The Center for Faculty Excellence invites you to celebrate with us the faculty who have made a difference in your life through their teaching.
Your professor may have mentored, advised, or inspired you through their teaching. They may have helped you understand a complicated concept, provided timely feedback for your future work, or connected you to campus or community resources to help you succeed academically and/or personally. Whatever your meaningful experience with a faculty member, we’d like you to participate in our Thank-A-Professor program by completing our Thank-A-Professor Survey.
Submissions to the survey about positive experiences with faculty will be printed and delivered to faculty in October and early April. We encourage you to be descriptive in why you are thanking the faculty member and to share the impact that their teaching has had on your life, personally, professionally, and/or academically.
Students, both undergraduate and graduate, are welcome to submit thank-yous for any current faculty. While we also greatly appreciate the incredible work of Graduate Teaching Assistants, this program is only available for faculty, including full-time faculty and adjuncts. We are also unable to provide Thank-A-Faculty to OU Health Science Center faculty who are not also part of a Norman-based campus. If a thank you is submitted for someone outside of the parameters of the program, we regret that we will be unable to deliver it.
You must have an ou.edu email address to submit a thank you; however, you may select for us not to share your name or email with the faculty member.
Faculty may use thank-yous to support their teaching accomplishments in their promotion and tenure documents. Staff with the Center for Faculty Excellence may also use quotes from anonymized thank-yous to share with faculty what students share as effective teaching practices.
Thank-yous should be personalized by the sender, but we offer the following examples for consideration:
All Thank-A-Professor submissions are reviewed by a Center for Faculty Excellence staff member to ensure that the survey submission is aligned with the goal of the program, to thank a faculty member for a positive experience. Any submissions that are disparaging will not be shared.
There are several avenues to provide feedback to faculty members. We encourage you, if able, to talk with your faculty member about any concerns that you may have. If you would like help in thinking about how to have that conversation, we encourage you to reach out to the University Ombudsperson, who can assist you.
Course Reflection Surveys are administered every semester as well, which provide a confidential way for you to share constructive criticism that may help the faculty member improve their teaching in future classes. If your faculty member does a survey looking for feedback earlier in the semester, we encourage you to share any concerns there as well.
If you are looking for a way to report a bias incident, we encourage you to fill out a bias incident reporting form.
Take a moment to honor how you’ve affected an OU student or alum. If you are preparing your dossier, keep the thank you and incorporate it in the teaching section to aid you in demonstrating your teaching impact.
While not a teaching award, Thank-A-Professor represents the many moments in which faculty are meaningfully engaging with students through teaching. We hope that this helps faculty recognize their many accomplishments and impacts through teaching that may otherwise not be visible and may inspire them in seeing how their teaching aligns with the goals of many teaching awards. More information about OU teaching awards can be found on the Faculty Awards page of the Office of the Senior Vice President and Provost.
