Peer Evaluation

An accessible version of the documents on this site will be made available upon request. Contact cte@ku.edu to request the document be made available in an accessible format.

 

The term “peer review of teaching” often evokes an image of someone visiting a class and writing a report on whether the lecture was clear and whether students were paying attention (or asleep). Our view at CTE is that there’s much more to teaching than holding people’s attention while talking non-stop. That includes designing class time, assignments, feedback, and practice that can make a course more successful.

In many cases, there will be time spent with students in which the teacher appears to be doing nothing but listening and occasionally commenting. An apocryphal story reflects the misconceptions that often raises. In the story, a department chair makes an obligatory visit to the classroom of a young faculty member and is surprised to see students working together. They sometimes share with other groups or the whole class, with a few interacting individually with the professor. After 20 minutes, the department chair says to the professor: “It’s OK. I’ll come back sometime when you’re teaching.”

Of course, the professor was teaching. The class interaction reflected the professor's planning and understanding that the deepest learning occurs when students are engaged in the learning process. 

Peer review of teaching should include a detailed analysis of the professor’s plan for learning, including material selection, targeted goals for students, methods of measuring learning, indicators of success in learning, and use of time with students during scheduled classes, studios and labs. To get at these elements, a high-quality peer review should include a conversation between the reviewer and course instructor, organized around a set of course materials. The peer review may also include observation of one or more class periods, with a conversation before and after the observation. Although these steps may sound like they take more time than just attending a colleague's class, most faculty who participate in a peer review dialogue find it to be far more informative and valuable because it reveals the instructor's thinking (i..e, the intellectual work) behind assignments, lesson plans, communications, and other aspects of the course. Many peer reviewers find that they learn something themselves through the process. The language in the Benchmarks Rubric can facilitate the reviewer's written summary of their observations.  

Guidelines for evaluation of teaching at KU include a section for peer review that’s drawn from reading and discussing a portfolio of course materials. Check out the portfolio checklist below for items to include.

  • Annotated syllabus describing course content.
  • Short description of reasons for decisions about content and goals.
  • Elaboration of instructional design.
  • Examples of assignments and of student work on those assignments.
  • Reflection on students’ achievements and plans for future course offerings.
  • Essential items are the syllabus, examples of assignments and student work on those assignments, and your reflections on students’ learning and plans for future course offerings.

Additional Resources. As part of the Benchmarks Framework, we have developed three guides or protocols to scaffold peer review of teaching:

More information about these resources and more can be found on the Benchmarks for Teaching Effectiveness page.