Evaluating Teaching

Evaluation of Teaching
In the last ten years the evaluation of teaching has become a widely accepted practice in higher education, but methods vary widely from school to school and from department to department. Recent national interest in the quality of teaching in higher education has spawned a movement to include teaching effectiveness in the criteria for promotion and tenure decisions, even in some research universities.

The Evaluation of College Teaching
After studying the problem at length, the committee eventually came to the conclusion that better evaluation would require two fundamental adjustments. The first was to establish the capability of examining multiple dimensions of teaching, something more than just what the teacher does in the classroom. The second was to deal with the need for multiple sources of information, something more than an exclusive reliance on student evaluations of teachers.

Improving Teacher Evaluations
Teacher evaluations are often designed to serve two purposes: to measure teacher competence and to foster professional development and growth. This digest discusses characteristics of effective teacher evaluations and some common teacher concerns.

Improving the Evaluation of College Teaching
The ideas described in this essay came out of deliberations at my university which has required student evaluations of all courses for several years. This succeeded in giving administrators a numerical basis for assessing the teaching activities of the faculty in annual performance evaluations. But many professors were bothered by the idea of having their teaching measured by one number or a set of numbers from student questionnaires. Eventually pressure built up to find a better solution to the problem.

It Takes One to Know One
Something (maybe the only thing) that most university administrators and educational reformers agree on is that the teaching evaluation methods used on their campuses leave a lot to be desired. The administrators often use inadequacies in the usual procedure (tabulating course-end student ratings) to justify the low weighting generally given to teaching in tenure and promotion decisions. The reformers (who include many administrators) recognize that their efforts will probably be futile unless they can provide hard evidence that alternative instructional methods really work, which will take better measures of teaching effectiveness than the ones commonly used.

Making Evaluations Effective
Following are some ideas for constructing, administering, and interpreting evaluations, starting with the simplest forms and proceeding to methods that take more work to implement but are more likely to improve teaching quality.

Assessing New Practices

People who continuously get better as teachers generally follow these three maxims...

Gathering Feedback on Teaching and Learning
Most instructors are curious about how their class is being perceived by the students and how the students are being affected by the class. This kind of feedback should be obtained during the semester rather than waiting until the class is over and it is too late to do anything about the results.

Fast Feedback
The most widely used method for evaluating teaching is the end-of-course questionnaire. The questionnaires arrive too late, however, to benefit the students doing the evaluation. Nor do the questionnaires usually encourage students to give the specific comments an instructor might need either to identify how well students have been understanding the material or to spot weaknesses in classroom presentation, organization, pacing, and work load. Much more effective are fast feedback activities that take place during the semester.

Information from Students
As an instructor, you are constantly evaluating students and giving them feedback on their work. However, there is a real advantage to receiving regular feedback from your students about your teaching.

Summative Evaluation
When you think of evaluation of teaching, you probably think of end-of-term or year-end questionnaires which are distributed to all the students in the class.

Formative Evaluation
Mid-term formative evaluation is used for teaching improvement. It produces information which instructors can use for teaching improvement during a course.

What Do They Know, Anyway?
Sooner or later, the conversation at the committee meeting or in the faculty lounge turns to student ratings of instructors. It's a sure bet that within six seconds, someone will announce that ratings are meaningless - students don't know enough to evaluate the quality of their instruction. Others agree: one grumbles that the high ratings always go to the easy graders and entertainers; another adds with complete assurance that the rigorous instructors who are really the best teachers may get low ratings now but in later years their students will come to appreciate them. What is interesting is that these assertions are invariably offered without a scrap of evidence by individuals with well-deserved reputations for analytical thinking.

Evaluating Your Own Teaching
Assuming that no one is perfect and therefore everyone has room for improvement, evaluation is the means by which we try to identify which aspects of our teaching are good and which need to be changed. The question then arises as to who should take responsibility for doing this evaluation. My belief is that evaluation is an inherent part of good teaching. Therefore it is the teacher himself or herself who should take primary responsibility for doing the evaluation.

Information from Yourself: Evaluating Your Own Teaching
How do you teach? How do you begin and end class? How do you emphasize main points? When do you change the volume or rate of your speech? How do you encourage participation? Try to discover the answers to these important questions by keeping track of your teaching for a few days.

Information from your Supervisor
You should attempt to obtain regular feedback from your supervisor on how you are teaching.

Collaborative Peer Review
For decades, academicians have assumed, usually erroneously, that summative evaluation--decision making with respect to reappointment, promotion, tenure, and compensation--is also a means by which instructional improvement can be facilitated. In practice, summative evaluation rarely provides sufficient information to faculty for improving teaching. In recent years, in fact, time-honored practices of faculty evaluation have been rather harshly criticized.

Typical Peer Cooperation Process
The person who is being observed should be as comfortable as possible, initiating the process and choosing the aspects of teaching to be observed. The process takes place around the middle of the term. This is the typical peer cooperation process...

Preparing for Peer Observation: A Guidebook

A Guidebook for knowing what to expect and how to handle the Peer Review Process.

Teaching Evaluation: Observation Checklist
This checklist is intended to help both who are being observed and those who are observing. The focus is on the mechanics of the classroom interaction, not on the content of the course.

Classroom Observation Form
A Sample Form of Things to Look for in Teaching Evaluation Observations.

If You've Got It, Flaunt It: Uses and Abuses of Teaching Portfolios
A memo from the Provost appears in all faculty mailboxes one morning, announcing that from now on every candidate for tenure and promotion must submit a teaching portfolio along with the usual research documentation. Faculty reaction is swift and divided, even though no one understands exactly what is being required or why. Some professors see the requirement as an indication that the administration is finally starting to take teaching seriously, others view it as just another drain on their time that won't accomplish anything useful and could hurt them. Either viewpoint could turn out to be correct, depending on how the portfolio program is handled.