2.2: Set Up Your Basic Structure

Set Up Your Basic Structure

Creating a Core Team

The core team will collaboratively lead the LAT and CAT. The team might also include members who help with logistics (e.g., scheduling, organizing resources), pursue related university-level changes in teaching evaluation, or study/evaluate change in your context. In the DeLTA project at UGA, the core team included four faculty (see 1.3 above) and graduate student and postdoc researchers and facilitators. The core faculty had collaborated on various projects previously and had strong working relationships.

Based on our experience, we recommend that core teams collaborate intensively and strategically divide their work. We found it useful to have one core team member lead the LAT and another member lead the CAT. If you anticipate larger cohorts, two CAT leaders would be even better. Though individuals led the LAT and CAT, planning and facilitation was often collaborative. We also had more than one facilitator from the core team at each LAT meeting. These co-facilitators joined small group discussions, which helped keep conversations on track and steer LAT members toward deeper reflection as needed.

We recommend weekly core team meetings to allow time for co-planning and problem solving. During weekly 1-hour meetings, we reviewed and refined meeting plans and materials and spent time discussing departmental progress and trouble-shooting department roadblocks. Once or twice a year we also had strategic planning days, which we used to delve into more intensive discussion and work to advance our approach. Weekly meetings and strategic planning sessions used shared agendas with clear goals and focused on using time effectively to achieve those goals.

The team benefited considerably from cognition-based trust, where we knew we could rely on one another and thus we trusted each other to follow through on our responsibilities to the team, almost without fail. We each took our responsibilities seriously and prioritized the work needed for the team, while also recognizing that occasionally folks needed extra help or time. None of us wanted to let the team down, but we also knew it was important to give one another grace and flexibility in the rare instances when it was needed. Team members also played to one another’s strengths, recognizing that no single team member was, or needed to be, strong at all facets of the work (e.g., communicating, focusing, reflecting, relationship-building, winning others over).

Scheduling LAT and CAT meetings, and supporting these faculty in making progress, requires a good deal of attention to detail and persistence. The LAT and CAT leaders and/or other core team members will need to be prepared to schedule meetings, send numerous reminders about meetings, and follow-up repeatedly on any product that faculty are asked to produce. Participants appreciate the time for learning and work in meetings, and the accountability provided by the core team, making this work worthwhile, albeit irksome.

Discussing the Project with Potential Participants

Getting started likely will require numerous one-on-one meetings with department chairs and college- or university-level administrators to share the project objectives and expected outcomes and explain how their partnership is needed. You also will need to spend time listening to each individuals’ interests and concerns around teaching evaluation. Listening will help to build rapport and buy-in, and the information you gather will allow you to adapt the project to your context. For DeLTA at UGA, the project developers followed a similar format for each one-on-one meeting. We shared the project background, objectives, and planned format. We also discussed the fact that we were funded by the National Science Foundation, as this award motivated people’s engagement. We always spent time asking heads and administrators to share about their interests and concerns while we took notes to inform our work. We ended each meeting by asking for a commitment of involvement or if we could follow up about a commitment.

Recruiting Departments

When you begin to recruit teams for this process, you will stack your deck with departments that have expressed interest, are receptive, and ideally are proud of fostering a supportive climate for developing and rewarding good teaching. They may have a reputation through receipt of unit or campus-wide teaching awards. These are excellent first cohort choices.

In DeLTA’s first several years of recruiting, we prioritized including departments that seemed willing and open, rather than investing time in convincing recalcitrant departments. It was not entirely clear from the start whether a department and their leadership would invest substantively in the project. Over time, when we learned that a department head or CAT members either were unwilling or did not have the bandwidth to invest we deprioritized that unit in favor of other units who had more motivation and were placing a higher priority on the work.

We have found that departments who proselytize their successes across campus generate queries from faculty and administrators in other units who are eager for access to similar resources. Department leadership turnover also is an inevitable and regular occurrence, and these changes can lead to new opportunities or new limitations.

In considering the potential success of these additional units, there are some critical indicators of successful departments.

1. Department Head: Make sure you have a committed department head who acknowledges the limitations of their expertise and is willing to empower faculty to assume this role. Heads who delegated the development of new practices to knowledgeable others were more successful in advancing teaching evaluation (Ericson, et al., 2025). In addition, department heads who perceived that teaching was undervalued and interpreted this as a problem but were confident that they could support the process were more successful in shepherding change (Ericson, et al., 2025).
2. CAT teams: The empowered faculty need to command respect from both their department head and colleagues.
   • Consider the tenure status of your members. Non-tenure track faculty are often perceived as lacking sufficient knowledge to create policy for tenure-track faculty. Discuss this with both the head and the faculty member before committing to membership.
   • Departments who have created hierarchies with service courses separated from the courses supporting their majors may have associated challenges with how teaching is evaluated.
   • If during discussions with faculty, you detect the department is somewhat fractured in terms of disagreement with some dissent, it may be productive to include a nay-sayer as one of the representatives on the team. Change may be slower to enact as a result, but including all perspectives and hearing from a convert may help allow other dissenters to feel their voices are being heard .
   • If you hear from the faculty representative that their access to the chair is limited or they are not provided opportunities to seek input from the rest of the department, take a pause, go back to the department head, and discuss the goals of the program. It may be time to seek another faculty member with more seniority or to reassess the working relationship between the head and faculty member.
   • Facilitators should feel empowered to decline to include a faculty member in the program if their fellow faculty consider them to be non-cooperative or they have not developed a good collaborative reputation.

Setting Up a Schedule

Meetings can be structured in a variety of formats to meet the unique needs of your campus. The materials we have presented assume formal twice a month face-to-face meetings for the CAT and monthly meetings for the LAT (6 times per year). However, other campuses have developed more informal online meetings during which the groups share progress after meeting individually and following directions and deadlines from the the facilitation team. For example, Texas Tech met once a month since they weren’t paid, with some working meetings before show-and-tell with a facilitator.