ADFL Resources

ADFL Guidelines on the Administration of Foreign Language Departments

ADFL Statement of Good Practice:
Teaching, Evaluation, and Scholarship

Recent widespread calls for a new emphasis on teaching in the mission and the reward system of higher education present foreign language and literature departments both opportunities and challenges. As recognition for teaching grows, rewards may increase for activities to which foreign language and literature department faculty members typically give considerable time and care. But hasty adoption of inadequate assessment measures is more likely to impair than to improve teaching. As departments respond to demands that faculty performance and productivity be subject to greater accountability, it will be important to reaffirm that scholarship and teaching support and enhance each other. Programs and procedures should maintain a locally appropriate balance between teaching and scholarship and reflect a well-considered sense of what constitutes good practice in teaching and evaluation.

Good evaluation requires sensitivity, judgment, and significant time and effort. Given the diversity of the American system of higher education, the criteria applied in different institutions will necessarily vary. What is appropriate in a research university may be limiting and even destructive in other settings. A department should develop rewards and assessment procedures for teaching and scholarship that fit its institution's history, mission, students, and resources. Departments and institutions can benefit from encouraging faculty members whose interests shift among teaching, scholarship, and administration or service over the course of their careers.

Teaching is the focus of the day-to-day professional life of most faculty members in foreign language and literature departments and is the primary source of the gratification they find in their careers. Scholarship is nevertheless a distinguishing feature of the work done by faculty members in higher education. When giving renewed emphasis to teaching, administrators should recognize that faculty members need to engage in scholarly projects that sustain and renew their intellectual lives. Especially in institutions like two-year colleges, where teaching has long dominated the mission and the reward system, faculty members need support that affirms the ways in which scholarship vitalizes teaching; creating opportunities for scholarship is not prima facie evidence of a lack of care and attention to teaching. Scholarship, broadly defined, is essential to effective teaching and to a satisfying professional life in the humanities.

Defining Good Teaching

Good teaching takes many forms. The characteristics listed below are common to many styles of effective instruction in a variety of foreign language classroom formats using a range of pedagogical methods.

Good teaching begins with imaginative, conscientious course design and ongoing efforts to maintain and develop subject-area and methodological expertise.
A good teacher recognizes that students learn by hearing the foreign language spoken well and by reading authentic texts, as well as by communicating with others in the foreign language, both orally and in writing. Practice in using the productive and receptive skills should be an integral part of every course taught in a foreign language, including those that focus on literature or culture.
A good teacher recognizes that students learn by interpreting, synthesizing, and evaluating what they hear and read; consequently, a good teacher endeavors to respond to students' ideas frequently and constructively.
A good teacher respects students and establishes a classroom environment in which students are encouraged to communicate in the foreign language.
A good teacher meets professional obligations conscientiously by holding regular office hours and returning written assignments and exams promptly.
Recognizing that valuable learning occurs both inside and outside the classroom, a good teacher encourages student conferences, peer study groups or tutoring, and regular practice of the foreign language.
Good teaching is enhanced when faculty members work cooperatively to ensure that instruction in every classroom is related to that in other classes in the department, in the humanities, or across the university.
The productivity of a teacher is qualitative; it cannot be reduced to such quantitative measures as student credit hours.
Good teaching is intense, demanding, and time-consuming. Honoring teaching does not mean assigning more of it. Good teaching may logically be rewarded, encouraged, and enhanced by periods of less teaching and no teaching.

Evaluating and Encouraging Good Teaching

The increased focus on undergraduate teaching often comes with a demand for additional tools for judging teaching performance. In the past, often the only measure of a teacher's effectiveness has been the student opinion survey at the end of the term. Teaching can be more effectively evaluated by using multiple measures. Departments need to create environments where teaching is a subject of ongoing formal and informal discussions. The review of teaching should be approached with the same care and conscientiousness used to evaluate scholarly work.

Offering more rewards is one way to encourage good teaching. If, however, the quality of instruction is evaluated only when salaries are set or promotions are at stake, assessment can be detrimental to teaching. Improving teaching requires settings where individuals can freely and openly review their teaching practices, admit weaknesses, and experiment with new, unfamiliar approaches. When promotion, tenure, and salary are at issue, the stakes in evaluating teaching are high and teachers will be reluctant to admit weaknesses or take risks. Evaluations intended to reward teaching ("summative assessments") must be kept separate from evaluations designed to improve teaching ("formative assessments").

The term assessment has in many institutions come to refer to evaluation of programs as well as of individual faculty members. Governmental bodies and granting agencies have increasingly demanded program assessments that measure student learning. Program assessments should build on the same qualitative, multiple measures used to evaluate individual teachers. Chairs and faculty members should play a leading role in designing and conducting such assessments so that the results will reflect their programs accurately and comprehensively. Departments can usefully address the programwide assessment of student achievement by developing statements of purpose and then creating appropriate measures to determine how well these objectives are being met. The primary purpose of program assessment should be for the faculty to discover how the department's programs can be strengthened and student learning enhanced.

Performance review for tenure, promotion, or salary increases should include comprehensive, qualitative evidence about teaching, but evaluations of teaching should not be limited to occasions when rewards are at stake.
Faculty members should assemble portfolios to represent their work as teachers. In addition to including the traditional student evaluations, portfolios may contain records of peer visits to classrooms, syllabi, course development plans, and representative student work. Individual faculty members should be encouraged to write periodic self-evaluations.
Departments should develop coherent programs to train graduate students who have teaching assignments and to improve teaching at all levels, including tenured and untenured and adjunct ranks. Administrators should provide resources to support these programs as generously as possible.
Departments should encourage faculty members to visit one another's classes. Some of these visits should be made for formative purposes and thus discussed only by the teachers involved.
In preparing evaluation forms, departments should emphasize qualitative measures and discursive formats, which represent the complexity and diversity of good teaching.

Integrating Teaching and Scholarship

Students need to have teachers who serve as models for learning--who are, in effect, lifelong students. Because teaching and scholarly activity are mutually reinforcing, departments and institutions should create conditions that encourage all faculty members to engage in intellectual inquiry.

Scholarship should be a criterion for promotion and tenure in institutions of higher education. Different departments will have different expectations about the kinds of scholarly activities that best serve their missions and fit their institution's profiles. Publication need not be the only or even the most important measure of a faculty member's accomplishments. In evaluations of scholarship, different kinds of activities and products should be given credit. Suitable measures of excellence should be developed for nontraditional as well as for traditional forms of scholarship.

Scholarship--the effort to advance knowledge--is a distinguishing feature of higher education. Knowledge can be advanced by the reconfiguring of previously established truth for different purposes or audiences, by the subtle altering of opinion about ideas long and securely held, or by the more effective explanation and dissemination of concepts, interpretations, and information that originated with other scholars. Institutions and faculty members should share knowledge with students and with the general public as well as with peers.

Released time for scholarly work should be supported, and faculty members should be held accountable for such released time. An institution should not, however, recruit faculty members by promising to keep them out of the classroom.
Faculty members should be allowed and even encouraged to shift the emphasis of their activities over the course of their careers. Departments should recognize the value to the individual and to the institution of changes in the focus of a faculty member's work.
Departments should recognize the value of having a diverse faculty practicing a range of scholarly activities.
Scholarship should be defined broadly and not be limited to the academic book or article. Local definitions of scholarly activity will vary and may include the presentation of papers, the development of instructional materials and computer software, reviews of others' scholarly work, and other forms of writing. These activities should be evaluated according to well-thought-out standards.
Scholarship on teaching--its methods, assessment procedures, and ways to improve it--should be valued on a par with traditional forms of scholarship.

Adapted from a statement prepared by the ADE Ad Hoc Committee on Changes in the Profession: Teaching and Research; adopted by ADFL 1993; reaffirmed by the ADFL Executive Committee in 2001.

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