Evaluating adjunct professors for promotion: a case study approach to review adjunct student evaluation of teachers over time

Student assessment of courses and instructors can provide meaningful data about effective educational practices.� Adjunct faculty make-up the majority of teachers in higher education but they are often not evaluated consistently or promoted to permanent faculty.� Instead, evaluations of adjunct faculty are primarily used to identify inadequacies.� The deficit thinking model argues that educational leaders should not use the term �at-risk� as a pretense to explain student outcomes.� Similarly, this study argues for the extension of the deficit thinking model to adjunct faculty. This retrospective mixed-methods case study investigated student feedback for one higher education teacher to understand procedures or best practices in the process of self-analysis for teaching effectiveness.� The three emergent themes from the study included instructor effectiveness (69.47%), course effectiveness (18.56%), and areas of improvement (11.97%). Findings indicate that in some instances educational leaders in higher education should shift thinking about the way contingent faculty are evaluated, promoted, and included in academic institutions.