It’s the time of year for awards ceremonies on television and at schools, colleges and universities across the United States. Many of the winners are selected by grade point average or by popular vote of peers or departments or by an adoring fan base. Because the Colleague to Colleague group is slightly geeky (and proud of it!) and we like dealing in more quantitative data, the SIDLIT awards go through a different kind of selection process. 

A couple of years ago, the awards committee took a look at the process to see how we could make selections based more on specific nominating criteria.  At that time, we came up with the idea to make a list of questions for nominators to address rather than have people submit anything from a short four or five sentence paragraph saying how special the person was up to multi-page vitae documents that took a really long time to wade through.  The prior process made it difficult to make a judgment when nominations were so very different - and we had some huge variations in submissions! 

Once we came up with the questions related to each award, we then created a rubric for scoring purposes with a scale of 1 to 4.  These criteria are 4 - Exceptional Evidence Provided, 3 - Highly Effective Evidence Provided, 2 - Acceptable Evidence Provided, and 1 - Unacceptable Evidence Provided.  

This allowed for more objectivity about the nominations.  But to make things even less related to personality and more related to the actual nomination information, we struck upon the idea of something akin to blind grading.  We wondered, “What would happen if we took all of the personal information (or as much as we could identify) OUT of the nomination information and only looked at the nomination information?”

What does this look like, you ask?  An initial nomination might look something like this:  Sarah Bellum is an outstanding and active member of Superduper Community College.  She and a group of individuals provide an excellent program for students of SCC where all the teachers are strong and the students are good looking.  Even though she is busy raising alpacas in her free time, she always has time to feed the ducks at the campus pond.

After the nomination comes in and before anyone gets to see the nomination, the Awards Committee Chair removes as much personal information as possible so that the nomination looks like this:

Candidate 4321 is an outstanding and active member of XX Community College.  S/He and a group of individuals provide an excellent program for students of XX Community College where all the teachers are strong and the students are good looking.  Even though s/he is busy raising alpacas in his/her free time, s/he always has time to feed the ducks at the campus pond.

Then, it is time for volunteers (or voluntolds) from the Steering Committee to look at the nominations and use the rubric to score each nomination.  At the current time, we have three people review the nominations for each of the awards.  The reviewers use a Google form to make their judgments, and the results are tallied to identify the winner.

You may recall several (annoying) emails beginning in February where we asked for your nominations.  It is a lot of work to answer the questions, so we started early reminding folks to nominate.   

For the 2015 SIDLIT awards, we ended up with six nominations for the Outstanding Technical Support Person, five nominations for Innovation in Teaching, and three nominations for Jonathan Bacon Leadership.  All of them were very worthy candidates with well thought through nominations.  The decision was difficult and close.  Anyone whose colleagues are willing to nominate them should be pleased whether they win the final award or not - they are definitely a winner in their colleagues eyes!  

This may be more than you wanted to know about the SIDLIT awards selection process but our goal is to be as transparent as possible about the nomination and selection process.  

If you have some suggestions for improving the process, we are happy to hear your thoughts!  Contact Angela Glascock at aglascock@usd310.org with the ideas. The awards for Outstanding Technical Support Person, Innovation in Teaching, and Jonathan Bacon Leadership are for our C2C members and represent the best our colleagues have to offer!  

This year’s winners will be announced at the 2015 SIDLIT conference at JCCC on July 30!  Please attend to celebrate the win with your colleagues and friends. 

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Angela Glascock is a business teacher and assessments coordinator for USD 310, Fairfield Schools.  She received her masters in Instructional Design & Technology from Emporia State University.  Her current interests include Google for Education/Google Certified Teacher, technology integration, and effective online instruction.