|
|
|
Environments Conducive to Summative Peer Evaluations
of Teaching
- The faculty members in a department frequently talk about how
teaching can improve student learning. Over lunch and in other
informal contexts, they discuss new approaches they are trying
in their courses, what has worked well or not.
- All departmental faculty frequently visit one another’s
courses either for the purposes of “formative peer review,”
or because they want to hear how their colleagues discuss their
research projects in a classroom context, or because they want
to better advise students on courses that would benefit a student’s
learning needs and goals.
- Guests in classrooms are welcomed (including prospective students
and their families as well as colleagues from other departments).
- The faculty understands the differences between formative and
summative peer review and don’t confuse the goals or methods
of each approach.
- All course syllabi are made publicly available in the department
and on-line.
- Faculty expertise in the department is drawn upon by requests
for guest lecturing in other departmental courses.
- The Chair encourages junior faculty to spend appropriate amounts
of time attending to their pedagogical development as well as
their scholarly development.
- Time is reserved each semester for the entire department to
discuss its perceptions about what best enhances student learning.
- Department meetings are occasionally devoted to faculty formally
presenting/discussing new courses they have developed for the
departmental curriculum.
- Colleagues attend or lead “Talk About Teaching”
sessions at the Center for Scholarship and Teaching on Fridays
at noon.
- The chair is comfortable talking to a faculty member after
hearing a student complaint or concern rather than ignoring the
concern or revealing it only at the time of a summative peer review.
- No shame is attached to saying to one’s colleagues “I’ve
been struggling with a problem in one of my courses this term
and I’m unsure how to solve it. Would you sit in on a section
or two and advise me on how you would handle it?”
- Chairs will gently discourage junior faculty members from writing
about pedagogy or attending pedagogy conferences until they receive
tenure rather than becoming apopletic about it.
- Junior faculty members have a sense of how they are doing in
the classroom and are not surprised by evaluations at the time
of pre-tenure or tenure review.
|
|
