ACC Faculty Evaluation Proposed Revisions – Purposeful Change

The Purposeful Change is meant to encourage faculty to try new ideas from time to time to improve their teaching. Changing teaching habits can come in two basic forms: major overhauls and smaller, more targeted changes. Major overhauls take a lot of time and work and are usually only undertaken when really necessary. However, faculty often make regular, more manageable smaller changes to their courses to improve teaching and student learning, using insights gained from day to day teaching experiences.

The Purposeful Change project occurs in year 2 of the 3 year evaluation cycle. For it, you will need to decide upon some particular change to make in your teaching that you think might improve student learning in some way; it can be one of these smaller more focused changes or it might be a major change. This could be informed by your current areas of interest, student comments, evaluation feedback, and/or your peer dialog project. If you would like assistance in planning or implementing your targeted change, Faculty Development can assist you. You should think through what your purpose is in making this change, how you will be able to tell whether it resulted in an improvement, and plan to carry it out during this year.

Afterwards, you should reflect upon whether it accomplished what you intended, led to some completely different outcome than you expected, or just did not work out at all. Your evaluation will not be impacted by whether your change was a success or not, but will consider your reasoning, planning, and analysis of the outcome. The idea here is to develop a habit of looking for small changes you can make in your teaching and experimenting with them and deciding whether to retain them or not. Over time, even small changes might gradually grow into a more significant overhaul.

If you have already carried out such a change in the prior year, you may choose to discuss that change instead of a new one this year. You would still submit this form in year 2 of your evaluation cycle, however.