Anyone who’s been a teacher has experienced it: the teaching evaluation. It becomes part of your annual review files, and, depending on your institution, it can have a major impact on your continued employment. As with any profession, however, performance evaluations are necessary for quality control, and given that if it weren’t for students, our educational institutions wouldn’t exist, it should be important to pay attention to teaching effectiveness. At the university level, there has long been a somewhat lackadaisical approach to evaluating and rewarding teaching excellence beyond student evaluations and pass rates, notoriously unreliable measures of a teacher’s effectiveness because of too many subjective variables. Add to this the historically insufficient attention to teaching development for PhD students seeking tenure-track positions, which require significant teaching assignments, and it’s easy to understand the prevailing idea that teaching is not as highly valued as scholarship is in annual reviews. Teaching at the university level – except for lecturers – is often regarded as a side gig, necessary in order to do the “real” work of scholarship and research. This is starting to change, and, as someone who regards teaching and mentoring students my primary mission, I find it heartening.
Hence the development of the Evaluative Teaching Observation at several universities, including mine (UT Rio Grande Valley). These observations are sometimes conducted by administrators, but more often by mentor or peer faculty. Many universities have also begun to encourage or require faculty to attend professional teaching development sessions, especially non-tenured faculty and lecturers. These are both steps in the right direction. However, as anyone who has attended teaching in-service seminars or workshops can attest, the ideas and strategies presented sound wonderful in theory, but there is often a lack of follow-through to determine if or how they were implemented and whether they had an impactful effect in the classroom.
Evaluative observations are problematic because they provide only a single snapshot of a teacher’s pedagogical practices, generally once a year for lecturers and tenure-track faculty, but at greater intervals for tenured faculty. There are generally two kinds of teaching evaluations: a specific date arranged between teacher and observer or an unannounced “spot check” visit. Both usually lead to inauthentic information about the teacher’s effectiveness. The prearranged observation, while less stressful on the teacher, tends to create the popularly termed dog-and-pony-show atmosphere. Most teachers will ask the observer to visit on a day when something exciting is planned to showcase engaged students and an animated teaching style. The “spot check” visit, while perhaps more instructive, may not account for anomalous circumstances that make the experience not representative of the usual classroom environment. Regrettably, these occasional evaluative observations rarely lead to constructive, authentic teaching improvement and are often seen as “just checking off a box” or as an instrument of possible punitive consequences.
So, here’s a radical idea: we encourage our students to collaborate, to engage in meaningful discussion, to understand different perspectives, and to learn from each other; teachers should be practicing what we preach. If we are serious about promoting and rewarding teaching excellence, we need to share our teaching experiences with each other more routinely, separate from the evaluative process. I’d like to see the creation of observation circles of faculty within our departments who regularly visit each other’s classrooms to give feedback about a strategy or see that strategy in action to take back to our own classrooms. These observation circles should also meet more informally to chat about teaching or plan to attend professional teaching development sessions together. Such a collaborative approach to teaching development would create a supportive environment for faculty to try out innovative pedagogical strategies, allow for constructive feedback that leads to improvement before evaluations take place, promote collegiality, communicate to faculty and students that teaching is as valued as scholarship and service, and, ultimately, benefit the students we teach, which is why we’re here, after all.
This is not to advocate for the elimination of evaluative teaching observations; they serve an important function in the official performance review process and should be conducted by someone not part of the teacher’s observation circle to ensure a measure of objectivity. But, with a collaborative approach to teaching development, they will be regarded in a less arbitrary light. We can assure authentic growth in our teaching skills and bring about the end of the dog and pony show in our classrooms.
