Just tell me what to do: Guides for departments who want more robust and equitable teaching evaluation

Departments that recognize, encourage, and reward effective teaching can help faculty prioritize continuous teaching improvement. Yet many STEM departments lack robust teaching evaluation practices. Teaching evaluation may be limited to end-of-course evaluations and haphazard peer observation, producing inadequate evidence to support and reward teaching improvement.

Based on a need in local STEM departments, we developed and refined guides that departments can use to develop cohesive practices for robust, equitable, and sustainable teaching evaluation. These guides address departmental practices for three voices that contribute to teaching evaluation: peers, students, and instructors themselves.

At the core of each guide is a set of Target Practices, which specify department-level teaching evaluation practices and processes. We developed the Target Practices based on scholarly literature, practices that have proven useful across institutions, and key principles of evaluation. Target Practices guide departments to work toward teaching evaluation that is: (i) structured to minimize bias, including formalized processes, training and support for enactment, and collective decision-making; (ii) reliable, including multiple sources of meaningful and trustworthy evidence; and (iii) longitudinal, in order to document change over time and provide feedback to instructors.

We encourage departments to see the Target Practices as long-term goals. Based on observations and interviews, we developed accompanying resources. Each guide includes a description of common departmental approaches to teaching evaluation. This helps departments quickly characterize their current status. Each guide includes a Target Practice self-assessment for planning and documenting change. Perhaps most importantly, each guide has a "quick-start" page that suggests starting places that have been fruitful for other departments, "bundles" to highlight how work on one Target Practice can be leveraged to achieve other practices, and links to resources. This talk will present the guides and their potential as tools for departments and change researchers.