Transforming Teaching Evaluation: Building an International Alliance for Systemic Change

This session explores how an international alliance could accelerate implementation of more robust and equitable teaching evaluation approaches in higher education. The need for better approaches has been percolating for years, but a recent surge of interest stems from universities' increasing focus on equitable student success, recognition of the limitations of student surveys, and the need to support growing numbers of contingent faculty. Evaluation processes that are more comprehensive, holistic and valid are needed to drive uptake of educational practices that increase student success, more equitably recognize faculty investment in such practices, and elevate consideration of teaching quality in reward systems.

While efforts to reform teaching evaluation have grown globally, significant work remains to foster widespread transformation. An accumulation of evidence suggests that networked and collaborative approaches are powerful ways to foster systemic change in higher education, thus we argue that transformational change in teaching evaluation is more likely to succeed through institutional collaboration. In this session we present a model for an alliance to leverage the experiences and efforts of the community of scholars and institutions that are now engaged in transforming teaching evaluation. Our rationale and plans for such an alliance are informed by the collective impact, networked improvement community, and sensemaking models, and insights from our NSF-funded project, TEval, to transform evaluation among a small network of institutions.

Our session will have two parts:

An examination of challenges in transforming teaching evaluation and discussion of why inter-institutional alliances provide unique advantages, drawing on insights from the TEval initiative and the literature on networked approaches to transformational change.

Collaborative exploration with participants of possible alliance elements, identifying needs, resources, and structures serving diverse institutional contexts.

Participants will share experiences and aspirations for sustainable teaching evaluation reform while considering how a strategic alliance might accelerate their goals.