Responding to growing pressures to emphasize teaching excellence, more colleges and universities are creating or expanding programs that recognize and reward outstanding teachers. The editors summarize the main issues in this movement by posing these questions:
Should such programs be widespread or highly selective? Based in the college or in the department? Small or large? Student-driven or faculty-driven? How should exemplary teachers be identified? What data can be relied upon to represent teachers' accomplishments? Data from students? From colleagues? From outsiders?
Those who are looking for a general survey of this educational trend will probably find this book quite satisfactory. Sixteen separate essays describe kinds of reward programs, the question of criteria, and the differences created by institutional size and mission. The kinds of programs range from awards for individuals, awards to departments and programs, the "certification" approach, and the concept of "teaching academies." The question of selection criteria involves student, colleague, administrative, and alumni evaluations, and Thomas Angelo makes a case for discovering exemplary teachers by focusing on the difficult-to-measure but essential evidence of student learning. One chapter suggests that the portfolio approach to evaluation "offers a wider range of evidence than single measures." Finally, the book examines programs from research universities, two-year colleges, liberal arts colleges, and specific programs at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, the U.S. Military Academy, and The American Association of Colleges of Pharmacy.
Apart from the effectiveness of its general survey, the main strength of this book lies in its copious bibliographical material. Most of the sixteen chapters have their own up-to-date bibliography, and, though there is some inevitable duplication of entries, taken together, these bibliographies provide the reader with an excellent tool for continued investigations.
The primary weakness of this volume is its lack of argumentative edge. The essays are largely descriptive, identifying programs and issues and describing how they work rather than evaluating present and proposed solutions to the problems of identifying excellent teaching. More than half of these essays were presentations made at a 1994 conference on Faculty Roles and Rewards and under the constraints of fifteen or twenty-minute presentations, it is difficult for presenters to carve out a sufficiently narrow focus or to employ the kind of penetrating analysis one would like to see in a volume on this timely and complicated issue.
For example, the editors claim that in this volume "the authors address the question of how institutions can recognize and reward those faculty who go beyond mere competence and truly represent the best teaching higher education has to offer." There are at least two crucial assumptions in this statement that require more careful analysis--one, that "mere competence" is insufficient, and, two, that the proliferation of teaching awards is tapping into a large if not inexhaustible pool of candidates. Is it possible that "competence" (no small feat, perhaps) describes the vast majority of teachers in higher education and that the group of teachers who stand out as truly excellent is really quite small? Is it also possible that as the number of teaching awards proliferates and as the process of identifying worthy teachers exhausts this small group of faculty, teaching awards begin to go to merely "good" teachers or perhaps even to "merely competent" teachers? Those looking in this volume for such difficult questions to be raised and thoroughly dealt with will be a little disappointed.
Terry Nienhuis
Western Carolina University