How Instructors Can Prepare for Evaluation

Materials from your courses can provide supporting evidence and examples related to your responses to the Benchmarks prompts. In your statement, point the reviewer to the relevant supporting documentation. Here are three recommendations for supporting documentation of increasing depth and informativeness.

• Basic Documentation. Include a syllabus for each course mentioned
• Moderate Documentation:  For an example course (or courses if, for instance, you teach a graduate course and a large undergraduate course), include:
  • Syllabus (or screenshots from course LMS)
  • Sample course materials, such as a sample assignment with rubrics or criteria, and a sample instructional activity that helps students acquire the skills/knowledge needed for the assignment.
• To make that even better, include:
  • Representations of student learning, such as summaries of student achievement on different rubric dimensions, or annotated samples of student work (see this consent form for permission to use student work). See this guide on how to represent student learning for teaching evaluation.
  • Student feedback (if available) and your reflections on it
• Thorough Documentation. A course portfolio that provides examples and evidence for one or more example courses. 
  • A course narrative(1/2 page or less) that provides a guide to the rest of the materials. Key framing questions include:
    • What are your goals for students in this course?
    • What assignments and activities do you use to accomplish these goals?
    • How do you create a motivating and inclusive environment for students to progress toward course goals?
    • How do you know if students are meeting your goals?
    • What future changes will you consider and why?
  • Syllabus (or screenshots from Canvas)
  • Sample course materials, such as a sample assignment with rubrics or grading criteria, and a sample instructional activity that helps students acquire the skills/knowledge needed for the assignment.
  • Representations of student learning, such as summaries of student achievement on different rubric dimensions, or annotated samples of student work (see this consent form for permission to use student work). See this guide on how to represent student learning for teaching evaluation.
  • Student feedback(if available) and your reflections on it

The statement should go beyond a philosophy of teaching. Use it to explain what and how you teach, giving specific examples to illustrate why you use the approaches you do and (very importantly) how you know whether those approaches are effective (i.e., the intellectual work involved in teaching). The Benchmarks dimensions and rubric can help you structure these reflective statements in one of two ways:

• A single integrated statement describing how and why you have designed, implemented and adjusted or improved the courses you teach, how you approach mentoring, and how you have contributed to teaching community and leadership. 
• Short individual statements on each Benchmarks dimension (or bullet points, if acceptable to your department). This approach may be easier for both instructors and reviewers, especially if a department elects to focus on a subset of dimensions each year, cycling through all over them over time. As a reminder, Benchmarks breaks teaching into seven component areas: 
  • Goals, content and alignment
  • Teaching practices
  • Class climate
  • Achievement of learning outcomes
  • Reflection and iterative growth
  • Mentoring and advising
  • Involvement in teaching service, scholarship or community

You may not have materials for each of those dimensions, and that's all right. Use the ones that best fit your teaching role and your department's expectations.

After a course, you should compile evidence of learning found in student work and reflect upon what it says about the course. It’s challenging to identify weaknesses in an instructional design and plan changes that might benefit future students. In many cases, this process involves making the results of your teaching public and seeking feedback from others. Peer review of teaching provides an occasion for examining the intellectual work of teaching, including constructive feedback on that work from professional peers.

In the process of offering a typical course you’ll likely spend about 50 hours in contact with students (in class, labs, studios or consultations), and probably the same amount of time outside class in preparation, reading student work, and general course management. Rather than discard the products of that substantial amount of time, it’s very useful to set aside some time to write down your impressions of a course. You could comment on which topics or issues you would emphasize more or de-emphasize in your next offering. You could consider how well you felt the assignments, projects, and exams represented the skills and knowledge you hoped to see in your students. Were there particular areas of student work (e.g., assignments, particular exam questions, or dimensions of an assignment rubric) on which students consistently excelled, or seemed to struggle? Making notes about such changes is best accomplished right after the course is over, while the ideas and experiences are still fresh in your mind.

You also can save some representative samples of student work that show what you and they accomplished together. It’s disheartening to a teacher to think that after years of teaching there has been no progress in advancing students’ understanding of our field. If you have a small but accessible record of some key performances from several offerings of a course, you can review them for any trends. Maybe you see some consistent problems that you can address with more time, different materials, or additional practice. Maybe you see some improvement over time that was not apparent to you in the midst of teaching. Ultimately this is why we teach, to help students appreciate and understand our fields as we do. Keeping a small archive allows you to see how you are doing in a longer perspective, and to make examples visible to others. You can use this student consent (.pdf) form to get your students' permission to use their work in representations of your teaching.  

Whatever your field of research or creative activity, you keep archives of your work. You have examples of studio work, lab data, and notes from library visits or interviews; you capture the important products of your inquiry into your field in many ways. Given the amount of time you likely spend each semester on teaching (probably more than 200 hours total for two courses), it would be a shame to lose all the benefits of that work by not developing some record of what was accomplished. The syllabi, assignments, and student work are done anyway, so you should not simply throw them away. Reflecting on and writing out your observations to capture your insights at the moment of greatest understanding is a wise investment. It will help you grow as a teacher and achieve your goals, and ultimately those reflections can document your intellectual work as a teacher.

For more detailed information about how to represent and write about evidence of student learning see the, "Guidance for Representing and Using Evidence of Student Learning for Teaching Evaluations" (.docx) document along with examples from a wide range of disciplines. 

One critical source of information for the evaluation of teaching at KU is material that the instructor being evaluated puts together to document and represent their teaching. The Instructor Statement, or Self-Reflection, is the centerpiece of an instructor's documentation of their teaching. The statement(s) should go beyond philosophy of teaching. Use it to explain what and how you teach, giving specific examples to illustrate why you use the approaches you do and (very importantly) how you know whether those approaches are effective (i.e., the intellectual work involved in teaching). The Benchmarks dimensions and rubric can structure these reflective statements. In short, the reflective statement will center on these sorts of questions: 

What are your goals for student learning in your course(s) and why? What approaches do you use to help students achieve these goals? How do you know that students are achieving them? How have your teaching experiences shaped your ongoing goals and practices as a teacher?”

You can see that this set of questions asks about the kind of consideration of your teaching that’s been highlighted on this page. If you’ve been taking time each semester to think back on a course, you’ll have this part already done. It’s most important to show the growth of a course, rather than document every aspect of every course. By capturing the essence of how a course has changed over multiple offerings, you provide your colleagues with a good representation of your thinking, planning, and growing as a teacher.

The Benchmarks Framework page provides more detailed prompts and tools to guide self-reflective statements (a self-reflection narrative guide and a short-form for self-reflection), along with suggestions for supporting documentation. This guidance is adaptable for P&T, multi-term, or annual reviews.  

For an example of this kind of writing, please see this sample teaching statement (.docx). 

Annual review requires far less documentation of your work than, say, a review for promotion. You can still use the Benchmarks rubric to guide you, but the material you gather will be abbreviated. Make sure you check your department guidelines for what to submit for annual review. Here are the basics we recommend, though:  

Part 1: Course basics

• List the courses you taught over the previous year, the semester they were taught, and the number of students in each course.
• Briefly describe: Did any of these courses go through a substantial revision or require changes Was this a new course or one that went through substantial revision?

Part 2: Assessment

• What did you learn from assessing learning in your course?
• What did you learn from students (through student surveys of teaching or class reflection assignments)?
• If you took part in peer review, what did you learn from that?
• What observations did you make during the year about student engagement, student performance, and student learning?

Part 3: Reflection

• How will you use the evidence and feedback next time you teach the course?
  • Do you need to make major revisions in the course? Smaller tweaks? Do some assignments need revision? Do areas of the course need clarification for students?

Part 4: Additional considerations

• These will be department-specific but might include things like awards, additional course loads, a need to take over a class for an ailing colleague, participation in teaching-related service (leading workshops, participating in committees), or involvement in professional development related to teaching.