A Scholarly Approach to Teaching Evaluation in Integrative Physiology

In 2017, Integrative Physiology (IPHY) faculty agreed to participate in the Teaching Quality Framework (TQF) initiative at the University of Colorado Boulder. The TQF initiative facilitates department and campus-wide efforts to implement scholarly approaches to teaching evaluation. It is an opt-in model, with departments choosing to engage with new ways of assessing teaching for merit evaluations and reappointment, promotion, and tenure reviews.

In general, the goals of the departmental TQF teams are as follows:

• To define teaching excellence based on six categories of scholarly activity
• To develop a framework for teaching evaluation and standards and processes for use
• To use multiple data sources of assessment including the perspective of the faculty member being assessed, their students, and their peers
• To leverage the collective efforts of multiple departments to create a shared pool of resources
• To improve undergraduate education by providing faculty members with feedback and support to become better teachers

For four years, IPHY faculty met monthly with facilitators from TQF Central to develop tools and processes for teaching evaluation. To help faculty reflect on their own teaching, the IPHY TQF team developed a guide for writing a strong teaching statement that describes the instructor's thoughts on teaching and learning, how they teach, and why they teach that way. The team also developed a student letter writing guide with suggestions on how to provide constructive feedback on an instructor's teaching and mentoring. To incorporate peer feedback into the evaluation process, the team developed a detailed peer observation protocol that assesses the environment, structure, content, and implementation of an instructor's lesson.

Our future goals are to create an overarching teaching effectiveness rubric that distinguishes among levels of accomplishment and explains how instructors can achieve each level, and to continue developing tools to evaluate and enhance teaching excellence in IPHY.