Faculty Supervisor Annual Evaluation Guidelines
If your role includes supervision of one or more full-time faculty members (including postdoctoral faculty, tenured or tenure-track faculty, clinical faculty, research faculty, and teaching faculty), you have the responsibility to prepare an annual evaluation for each full-time faculty member you supervise. Faculty evaluations are intended to be both formative (contributing to ongoing professional development of the faculty member evaluated) and summative (contributing to reappointment, promotion, tenure, and salary adjustment decisions). The evaluations you write are therefore important.
Below are a few best practices and references for relevant professional development readings related to preparing meaningful faculty evaluations.
Evaluation Best Practices
- Communicate Process Logistics
- Provide advance notice of any unit-specific information you will need faculty to report
on prior to the end of the fall academic term.
- Review your evaluation queue and communicate reminders as deadlines approach (and
immediately after they pass).
- Schedule one-on-one evaluation & planning meetings to occur after faculty have an
opportunity to review their evaluations
- Ensure faculty acknowledge their evaluations (and provide comments if they wish) so
that the evaluations can be reviewed by the approver (your supervisor)
- Provide advance notice of any unit-specific information you will need faculty to report
on prior to the end of the fall academic term.
- Be Forward-Thinking
- A key outcome of the faculty evaluation process (supported by both your written evaluation
and your one-on-one discussion of that evaluation with your faculty member) should
be clear goals for the future.
- Make sure to discuss any planned changes in workload distribution and the basis for
that planned change.
- A key outcome of the faculty evaluation process (supported by both your written evaluation
and your one-on-one discussion of that evaluation with your faculty member) should
be clear goals for the future.
- Be Honest
- Since the faculty evaluation is intended to be a mentoring tool that assists in the
ongoing professional development of each faculty member, it is important to identify
weaknesses that, if addressed, will assist faculty members in reaching their professional
goals and in making more meaningful contributions to their unit.
- Since the faculty evaluation is also used in a summative fashion, it is important
to provide meaningful scores. Consider developing a rubric for each content area
- Rubric will need to account for workload differences – someone with 20% effort assigned
to research should not be expected to have the same quantitative productivity as someone
with 60% effort assigned to research, for example.
- Rubric will need to account for workload differences – someone with 20% effort assigned
to research should not be expected to have the same quantitative productivity as someone
with 60% effort assigned to research, for example.
- Since the faculty evaluation is intended to be a mentoring tool that assists in the
ongoing professional development of each faculty member, it is important to identify
weaknesses that, if addressed, will assist faculty members in reaching their professional
goals and in making more meaningful contributions to their unit.
- Be Positive and Constructive
- Different phrasings of a criticism can produce dramatically different emotional responses,
which may impact subsequent implementation of recommendations.
- Be clear and evidence-based
- Relate both praise and constructive criticism to specific data in the faculty member’s annual report or your own observations.
- Different phrasings of a criticism can produce dramatically different emotional responses,
which may impact subsequent implementation of recommendations.
Recommended Professional Development Resources
Buller, J. L. (2012). Best practices in faculty evaluation: a practical guide for academic leaders. John Wiley and Sons, Inc.
Buller, J. L. (2006). The essential department chair: a practical guide to college administration. Anker Publishing Company, Inc.