Guidelines for the Evaluation of Teaching
Tabulated (summative) evaluations provide useful information for gauging the effectiveness of teaching. Like all indicators of performance, however, they have limitations. They sample at one time students' ideas and impressions about instruction in a course that is delivered over a long period of time. Consequently, to evaluate the complex activity of teaching and how teaching affects learning, the University must rely on a range of indicators, not just one numerical index. For department heads and administrators to examine several sorts of evidence about teaching requires, of course, that faculty submit pertinent materials for review in their FIRs (Faculty Information Reports), P/T (Promotion and Tenure) files, and/or ARFs (Academic Record Files). Such materials may include but are not limited to:
listings of one's courses, credits, and numbers of students;
- Descriptions and estimates of the time/labor expended in consulting with students, advising, and supervising internships, etc;
- Descriptions/listings of activities, workshops, publications, conferences, and leaves that demonstrate a plan to improve one teaching, expand its scope, and/or change its orientation;
- Descriptions/listings of one's outreach efforts that involve the mission of teaching, broadly conceived; and
- Development of new courses and/or teaching materials as well as the adaption of existing courses to new technologies and/or different audiences;
- Teaching materials including syllabi, assignments, summaries of methods/goals, videotapes of one's teaching, and instructional software that one had developed,
- Qualitative evaluations of instruction by students (faculty are encouraged to use the optional questions that the Joint Labor-Management Task Force developed);
- Peer evaluations of teaching (see the Peer Evaluation Form that the Joint Labor-Management Task Force developed self or peer "analysis/interpretation of . . . evaluations" (see 202.200 in the Contract);
- Plans for improving one's instruction, including classroom teaching, field placements, preparation of materials, and assessment of learning (normally, such plans respond to previous evaluations
- Pre- and post-assessments of students' learning;
- Formative (mid-course and earlier) evaluations of teaching;
- Feedback from former students and/or their employers;
- Site coordinator's evaluations of internships/practica that one has overseen; and
- Evaluations of pertinent outreach activities by peers and/or members of the community.