Instructional Workload Policy

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The instructional workload policy of the College of Letters and Science is to maintain a College-wide average of two group instruction sections per instructional FTE per semester, and an average of two individual instruction sections per FTE per semester. Each department will develop its own departmental instructional workload policy, approved by the Dean.

GENERAL CONSIDERATIONS

This document describes the policy on instructional activities for the College of Letters and Science and provides guidelines for creating more detailed policies specific to the various schools, departments, and programs within the College.

The mission of the College of Letters & Science is broad and complex, requiring a great variety of instructional aims, methods, and settings. The College's stated mission includes:

The normal duties of a faculty member in the College of Letters & Science include teaching, research, and service. This distribution of effort means that the particular workloads of individuals within the College will vary considerably. Even within a given department, proportions of total workload devoted to one or another of the three major categories of effort will reflect necessary differences.

The primary way the teaching mission is accomplished in L&S, however, is through group instruction. Such instructional groups can be large or small, but they are in any case constituted of registered students who meet together regularly with an instructor. Such instruction may be in one of several traditional forms: lectures, discussion classes, seminars, field courses, workshops, studio or laboratory classes, for instance. Level of instruction and pedagogical requirements of particular disciplines dictate a variety of sizes for classes, ranging from large lectures to one-on-one instruction in performance or other creative areas. Teaching in any of these contexts involves a variety of corollary tasks that are fundamentally necessary to successful instruction, including such activities as preparing syllabi, selecting textbooks, insuring library access to relevant texts, ordering supplies for classroom or laboratory use, creating and grading written assignments, coordinating class planning with teaching assistants, and giving constant attention to preparation for every class.

Another standard format for teaching is individual instruction. This arises from a number of particular needs of the students in question, such as the undergraduate honors thesis, Masters thesis, Ph.D. dissertation, or Independent Study in a subject not otherwise available, all of which require the student's formal registration but which the instructional staff member assumes in addition to the duties in the Group Instruction category mentioned above. All faculty members are expected to participate in these instructional activities.

To maintain a dynamic instructional program and a vital College community, fed by creative change and the constant flow of new knowledge, much activity beyond the classroom is a necessary part of a faculty member's professional life. Besides the primary teaching duties in the group instructional modes listed above, and beyond the formal individual instructional activities, faculty members mentor and advise students, develop new instructional methods and materials, create and approve new courses, serve on committees that foster and oversee the teaching mission, direct and oversee the administration of large, multi-sectioned courses, train and advise teaching assistants in their teaching apprenticeship, develop and contribute to continuing education courses, engage in outreach activities, provide links with local school districts, and other such activities. Although it would be rare that any faculty member would do all of these things at any given time, it is assumed that all faculty will participate in such work.

DEPARTMENTAL INSTRUCTIONAL WORKLOAD POLICY

In view of the fact that separate programs often have unique pedagogical and programmatic considerations, each department will develop an instructional workload policy appropriate to its mission and that of the College. Each department will therefore define its specific mission and indicate how it is implemented in the unit's instructional workload policy. Such policies should consider the distinctive role of instructional academic staff members (both continuing and temporary) and teaching assistants as well as faculty members in fulfilling the department's teaching responsibilities. The policy should specify how courses at various levels--Elementary, Intermediate, and Advanced--are distributed as well as what rules govern the assignment of individuals to different kinds of courses: seminars, large lectures, pro-seminars, field courses, lab courses, etc., and how those assignments are rotated.

Each departmental teaching policy will specify the usual number of formal courses to be offered by each instructional staff member and indicate the criteria used to determine the appropriateness and fairness of its instructional assignments. Some comment on how the mix and distribution of graduate and undergraduate instruction is assigned is required. It is expected that within units there will be some differences in faculty teaching loads, depending on how other duties are assigned. Some explanation of the relationship between academic staff and faculty teaching loads should be included. Consideration should also be given to how team-teaching arrangements will be credited in order to achieve equitable distribution of teaching duties while also encouraging collaborative instruction both within departments and across departmental and disciplinary lines.

Each department's statement on its workload policy should specify:

Every department's instructional workload must be submitted to and approved by the Dean of the College. Thereafter, departures from the approved department policy must be approved in advance by the Dean. Such individual department or program instructional workloads, and subsequent requests for change, will be subject to the Dean's review to insure that they are consistent with College policy.

The Dean will monitor instructional policy and practice in individual departments by using, insofar as possible, established reporting mechanisms.