Using Student Course Evaluations to Design Faculty Development Workshops (Report‪)‬

INTRODUCTION Teaching consumes fifty percent or more of a professors time (Bowen and Schuster, 1986), yet professors are tenured, promoted and evaluated more on the basis of their research and scholarly activities than on their teaching. It may be too much to say that institutions of higher learning "have paid lip service" to the importance of teaching, or that "Policies, procedures and criteria for the evaluation and promoting of faculty in higher education contribute to the marginalization of teaching" (Davidovitch and Soen, 2006, p. 351). It is curious, however, why the activity that consumes so much time, and is seen by many outside the academy as the overarching objective of a college or university (namely, to educate students), is often of lesser importance when evaluating faculty performance.