Iowa State University

Teaching Excellence Awards for Fall 2009 - Summer 2010

Teaching Excellence Award Guidelines

(Awards for Outstanding Teaching by Graduate Students)

Nomination Deadlines:

Awards Mailed to Departments:

Purpose of Program: The purpose of these awards is to recognize and encourage outstanding achievement by graduate students in teaching. The intent is to recognize up to 10% of the graduate students involved in teaching each year. The program is administered by the Graduate College.

Description of Awards: Each Teaching Excellence Award consists of a letter of commendation from the ISU President and a certificate of achievement signed by the ISU President and the Graduate Dean. Probably many teaching excellence winners will not be graduating at the time these awards are given, but recipients will also be recognized at the time of their graduation – each will be given an honor cord, cited in the ISU Commencement Program and recognized during the ceremony; the award is also noted on the student's transcript. Funding is not available through this program to offer cash prizes. However, departments are encouraged to use their own funds for this purpose whenever possible. Any cash prize should be handled directly by the department.

Eligibility: Any graduate student with teaching responsibilities, and who has been in a teaching position at least two terms (including summer sessions), is eligible for an award. Nominees do not necessarily need to be on a C-base appointment, but must be at Iowa State primarily to work on a graduate degree. Recipients of these awards must be enrolled at ISU at the time the awards are given; students who have already graduated are not eligible. A student is eligible for only one Teaching Excellence Award; however, it is possible to grant a student both a Teaching and a Research Excellence Award during his/her academic career. Examples of teaching duties include:

1. serving as the sole instructor for one or more sections of a course;
2. making frequent classroom presentations while not solely responsible for the instruction;
3. serving as discussion leader for a recitation section;
4. serving as laboratory instructor presenting new material or experiments not covered in the lecture section;
5. serving as laboratory instructor reviewing homework assignments and/or answering questions;
6. assisting with setting up experiments, preparing and/or cleaning up before and after class or lab;
7. tutoring students;or staffing a help room and/or assisting students in a lab;
8. proctoring exams, grading homework and/or lab. reports; working on course web pages, or projects;
9. performing other teaching-related duties unique to the department.

It is expected that those nominated for an award would be involved primarily with teaching duties like those described in items 1-5, although additional involvement in items 6-9 is possible.

Nomination Procedure: These nominations must be completed by the department official in charge of the award process. Individual faculty should check with their department for the award process within their programs.

• Teaching Excellence Nomination Form (Sign on with your NETID and password to access this form. Your NETID is the part of your email address before the @iastate.edu).

Selection Process: The process of selection is the responsibility of each department or interdepartmental program. In cases where departments hire students from other departments to teach courses for them, the hiring or employing department is responsible for recommending these students for awards (i.e. the department that organizes and supervises the courses to be taught).

Departments/interdepartmental programs are encouraged to develop a procedure for evaluating teaching performance (if not already in place). For programs wishing to establish a formal review process, the following ideas are offered:

• Consider the establishment of a committee of people that have direct knowledge of the individuals' teaching performance and responsibilities, and who have experience evaluating academic performance, such as TA coordinators, department chairs, teaching faculty, and past Teaching Excellence Award recipients.
• Consider methods of evaluation (e.g. direct observations, interviews with TAs, student evaluations and testimonials).
• Consider other factors such as 1) improvement and development; 2) difficulty of the teaching assignment; and 3) differences in teaching styles.

Award Method: Awards will be mailed to the nominating departments at the end of each semester. (The exact dates are given at the top of this page.) Departments will be responsible for presenting the awards and will have the opportunity to supplement the award with a cash prize at that time. Each nominee will be given an award provided the student meets the eligibility requirements and the department has sufficient entitlement to cover the award (or has made provisions to do so in special cases).

NOTE: If you have questions, or want to know which awards your program has already given out, please contact Amy Rogers in the Graduate College: 294-5645, or alrogers@iastate.edu.

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