Chair instructions 

Thank you for putting the time and effort into recognizing the excellent work of your colleagues.

FOR ALL INDIVIDUAL AWARDS: Chairs have the responsibility of confirming if a nominee meets this eligibility requirement for the individual awards: Full-time faculty at the rank of Instructor or above, or part-time faculty with at least five years experience teaching at UND. Please respond promptly to the email you will receive from Jana Lagro concerning the eligibility of nominees in your department.

FOR ALL AWARDS: For all individuals and departments nominated for all awards, chairs will receive instructions via campus mail for compiling supporting folders (which are due January 4) in a color coded loose leaf file.  For undergraduate teaching award nominees, there is a two step process described below (with chairs letters due November 1 and, for the ten semi-finalists, full files due January).

 

 Undergraduate Teaching Award:

The chair's two page letter is due by Thursday, November 1, 2012 at 4:00 p.m. and must be sent electronically by that deadline to Jana Lagro (jana.lagro@email.und.edu) as a PDF.  

This rubric is used by the committee to evaluate the chairs' letters.

Explanation: In 2011 the Outstanding Faculty Awards Committee (OFAC), which selects the awardees, instituted new measures with the intent of making the workload associated with recognizing our colleagues in this way less burdensome.  In the fall nominations for faculty teaching and service awards are received by the committee. The Office of Instructional Development (OID), which administers the work of the committee, then informs chairs of any nominees in their department. In the past chairs then either personally created the supporting file or designate a member of their department to do so and turned in the materials to the Writing Center by the established deadline in January. Prior to this change in a typical year over 70 faculty members may have received at least one nomination for the undergraduate teaching award category alone. Many supporting files were generated (a total of 90 files for all 2010 awards for example). As you know, this represents a tremendous amount of work on the part of chairs and departments in generating and gathering the materials for the files. The task of reading this mass of material, especially given the very tight time frame for the selection process to occur, was equally an onerous one for the committee.

To streamline and reduce workload a two-step process was put in place for the undergraduate teaching awards category, which represents by far the largest percent of nominations. When the nomination process closes, chairs will be informed if any teachers in their department have received a nomination for the undergraduate award. Chairs or their designees will then submit a two page letter addressing the merits of the candidate. No supporting material will be considered at this juncture. The committee will review all supporting letters submitted by chairs and select a list of ten semi-finalists. Full files will then be constructed by chair/chair designee for those semi-finalists and the committee will review those full files to select the awardees. Through this two step process (with a letter and then a full file for semi-finalists only, rather than a full file for every candidate as in the past) the number of files generated will be significantly less.    

The letter submitted in the first step of the process will be limited to two pages in length and should provide convincing evidence to the committee that the nominee should go forward. This rubric will be used by the Outstanding Faculty Awards Committee to evaluate these letters of support. The material gathered to evaluate teaching (teaching evaluations, peer evaluations, letters, etc.) should be referenced in the chair's letter, but NOT included (and if included it will not be forwarded to the committee.)

Your two page letter is due by Thursday, November 1, 2012 at 4:00 p.m. and must be recevied electronically by that deadline by Jana Lagro (jana.lagro@email.und.edu) as a PDF.  

Once the 10 undergraduate teaching award semi-finalists are chosen by the committee, we will mail a loose-leaf file to the chairs of those faculty that have been selected for the semi-finalist round.  Instructions on how to complete the nomination are given with the loose-leaf file.  This loose-leaf file needs to be completed and sent back to our department by 4:00 p.m. Friday, January 4, 2013.  The faculty member nominated is notified by our department.   

Please note again that this change in process affects only the Undergraduate Teaching Award. All other award categories will continue with the traditional process.