English Department
Guidelines for Preparing for Senior Lectureships

College of Liberal Arts and Sciences guidelines for faculty wishing to be considered for senior lectureships can be found at http://www.iusb.edu/~lasi/facpol.shtml.  The guidelines that follow are supplementary departmental guidelines.  

1.  To meet the requirement for “rigorous peer review of teaching by colleagues,” we will ask everyone to have reports from three peer visits.  A couple of these should come from departmental administrators; the dossier can also include peer evaluations from other lecturers.  Ideally, these visits should be spread out over time; they should not all be made by the same person.  A useful overview of peer observation of teaching can be found at the University of Texas website, http://www.utexas.edu/academic/cte/PeerObserve.html; the Facet website includes a detailed report on an innovative teaching development program incorporating peer review developed at the University of Nebraska,  http://www.unl.edu/peerrev/index.html 

2.  Evidence of collaborative work should be included–work on W130 exit goals, for example.  We want to emphasize that this activity is part of teaching in our department.  

3. Provide examples of service; rather than simply listing committees, explain concisely what the committee does and what your role was.  Evidence of service beyond the department is not required, but probably is helpful.  Community service, such as high school workshops, should be included if it is demonstrably relevant to professional interest.  Advising (as in serving as an advisor during registration) is another activity that you should include if you do it.  

4.  Include evidence of in-service professional development–e.g., departmental workshops, UCET presentations, SOTL conferences, system-wide Non-Tenure Track Faculty conferences held in Indianapolis every fall.  

5.  The above might include relevant course work, where applicable.

6.  External letters: a maximum of three, to document teaching, service, or professional development beyond the peer reviews.

7.  Self-assessment, as seen in annual reports, can be very helpful; evidence of reflection, adaptation, innovation.

8.  The annual report assumes new importance, since five years’ worth go into the dossier. The audience is no longer just the immediate supervisor and dean, but people who do not know you or know much about the teaching of writing. Readers who have to read multiple dossiers at one time consistently report that long annual reports become a burden.  Few committees or deans will welcome a hundred or even fifty pages of single-spaced annual reports from the same candidate.  To stress development, annual reports might well refer to reports from previous years, especially noting changes made in response to issues raised in student evaluations, peer reviews, or self-assessment.  Though some repetition is inevitable, one should try to avoid it.  Keep in mind that a reader who does not know you will respond to the persona the document projects.  

9.  The dossier needs to include a teaching statement. Assume an audience that includes people from the sciences and other disciplines. Since five years of student evaluations are included in the dossier, it is important to define excellent teaching in ways that are relevant to service and first-year courses: guide readers to see the challenges that first-year writing classes pose. Explain cheerfully, but note issues with which outsiders will be unfamiliar and relevant pedagogical strategies you have developed to address them.  Feel free to ask other people in the department to let you read their teaching statements, and to seek out other examples. 

10.  Although publication is not required of lecturers, people who have published creative or academic writing should include it.  If you can make a point about how your writing ties into your teaching of writing, so much the better.  	

11.  Please notify the chair and Director of First-Year Writing by May if you intend to go up the following fall.  Even earlier may be helpful.  Putting together a dossier is to some extent a collaborative activity–be sure to have a couple of people read it and make suggestions.  

(last updated 9/08)