The evaluation of teaching and learning reaches far beyond gathering end-term course feedback and includes mid-term feedback and other methods to assess the quality of an instructor’s teaching, including peer review and the instructor’s own reflection.
Key principles and practices
- No one method offers a complete view of the quality of an instructor’s teaching. Each source of data provides a partial perspective and has certain limitations.
- The validity of any measure of teaching effectiveness depends on how well it correlates with intended student outcomes.
- The standards to which faculty are held are most fair when transparent.
- Fairness also depends on measurements being applied under equivalent circumstances across courses. Measured values should take into consideration factors over which faculty have little or no control, such as class size; student preparedness; quarter in which a course is offered; and the demographics of the class, including race, gender, sexual orientation, intersectionality, and other dimensions of diversity.
- Faculty can be productively included in developing the criteria and methods for evaluating teaching effectiveness.
- Evaluation can extend beyond classroom performance. The development of new curricula or courses, and the supervision and mentoring of students can all be taken into account. Participation in teaching development institutes, workshops, and consultations might also be considered.
- Practicality requires that evaluations fit the capacity of the department to actually undertake the process.
- Decisions about appointments and promotions should concentrate on the individual and take into account the distinct characteristics of an instructor’s career and teaching context, even though comparative rankings hold great sway in some current evaluation systems.
