The Faculty Evaluation Process: A Step in Fostering Professional Development

Evaluation is the systematic collection and analysis of data needed to make decisions, a process in which most well-run programs engage from the outset (Muraskin, 1993, p. 2). It relates to all phases of the professional development process (Kutner, Tibbetts, & Condelli, 1997) and its purpose is to recognize meritorious performance, to promote convenient teaching and learning skills, to identify the appropriate professional development activities, and to uncover obstacles to faculty productivity (Beaty, 2003). Professional development evaluations are continuous activities rather than single events that occur at the end of professional development actions (Kutner, Tibbetts, & Condelli, 1997). Although evaluation is a critical component in the delivery of professional development to adult education instructors, it is partially overlooked in our higher education institutions. Many institutions focus the faculty evaluation on students ratings of teaching performance. The results are not always adequate and free from subjectivity. Moreover, when there is a perception that the performance of some faculty members is not satisfactory, they will be notified that they will not come up for promotion in the near future. That is it! Thus, the process of evaluation that takes place now must be changed and any substantive evaluations should be oriented towards more professional development influences on instructors, program/curriculum designers and consequently on learners. The 21st century is the era of the transforming university" (Housewright and Schonfeld, 2008). Higher education is actually undergoing remarkable and universal change (Poole, 2005) which is driven by two trends: first, the learner has gained increased freedom to access, create, and recreate content; second, he/she has found an opportunity to interact with peers outside of a mediating agent (Siemens and Tittenberger, 2009). Moreover, as in Yale University and Massachusetts Institute of Technology, content is no longer the only strategic value point for higher education; the real value now is the type of interaction that occurs between students and faculty. However, the situation in some, if not all, of the Lebanese universities is different. The following set of e-mails exchanged between a university student and his instructor at the end of a semester reflects a side of the reality:
Instructor: You can be great when you want!! I felt happy when I corrected your final. I thank

you for making me have this feeling! Student: Thanks :) i'm happy to hear that:) I hope to meet more teachers . who care about students learning ...unfortunately from what i experienced in higher education did not please me and this got me to be lazier than usual , but this semester i learned lots and i .. focused on improving myself. Now i have to tell you about what did not make me comfortable in your class, . it was that you sometimes expressed .. [that] people need to attain a certain social status to achieve success or happiness in life. IMO this is one of the reasons our society is the way it is because people are fed these capitalist ego thoughts since childhood. .

To make himself clear to the student, the instructor replied:

Instructor: I think there is misunderstanding. I always encourage my students to seek knowledge because with knowledge we can experience life with all its constituents from happiness to pain ... For me knowledge cultivates *our+ seeds but does not sow in [us] seeds." (Gibran) knowledge is the true organ of sight, not the eyes." (Panchatantra) and "if we would have new knowledge, we must get a whole world of new questions (Langer) that are answered by applying "the true method of knowledge * _ + experiment." (Blake). then we Say not, "I have found the truth," but rather, "I have found a truth, .. (Gibran) AND only through knowledge we can KEEP WALKING! ..Now it is left to you to seek happiness!!!

The above internet chat mirrors the performance of some of our university faculty and leads us to raise this question: how can real interaction between students and faculty be activated? How can we as institution/faculty of higher education help our students seek happiness and KEEP WALKING to face life problems? The answer is to provide our students with vast opportunities to develop creative thinking skills which enable them, as Amabile, (2005) states: to find novel possibilities and imagine diverse ranges; to see it through and be persistent in tackling the problem; to have high standards;
to be independent individuals; to yearn for taking risks; and to have the courage to try something new.

In other words, we need to prepare our students to become experts who own enough corpuses of solved problems and comprehensive knowledge of at least one area, and to show flexible and

creative skills that enable them to predict, infer outcomes and find solutions to a variety of problems they may face during their life journey. Few decades ago, the evaluation of university teaching was controversial and it was an affront to faculty academic autonomy. Recently, it has become a necessity for joining the growing global movement and redefining the education goals that meet with the 21st century skills. According to Hounsell (2003), faculty evaluation is an essential adjunct to accountability and to good professional practice. Expertise in teaching is not simply the product of experience; it is the act of regular monitoring of teaching performance to pinpoint achievements and strengths, and identify areas where there is space for improvement. Thus, for students achievement of good academic experience, higher education institutions need to ensure the right contexts for learning. To have this attained, what will the role of the faculty be? Will the evaluation of full-time faculty, as it is taking place now, be the only major aim? How can instruction effectiveness and development of expertise be managed? What type of feedback should be sought by institution and faculty to develop educational development? What should be done after receiving feedback? Feedback is the process in which part of the output of a system is returned to its input in order to regulate its further output (Websters Dictionary). In higher education, there are three principal sources of feedback to be sought, namely: students, teaching colleagues and professional peers, and self-generated feedback which cultivate reflection and promote self-scrutiny (Hounsell, 2003). Moreover, incidental feedback which can be gathered from everyday routines of the course administration may be an effective instrument for gathering data and feedback about the teaching/learning process. Bligh (1998) suggests that there are several instruments which the faculty can use to get feedback about his/her teaching performance among which we can check attendance, levels, pass/fail, or transfer and drop-out rates. We may also get feedback by observing the nature of students choices to research topics, the rate of their alertness and responsiveness, or even their lack of involvement. The means for collecting feedback from colleagues can be done through observation, previewing and retracing collaborative comment. Whereas the feedback from students can be attained through designing questionnaires and proforma surveys or through conducting structured group discussions and e-mail bulletin boards (similar to the example mentioned above). With respect to

self-generated feedback, it may take place through reviewing, retracing and observation via audio and video tapes. Improvements in teaching happen when university instructors not only receive feedback but draw on expert help in exploring how they may best capitalize upon strengths and address weaknesses. In many higher education institutions in Lebanon, short workshops are conducted to fill gaps and develop faculty performance. However, such workshop models have not proven to be successful in the process of professional development. Why not? Becausee during such workshops, instructors become recipients of information and have no role in defining the topics to be covered in the workshop or in its format; such workshops leave the teacher out of the process and perpetuate the image of teaching as telling. Moreover, many times, they are not monitored. The alternative is to use Knowledge Management (KM) techniques and technologies in higher education. It has been proven that KM in higher education can be as vital as it is in the corporate sector and KM pillars to put learning forward may include leadership, organization, technology and learning itself (Stankosky, 2005). Before moving further in what is needed to implement KM in higher education, I find it necessary to explain what the term knowledge means in this paper. As Firestone (2005) states, knowledge starts as dataraw facts and numbers. When data are put in context they become information. Information joined with experience and judgment becomes knowledge that includes insight and wisdom of those involved. He adds that knowledge originates in individuals, but is embodied in teams and organizations and once knowledge is gained, it will be put to work and applied to decision making. According to Brun, (2005), knowledge can be explicit or tacit. Explicit knowledge is documented information that can facilitate action and it is packaged, easily codified, communicable and transferable. For example, in an organization the explicit knowledge can be the strategies, methodologies, processes, patents, products, and services. While, as Brun adds, tacit knowledge is know-how and learning embedded within the minds of the people in an organization. It involves perceptions, insights, experiences, and craftsmanship. For example, tacit knowledge in an organizational context can be the skills, competencies, experiences, individual beliefs, values, ideas and the relationships within and outside the organization.

On the other hand, management is the activity of getting things done with the aid of people and other resources (Pearson, 2002). KM is the set of processes that seeks to change the organization's present pattern of knowledge handling to enhance both knowledge and its outcomes (Firestone, 2005). And the challenge in KM, as Brun, (2005) declares, is to make the right knowledge available to the right people at the right time (Brun, 2005) and as Zahner (2002) adds, the main abilities of a knowledge management system are: to gather the knowledge, organize it, distribute it, convert it into action and train oneself continuously to keep seeking it. Then have the cycle repeat itself. Thus, if our aim as higher education institutions is to rank ourselves as professionals, we should start launching programs that enable our students to develop critical and creative thinking skills. In addition, we, as faculty members, should start thinking seriously of how to increase our students engagement in planning, designing and continuous reforming of the courses syllabi and curricula. We should enhance active learning, apply teaching strategies that address diverse learning needs and handle with care our less productive students while guiding them to achieve their goals. We should create tasks that give our students the opportunity to experience the value of team work in a country where the sense of ego is very high; we should encourage collaborative and cooperative learning by creating effective group assignments and developing learning communities. For the sake of activating practice-oriented approaches, we should establish writing across the curriculum (paired courses) tasks, encourage and lead students to write for publication and involve them in conferences that motivate them to search, examine, make decisions, communicate thoughts appropriately and construct a divergent spectrum of knowledge. Finally, to embrace this act of active and interactive teaching and learning, reliable assessment techniques and varied assessment tools and rubrics will become a necessity for everyone in the educational institution to study results and make wise decisions that aim at improving and innovating programs that will help students gain awareness and knowledge in a variety of disciplines.

Moreover, educational administrators have important roles in keeping faculty members updated. Among the ranked activities we can think of designing interactive workshops and demonstrations. We may establish web-based courses, and activate teaching circles and clubs. We may substantiate learning-teaching communities, and design university-wide forums. As

Cranfield and Taylor (2008) suggest, administrators should benefit from faculty and staff who possess institutional knowledge and convert the information that currently resides in those individuals and make it widely and easily available to any faculty member, staff person, or other constituent.

To sum up, we all know that the instructional development in higher education is nowadays an important topic. however, as many researchers in this field state, evaluations have generally been limited measures of participants satisfaction: little is known about the impact on daily teaching practice. Students often come to university with inadequate knowledge about the roles of their instructors and, on the other hand, instructional development remains unclear to faculty members who usually teach the way they were taught. Thus, the main purposes of a faculty evaluation system should be to provide the feedback that initiates self-improvement and to provide the data needed for personnel evaluation. If this is done effectively, it can lead decision-makers to be more capable of managing reduced product development cycle time (for example, curriculum development and research), improving academic and administrative services AND reduced costs. I end up by saying there is a great difference between the good and the best. So, let's hope for the best for our future generations.

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