Nominations for excellence in teaching awards accepted until March 5

Awards honor the late James H. Burness
2020 Burness Award Winners

Nominations are being accepted for the James H. Burness Award for Excellence in Teaching for 2020-21 at Penn State York until March 5. Sonia Molloy, assistant professor of human development and family studies, full-time faculty award, left, and Louis Paioletti, adjunct lecturer in marketing and supply chain management, part-time faculty award, were last year's winners.

Credit: Penn State York

YORK, Pa. — Nominations are being accepted for the 2020-21 James H. Burness Award for Excellence in Teaching. The award is given annually to recognize any aspect of excellent instruction — lectures, demonstrations, classroom activities, handling of discussions, individual attention, laboratory instruction, etc. — that contributes to the academic quality of Penn State York.

The purpose of the award is to recognize excellence in instruction, not to identify the most popular faculty member. The teaching award is named in memory of the late James H. Burness, in recognition of his outstanding teaching and service to the campus. Burness died in December 1999.

All faculty are eligible to be nominated except for recipients of the award in the past four years: Orsay Kucukemiroglu and Eugene Ellis (2017), Jessica Petko and James Miller (2018), and Nicole Muscanell and Janet McNally (2019), and Sonia Molloy and Lou Paioletti (2020).

Two awards are given: one to a full-time faculty member and one to a part-time faculty member.  Do not worry if you are unsure whether a faculty member is full-time or part-time, the Teaching Award Committee will divide the nominations accordingly.

This nomination form is for faculty who are teaching in spring 2021. Nominations should be as specific as possible with comments about nominees. When the committee receives something such as "she's a great professor and definitely deserves the award," it does not help much in making a decision.

Nominations should be submitted online by 11:59 p.m. on Friday, March 5.

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