3.6 Strategies to Maintain and Improve the Quality of Teaching Staff

3.6.1 Basic Policy of Educational Development

The University must maintain and improve the quality of its faculty in order to provide an outstanding education at the University and to meet the different educational needs of each student. The office of the Dean of the Graduate School will play an active role in the development of faculty members by implementing programs for faculty development in teaching and supervision of graduate students.

3.6.2 Methods

Specifically, the University will conduct the following:

3.6.2.1 Teaching Guidelines
The Dean of the Graduate School’s office will create, maintain and distribute guidelines for quality teaching to ensure that uniform best-practice teaching standards are observed at the University.

3.6.2.2 Student Teaching Evaluations
Students will evaluate each course with a standardized questionnaire at the end of the course. The student responses will be reported to the Dean of the Graduate School’s office and will be distributed to the instructors and students. The Dean of the Graduate School’s office will assist the instructors to respond appropriately to this feedback. This feedback should be treated as confidentially as possible.

3.6.2.3 Peer Review of Teaching
Faculty members will support the development of their colleagues by participating from time to time as classroom observers, with the agreement of the instructor. The date of such observation will be reported to the Dean of the Graduate School’s office, and the observer will discuss their observations with the instructor in a collegial, respectful and supportive manner.

3.6.2.4 Instructor Training
The Dean of the Graduate School’s office will arrange training sessions, and workshops for faculty development from suitably qualified facilitators, in order to enhance the teaching ability of faculty members.

3.6.2.5 Mentoring
A mentoring system will be established so that faculty with less experience in teaching and thesis supervision can meet with more experienced faculty to receive advice and support. As a part of this system the Thesis Committee supervising each student will include junior and senior faculty members to facilitate the transfer of skills relating to supervision of research.

The Dean of the Graduate School’s office will implement these methods to ensure the improvement of the education and research of the Graduate University.