As my university’s director of faculty development, charged with designing a new Center for Teaching & Learning, I surveyed faculty to try to get a sense of how they felt about their jobs. Survey results are in and I have done a preliminary sort of the data. Here are my initial impressions:
- Both full- and part-time faculty derive much satisfaction from helping students learn and seeing signs that their teaching had an effect. But not a single respondent referred to student evaluations of teaching. The instrument simply isn’t on instructors’ radar as an informative, useful tool. (Probably because it’s not.)
- Only 2 of the 79 full-time faculty who completed the survey mentioned collaborating with colleagues to foster student achievement. Teaching seems to be regarded, in the end, as a solitary endeavor.
- On Likert-scaled questions about teaching, research, and service, full-time faculty were the most satisfied with their teaching (4.3 out of 5) and the least satisfied with their research (3.2). Perhaps this explains why only a handful of both full- and part-time faculty expressed a desire for pedagogical training. Since respondents frequently cited high teaching loads as the main impediment to engaging in more research, opportunities to learn how to teach more efficiently — for example, by spending less time on grading — might be well-received.
- Although satisfaction with research had the lowest numerical score, responses to open-ended questions about committee service were far more negative than comments about teaching or research. Faculty signaled frustration with the inequitable distribution of service commitments, meetings that were badly managed and time-consuming, and a general lack of concrete outcomes from committee work.
- In general, faculty feel that there are too many conflicting demands on their time. As a result, they feel forced to reduce the scholarship that — in their minds — is inherent to being a professor. Notable in its absence is any mention of the scholarship of teaching and learning.