Members of the teaching stream faculty convened at a social on February 2, 2017, to mark the newly created rank of full professor in the teaching stream and to celebrate the successful SJAC negotiations. While the gathering served to build community amongst the teaching stream, it also afforded members the opportunity to share their experiences and to help plan future advances.
The Teaching Stream Committee met on March 9, with new members joining veterans, to work toward forging short guidelines for the interim review, which has reportedly not been conducted in a uniform manner across units. A member who had recently gone through the interim review process shared their experience with the committee. Incorporating the member’s experience, amendments were suggested to UTFA’s extant draft guidelines for the interim review.
The committee has come to realize that UTFA needs to take a proactive role in educating chairs and department heads regarding the process itself, and to make standards for promotion more explicit, to include recent adjustments to the expanded criteria for assessment laid out in the Memorandum of Agreement. Committee members highly recommended that updated benchmarks for assessment be communicated to all members more fully, to enable them to proceed through the promotional process in a more knowledgeable fashion. It was recommended further that updates regarding teaching stream advancement should be developed across the promotional spectrum to include PTR. To this end, the committee will work on developing a tip sheet to assist teaching stream members in forging language that more fully indicates their accomplishments for the yearly Activity Report.
The committee will develop and distribute draft guidelines for feedback at its annual Teaching Stream Promotion Workshop, to be held on May 5. It is hoped that that new guidelines for promotion to full professor will be released by the Administration before this date, so that the specific criteria for advancement can be addressed at the May 5 meeting.
Kass Banning
Chair, Teaching Stream Committee