rain, rain go away

This was the first morning since I arrived in late August that I had to walk to work in bad weather. I guess I am spoiled. It was a good thing that Mike got a really good umbrella as a gift when he played in the ASHP golf tournament while he was here. It really came in handy this morning.

Today, I am going to talk about my project, so those of you who think I am just partying in DC can log out now. I have had a lot of frustration trying to get the methodology worked out for my project. I have designed four parts to it--more than I can accomplish while I am here. Of course, I think I can do parts 1-3 even though all of the people I have consulted here tell me that I can't. Yesterday, while I was rereading many of the articles I collected as background, I think if finally started to gel. Hopefully, I can get things off the ground soon. Part one is a review of promotion and tenure documents at schools of pharmacy to see whether there is evidence of the scholarship of teaching. There are a few confounding factors with this. Can I get the documents from all the schools who have them? (some of the new schools may not have documents yet) Do some schools have different criteria in different departments? Are the documents too general to provide the information I am seeking? Finally, is there sufficient consensus about what constitutes scholarship of teaching vs. teaching excellence to have a clear definition of what I am looking for in the documents? And that is just part 1! Parts two and three are surveys of department chairs and faculty to determine their perceptions of what teaching-related activities are valued toward tenure. Hopefully, the only difficult part of the surveys will be getting an adequate return rate. I should be able to use the same list of activities that I use in Part 1 for the surveys. I can ask these two groups of people to rate the activities related to their importance toward promotion and tenure. Then I can compare the three sets of information. Easy--ha!

I guess that is enought for this morning. Mike is coming to visit for the weekend. I am really looking forward to his visit.