors' classrooms
> (more's the pity), so voting by the faculty doesn't seem a good idea.
> Teachers of required courses generally do not receive as high scores
> on evaluations as those who teach specialty courses that students
> elect for their majors, so using student evaluation results has
> limitations. Nobody wants to put this solely in the hands of the
> administrators (who also, by the way and more's the pity, don't
> generally see the actualities of what goes on in the professors'
> classrooms). We have considered having students nominate professors
> and then having some sort of committee make the decision, but we are
> wondering what the composition of that committee would be.
>
> If your institution has such an award, I would greatly appreciate a
> description of the procedure you use and any comments you have on how
> well your procedure works.
>
> Thanks, in advance!
> Louise Marshall
>
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Martha L. Olney
Adjunct Professor of Economics
University of California MOlney@econ.berkeley.edu
Department of Economics http://socs.berkeley.edu/~olney
549 Evans Hall, #3880 Office: 510-642-6083
Berkeley CA 94720-3880 Fax: 510-642-6615
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