Chancellor's Awards for Excellence in Teaching

The primary criterion for the awards is skill in teaching, although consideration is given to sound scholarship (usually demonstrated through publications or artistic productions) and service to the University and to the campus. In the selection of persons to be nominated for these awards the following criteria are to be used:

Eligibility

Candidates must be full-time regular (tenured or tenure-track) teaching faculty, who currently and regularly carry a full-time teaching load as defined by the campus for full-time teaching. Candidates may hold any full-time academic rank. Candidates must have completed three consecutive academic years of full-time teaching at Binghamton University prior to the year of nomination. Recipients of any Chancellor's Award may not be nominated for another Chancellor's Award within a five-year period.

Teaching Techniques and Representative Materials

There must be positive evidence that the candidate performs superbly in the classroom. The nominee must maintain a flexible instructional policy which adapts readily to student needs, interests and problems. Mastery of teaching techniques must be demonstrated and substantiated. Consideration is to be given to the number of substantially different courses taught, the number of students per course, and the different teaching techniques employed in the various courses.

When available, student evaluations (in the form of student questionnaires administered and compiled by persons other than the nominee) presented for several different courses over a period of several recent years may provide a clear idea of the nominee's impact on students.

Scholarship and Professional Growth

Candidates must be teacher/scholars who keep abreast of their own field and who use the relevant contemporary data from that field and related disciplines in teaching. Evidence in this area includes but is not limited to publications or artistic productions.

Student Services

In relating to students, candidates must be generous with personal time, easily accessible, and must demonstrate a continual concern for the intellectual growth of individual students. The focus here is the accessibility of the nominee to students outside of class, e.g. office hours, conferences, special meetings, and the nominee's responsibility in terms of student advisement.

Academic Standards and Evaluation of Requirements and Student Performance

Candidates must set high standards for students and help them attain academic excellence. Quantity and quality of work that is more than average for the subject must be required of the students. Candidates must work actively with individual students to help them improve their scholarly or artistic performance. This individual interaction is an important source of information which indicates the nature and level of instruction offered by the nominee. Consideration is to be given to the quality, quantity, and difficulty of the tasks or work assigned to students.

Candidates' evaluations of students' work must be strongly supported by evidence. They must be willing to give greater weight to each student's final level of competence than to the performance at the beginning of the course. Since expert teachers enable students to achieve high levels of scholarship, it is possible that the candidates' marking records may be somewhat above average. There must also be evidence that the candidates do not hesitate to give low evaluations to students who do poorly. For this category, consideration should be given to grading patterns, particularly grade distributions for all courses in at least two recent years. Evidence in support of student performance may also be assessed by the accomplishments of students, including placement and achievement levels.

All Nomination Materials Must be Submitted Electronically

Nomination materials must be submitted in Microsoft Word format. PDF files will not be accepted. The nomination dossier should include the following:

Nomination letter
Chair's letter
Dean's letter, which should be 1-2 paragraphs in length
Supporting letters of reference (combined letters should not exceed a total of 20 pages)
Nominee-authored statement of teaching philosophy
Curriculum vitae
Selected evidence of teaching:
- Summary of SOOTs (individual SOOTs will not be accepted)
- Sample syllabus pages, limited to a combined total of 20 pages
Statement of justification (a summary of the candidate's qualifications for the award, distilling into a two-page statement the most salient information from 1-7 above)

Nomination dossiers should be submitted to the Dean's Office of the nominee's school. The Deans' Offices have set their own deadlines for receipt of these dossiers; please contact the relevant office for specific details. A list of names of nominees must be submitted by the Dean's Offices to the Provost's Office no later than Friday, 7 December 2007. Completed nomination dossiers must be submitted electronically by the Deans' Offices no later than Friday, 4 January 2008 to Deborah Dunn, Office of the Provost, at ddunn@binghamton.edu. We ask that you take these deadlines very seriously; files that come in late create difficulties for us in processing.

For More Information

For information from the State of New York on the Chancellor's Awards for Excellence, please visit the following website: http://www.suny.edu/provost/facultyawards.cfm?navLevel=5. Please note that this website may not yet have current information on this year's Chancellor's Awards.