Teaching Assessment Policy
Introduction
Dublin City University strives to foster a culture amongst its staff and student community that is open, collegial, collaborative, student focused and ambitious. These values reflect a commitment to equality, educational opportunity, social justice, ethical behaviour and academic freedom. In applying open, transparent and merit based effective recruitment and selection procedures the University strives to attract and retain high quality staff that share and live our values.
The following procedures are designed to ensure our process is planned, organised and conducted in a way that supports an objective, transparent merit based assessment of every candidate and ensure that the best candidate has been selected on their merits and abilities.
As part of the interview and assessment process for academic posts, candidates being assessed for Assistant Professor and Associate Professor posts may be required to make a teaching presentation to the assessment board. The teaching presentation will be delivered prior to the commencement of the interview and is designed to access candidates’ teaching, presentation and communication skills.
Candidates must achieve a satisfactory grading in this assessment to be considered eligible for appointment.
Candidates for Professor or Full Professor posts may also be required to deliver a presentation, the nature of which will be determined for the particular post.
Each candidate will have been previously advised at the formal invite stage that as part of the selection process, he/she will be required to make a presentation to permit assessment of his/her teaching/communication skills.
Candidates will be asked to present a teaching topic (the topic will be chosen by the Executive Dean of Faculty and/or Head of School and supplied to candidates in advance of the presentation session). The presentation will typically be 10 minutes in duration and will be followed by a 5 minutes period for questions and answers.
In turn candidates will be required to forward their teaching presentation to the Human Resources Department ahead of their assessment.
The same board will assess both the presentation and interview and will be convened in line with the normal selection board criteria:
- The Chair will normally chair both the presentation and interview, however in some appropriate instances he/she may decide to nominate another board member to chair the presentation board.
- The presentation will be conducted and the board members will take notes in the assessment documentation in the normal fashion. Immediately following the presentation the interview will commence.
Candidates must deliver their teaching assessment in person. If the candidate is being interviewed remotely (i.e. via Skype or Google Meets) he/she will not deliver a teaching presentation. Should the candidate be deemed ‘first appointable’ following the interview process he/she will be invited to attend in person a re-convened assessment board to deliver the presentation. Candidates must achieve a satisfactory grading in this assessment to be considered eligible for appointment.
An assessment of a candidate’s research output will be conducted through questioning in the actual interview.
As the formal assessment process is confidential there will be no provision for the relevant School members to be present at the teaching presentation. However, the Head of School can invite candidates to present to the School outside of the formal assessment process. It is important to note that such a presentation will have no bearing on the outcome of the formal assessment process.