Submitting a Nomination

The Committee on Distinguished Teaching Awards wishes to bring to your attention the opportunity for submitting nominations for the distinguished teaching awards.

The purpose of the awards is to call attention to the importance of teaching as well as to recognize those who have demonstrated excellence. The faculty awards are made at the Celebration of Distinguished Teaching Dinner, and a cash award goes with the certificate. The amount of the cash award becomes a permanent supplement to the awardee's salary in subsequent fiscal years for as long as the awardee remains employed at Indiana University. The Lieber Associate Instructor Awards are also given at Founders Day and they receive, in addition to the certificate, a one‑time cash award.  The awards to be presented in 2012 are listed below:

• Sylvia E. Bowman Award

• Frederic Bachman Lieber Memorial Award

• Herman Frederic Lieber Memorial Award for Teaching Excellence

• The President's Award for Teaching

• Lieber Memorial Teaching Associate Award

Individuals may make nominations directly to the Committee or they may submit nominations through departmental chairpersons or deans. Serious consideration should be given to the nomination of faculty members. The committee does not consider visiting or emeriti faculty nor former All University Teaching Award recipients for these awards.  For the Sylvia E. Bowman, Frederic Bachman Lieber, the Herman F. Lieber, and the President’s Awards, the committee will only consider tenured full-time faculty (or faculty holding an equivalent appointment in a continuing full-time position) who have taught for five or more years at Indiana University. In a change from previous years, the committee will also consider lecturers for the President’s Award. Please be sure to carefully read the eligibility requirements for these awards. The following suggestions for evidence are presented for use in preparing a dossier.

General Guidelines

The quantity and quality of information submitted in support of a nomination have tended to vary considerably in the past. While there is no wish to demand an artificial uniformity in the documents submitted to it, the Committee believes that some description of what it looks for when evaluating nominations may be helpful.

All the awards are given in recognition of distinguished teaching; a candidate must be judged, therefore, in terms of his or her accomplishments as a teacher. Evidence concerning a candidate's excellence in research, in administrative duties, or in public service is relevant only so far as the information helps explain the candidate's effectiveness as a teacher.

Similarly, statements concerning a candidate's personality or popularity are significant only when they help demonstrate or define the precise nature of the individual's excellence in teaching. The Committee naturally is interested in knowing all it can about the individuals it must evaluate, BUT its decisions must rest primarily upon information that is offered to substantiate superiority in teaching.

The more precise such information is, the more likely it is to gain favorable consideration.

• The Committee is interested in knowing the particular way in which a candidate has displayed his or her abilities to best advantage:

  • whether he or she is most outstanding in lecturing,

  • as a leader of small seminars and classes,

  • and/or as a guide for students in their independent projects.

• The Committee wishes to learn through the required self‑analysis how the candidate has enlarged the content or elevated the intellectual level of his or her courses, how the candidate has used constructive feedback from  student evaluations and peer reviews to improve his or her teaching, and how his or her teaching activities have contributed to the intellectual growth of  both the students and the candidate.

• The Committee is concerned with the candidate's rigor as a teacher. It seeks evidence that the candidate has been doing not simply a good job but a distinguished one and that his or her contribution to students, to the department and to the University as a whole testifies to exceptional abilities and efforts.

This evidence may be derived from various sources. While the Committee appreciates the opinions of a candidate's students, as well as those of colleagues and supervisors, it usually values these opinions in direct proportion to their spontaneity. It does not, therefore, recommend deliberate campaigns to solicit student support. It finds the view of students most informative when the students are least aware that these views may affect their teacher's chances of receiving an important award. In general, the Committee is more impressed by the quality than by the number of endorsements that a candidate receives. Student course evaluations submitted as part of a candidate's dossier should be accompanied by an explanation of how the evaluations were administered. An explanation of the methods by which evaluations and endorsements were obtained helps insure that the Committee will weigh them appropriately.

Those professors who do not receive awards in the year when they first are nominated are automatically reconsidered by the Committee for an additional year. New supporting evidence may be submitted in the second year.