By SHANNON O. WELLS
The Senate Faculty Affairs committee spent a chunk of its first meeting of 2024 discussing concerns about faculty evaluations, specifically how Pitt’s Office of Measurement and Evaluation of Teaching (OMET) surveys define the fostering of classroom “inclusivity.”
At its Jan. 9, meeting, the committee, led by new co-chair Frank Jenkins, associate professor in the School of Medicine and School of Public Health, focused on the evaluations. He also continued a discussion from the committee’s Dec. 8 meeting regarding what topics can be discussed with both members of the faculty union bargaining unit and non-members, which include School of Medicine faculty.
Regarding the OMET surveys, Jenkins said the Educational Policies committee, in an effort to address concerns that the surveys are clearly worded and fairly applied, requested a Faculty Affairs volunteer to assist in reviewing and proposing revised language for survey questions that pertain to inclusivity.
Jenkins said he and Bonnie Falcione, Educational Policies co-chair, discussed the surveys, including the origin of an item asking students if the “Instructor creates an inclusive learning environment for all students.”
“And there were some concerns raised about that phrase. One was there’s a lack of clarity with what the term ‘inclusive’ means,” he said. “It says it’s not defined and can be interpreted in a variety of manners, such as an EDI (equitable, diverse and inclusive) sense, or in terms of topics, etc.”
When a student rates an instructor poorly in this area, Jenkins noted, there’s no mechanism to provide or collect additional information the instructor or department could use to address a potential problem.
Jenkins said the Educational Policies committee added the “inclusivity” item to OMET surveys as part of Pitt’s response to student requests during summer 2020, following the national wave of Black Lives Matter social justice protests. The Council of Deans discussed adding a “general” response-type question and implemented it in the survey the following spring.
“The way I’m understanding this is they’re looking for questions that actually generate information that the instructor can use to then improve the course,” Jenkins said. “The way it’s written now, you just say yes (or) you say no. It doesn’t really tell you anything. … It’s so vague, they don’t understand it. So they’re asking for help from our committee.”
Laura Dietz, associate professor in the Department of Counseling and Behavioral Health, volunteered for the OMET review group. She noted that new annual self-evaluations in the School of Health and Rehabilitation Sciences will include a heading for DEI initiatives that instructors can incorporate into areas such as teaching, mentorship and clinical sites they supervise.
“I’d be happy to volunteer for that,” she said. “It’s very helpful to have kind of high ratings from your students in that area. Of course, as we know, that’s often … less of a reflection on DEI and more of a reflection on whether the students like you or like your class. So, I’m really happy and motivated to help flesh that out a little bit.”
Useful elaboration
Tom Songer, Faculty Affairs co-chair, agreed that the survey wording “warrants attention,” including questions about how to distinguish inclusion “across all of the vast amounts of disciplines that are being taught,” he said. “And students may have opinions about inclusion that don’t necessarily take into account the nuance that goes across all the different disciplines.
“And the concern, then, would be that these teaching evaluations do have some role to play — in some areas a very strong role and other areas a (smaller) role — in the promotion process,” he added.
Seth Weinberg, professor in the Department of Oral and Craniofacial Sciences, said there’s a “bigger debate” about whether the evaluations should be used at all in promotions, “because they’re not designed to be used that way. They’re designed to provide informative feedback to faculty members.
“It’s a formative evaluation,” he added. “So that’s a bigger, broader problem with the misuse of these types of things. I think that’s important to point out.”
He recommended amending the survey to require an explanation for low scores — based on a five-point scale — on the inclusivity question. “Maybe it doesn’t help with the question per se, but at least it might provide something useful,” he said, “because if you see three or four or five different people saying the same thing, I think that could indicate something.”
Dietz, an appointment stream faculty member, emphasized that OMET surveys will be an ongoing factor in determining promotions “even if we’re moving toward more observational bases of evaluation and teaching,” she said. “I don’t think that there’s an easy, one-size-fits-all answer, but I’d like to be involved in the (discussion process). … This is something that really affects a lot of faculty. … We don’t get to opt out of the OMETs.”
Seeking discussion topics
In other Faculty Affairs topics, Jenkins proposed sending a poll for faculty members to share areas of “interest or importance” for the committee to discuss, “to make sure that we give our faculty the opportunity to have their concerns brought to this level,” he said
Regarding his and other committee members’ concerns about what information can or cannot be shared with members of the Union of Pitt Faculty bargaining unit as opposed to non-members, Jenkins deferred to Robin Kear.
“I’m sending out a call to Robin for leadership on this,” he said. “I don’t know if we’d be allowed to talk to the faculty that are going to be part of the bargaining unit. Or does it have to be only going to faculty that are outside of the bargaining unit? Because I certainly don’t want to step on toes and get in the crosshairs of the union group by making some sort of mistake.”
Kear said she thinks there are ways “to reach out to faculty to find out if there are concerns” to discuss, although she’s not sure about a survey to all faculty. “I don’t believe we’ve done one of those in a very long time. But that’s not to say that we can’t or that we shouldn’t. I can reach out to (Faculty Assembly) members and ask them to reach out to their areas.”
As far as topics or issues that can be discussed, Kear noted she has been “thinking about this for three years now” while negotiating shared governance’s role alongside the faculty union. “And I feel that (this group) and any faculty member that wants to bring an issue here can do so.
“We can talk about any item in the committee that you want,” she added. “We can try to work with the union on presenting what this group thinks might move an issue forward.”
Kear noted that there are problems with administration representatives “being able to talk to us about certain things and get information, or talk to us candidly about issues that are in the mandated subjects of bargaining — mandatory subjects. They will not do so.”
First expressed at the Dec. 8 Faculty Affairs meeting, Kear said the committee should consider getting a chancellor’s appointee from the medical school, so the group could effectively discuss issues related to those faculty, who are not in the bargaining unit. Meanwhile, Kear said she’s been moving concerns “forward through my usual chats” until she hears “we can’t solve that or talk about that right now.”
Despite potential barriers and complex dynamics involving the administration and union, Kear said she’s “always felt that talking through issues and presenting solutions (is) better than not doing it at all.”
Jenkins said he would work with Kear to help finesse the situation and move ahead with a poll for discussion topics, “and let’s see what kind of interest we get.”
Shannon O. Wells is a writer for the University Times. Reach him at shannonw@pitt.edu.
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