More recognition and rewards for teaching?

Remon Rooij, Ingrid Vos, Floor Driessen, Annoesjka Cabo – TU Delft Teaching Culture Survey team

This year TU Delft participated for the second time in the Teaching Cultures Survey to portray our Delft university teaching culture. This survey was conducted in May 2022 among the TU Delft academic community, ranging in seniority from Ph.D. candidates to senior university management. More than 750 members of the academic staff (18% response rate) took part in the survey. Survey participants are positive about our teaching and learning environment and TU Delft’s support for university teaching. But they would like to see greater recognition of teaching within the academic career in appraisal and promotion.

Some results that stand out in the findings are:

  • Time spent on teaching: Of the TU Delft respondents 54% were satisfied with the amount of time they spent on university teaching, 27% would like to have spent less time and 19% would like to have spent more time. About the COVID period almost 38% of TU Delft participants reported that their university teaching workload had increased to a level where additional hours were needed.
  • Desired and perceived opportunity for education-oriented careers: 64% (63% in 2019) of staff would like university teaching to be very important in promotion opportunities. But the perceived importance for promotion to full professor is much higher for research (very important: 83% in 2022, 86% in 2019) than for teaching (very important: 27% in 2022, 24% in 2019). For valorisation these numbers are 31% (33% in 2019) and for leadership & organisation 26% (19% in 2019).
  • Career progression: A minority of 21% (25% in 2019) of respondents agreed with the statement “Time spent on university teaching has a positive impact on the career progression of academics at TU Delft” and 45% (38% in 2019) disagreed. Especially mid-career respondents disagreed with this statement (57%).  
  • Mentoring and professional development: 51% of TU Delft respondents stated they had someone they could turn to for mentoring on university teaching; for research, this is 63%. The majority of staff values pedagogical training and development as a regular part of one’s job (88% in 2022, 86% in 2019). TU Delft provides a supportive learning environment opportunity to develop and improve teaching practices (64% in 2022, 63% in 2019).
  • Commitment to rewarding teaching excellence: About half of the staff feels there is ‘much’ or ‘somewhat’ commitment among our departmental, faculty, and institutional leaders towards rewarding teaching excellence. But about a quarter of our staff also tells us that they just ‘do not know’ about the commitment of their leaders. People state that teaching deserves more attention in the annual appraisal: 23% (22% in 2019) agreed with the statement that university teaching was explored in depth during the annual appraisal, and 29% (32% in 2019) disagreed.
  • Trust in the robustness of evidence used to assess research and teaching decreased significantly from 2019 to 2022. For research 48% of respondents think that the evidence is very or somewhat robust; this was 61% in 2019. For education, it decreased from 40% (2019) to 30% now.

More information and follow-up session for all TU Delft staff

The Teaching Cultures Survey was developed by a global partnership to explore and track the culture and status of teaching in universities. It is based on the Teaching Excellence Framework by Dr Ruth Graham. This is an open-access career framework to help universities evaluate and reward the teaching achievements of their academic staff. You can read the TU Delft Teaching Culture Surveys summaries of 2022 and 2019. Also, Ruth Graham will come to Delft 2 February 2023 (1300-1500h) to share and discuss the TCS results with us! You are invited to join Ruth’s presentation on our TCS results at the Teaching Lab and the subsequent discussions on TU Delft teaching professionalization, robustness of evidence on teaching and education oriented career paths, and the role of teaching in the Result & Development talks. The meeting will be at the Teaching Lab. Register now!

Do you have other suggestions on how to reinforce our teaching culture or do you know of any developments going on in your faculty that you would like to share? Please let us know via teachingacademy@tudelft.nl.

 

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