• Sources of Data: A grid providing suggestions for where units can gather data for each of the four dimensions of the definition of teaching excellence.
• Example Rubric (coming soon): An example rubric for providing feedback or evaluation. When used for evaluation, it is not expected that all instructors will be excellent on all dimensions, rather units should identify expectations for achievement of the rubric levels for instructors at particular career phases or tracks (e.g., a unit may decide that junior faculty should be developing in no more than one category for promotion, but mid-career faculty should be at least proficient in all categories for promotion).
• Example Portfolio (coming soon)

• Canvas Course on Peer Observation (coming soon): This training course introduces the critical distinction between evidence and evaluation during peer feedback and unit review of teaching and how focusing on evidence rather than evaluation can promote honest dialogue between observers and observed. The course describes best practices for conducting a peer observation, particularly the model of using pre-observation meetings, evidence-centered observations, and post-observation meetings. This model enables observers to learn more about the context of what they are going to observe and provide observations that are more beneficial to the faculty member being observed.
• Teaching Philosophy/Statement Course (coming soon): This training course guides a faculty member through the process of writing a teaching philosophy statement for their promotion dossier that aligns with the Campus Definition of Teaching Excellence.

Non-exhaustive-list of models that units have used for annual data collection for feedback and evaluation. 

• Assigned committee/individual: The unit assigns a committee or an individual to oversee the feedback and evaluation processes. This would generally be considered a significant service load for those involved. May be necessary for larger units where there would be too much administrative overhead for the unit EO to coordinate.
• Evenly distribute across unit: The unit EO assigns all faculty in the unit to provide peer feedback to each other and each faculty member is responsible for documenting their own teaching. For example, every faculty member is responsible for providing feedback to two other faculty and can expect feedback from two other faculty members. Assignment process may vary based on department size or culture.
• “Faculty trios”: The unit EO creates peer mentoring groups of three or more faculty members and members of these groups provide peer feedback for each other. This model can be especially helpful for units where the content and delivery of clusters of courses are tightly coupled.

An instructor likely knows more about the design, delivery, and goals of a course than anyone else, but they have the most conflicted perspective when it comes to interpreting whether their instruction is achieving the desired goals.

• General guidance about what to document: An overview document for instructors.
• Teaching philosophy/statement: Required component of a promotion dossier, but also something worth regularly revisiting as an aid for reflection and goal setting.
• Instructor reflection templates: Structured reflections can be especially helpful for faculty to document how their teaching has evolved over time.

Peers can provide perspectives on the quality of content in a course and to varying degrees the quality of pedagogical approach, but they have the least visibility into how the course actually runs or how students respond to the content and pedagogy.

Core Principles

Peer feedback should sometimes focus more on feedback and prioritize dialogue and reflection. One component of the definition of excellent teaching is that teaching is reflective and evolving: this type of feedback best supports our faculty in meeting this expectation. By focusing on feedback and dialogue, general faculty mentoring can be woven into the process.

Peer feedback is more than peer observation. Peer observations of teaching focus on aspects of whether a course is well delivered and provide little insight into whether a course is well designed. Units should be using other peer feedback activities to complement or replace peer observations. Most of these other feedback activities are less time/resource intensive than peer observations and your unit may already be doing some of these activities. For example, reviewing a new course proposal can count toward peer feedback that is focused on whether a course is well designed.

For feedback, peers can be anyone with relevant expertise and experience. While evaluations (internal or external) that are included in the promotion dossier must be written by a faculty member who is of a higher rank than the faculty member being evaluated, there is no such restriction for teaching feedback. Units are encouraged to think about who may be the best peer to provide feedback on different dimensions of teaching. For example, staff from the Center for Innovation in Teaching and Learning (CITL) may serve as peers on in-class delivery. Likewise, for some disciplines, practicing professionals (e.g., practicing lawyers, veterinarians, artists) may be the appropriate peers for reviewing the content of a course or the learning outcomes of students. 

• Peer observation: We recommend that peer observations include a pre-meeting to establish the goals of an observation and a post-meeting during which the instructor and observers collaboratively interpret the observation data.
• Course artifact feedback: Artifacts can be things like a syllabus, assignments, or anything else students are given to aid their learning. Feedback on these items will typically focus on the design of a course, especially whether learning resources provide appropriate support for students’ learning and are well-aligned with each other. For example, a well written syllabus will communicate why certain activities can help students achieve the learning objectives of the course.
• Course proposal feedback: Course proposals are an excellent opportunity to provide feedback on whether a course’s learning objectives are appropriate and prepare students to engage with the state of the art in a field.
• Course accessibility feedback: The Center for Innovation in Teaching and Learning is providing guidance for how to make online courses comply with the accessibility standards of Title II.
• Course descriptive data (DMI list of courses taught, etc.): Basic data to capture the overall workload of instructors.
• Supervision of students: Teaching also takes place outside the classroom through formal mentoring and supervision of students (e.g., course advising for undergraduate students or research advising for graduate students).

Students are deeply familiar with what actually happens in a course and have the most incentive to be honest. Their educational outcomes are the primary goals of teaching. However, they have limited perspectives on the quality of content and pedagogy or even how much they learned in a course.

• Student feedback on teaching: We are in the process of replacing the current Instructor and Course Evaluation System (ICES) with new software (Blue) and a new survey (Feedback on the Learning Experience, FLEX) that emphasizes that students are not in a position to evaluate teaching on their own, but they are in a position to provide feedback on how they experienced a course and their interaction with the instructor.
• We are working to remove the requirement that longitudinal ICES ratings be included in promotion dossiers. Including longitudinal ICES ratings, separate from the rest of a teaching evaluation, makes it easier for the numbers to be misinterpreted or abused. ICES, and soon FLEX, ratings should be interpreted within other contextual factors such as peer feedback, instructor documentation, and the role that course plays in the curriculum.
• Recommended reading for interpreting and using student feedback (Paper in Studies in Educational Evaluation)
• Evidence-based surveys: Evidence-based surveys are often research-based published surveys, but may also include peer-reviewed surveys. These surveys are used to track progress toward some identified goal of the instructor. For example, an instructor might use a motivation survey from the research literature to track whether changes in their course policies and pedagogy are increasing students’ intrinsic motivation to learn and decreasing their extrinsic motivation to earn a specific grade.
• Learning outcomes tracking: Instructors may wish to improve students’ attainment of specific learning objectives and collect data to document the success (or not) of their efforts.

The teaching portfolio should include data from all three sources from multiple time points. Units have flexibility to decide what should be in the portfolio and how the portfolio Is constructed (e.g., should everything be aggregated into a single document or a Box folder?)

• Examples coming soon

Unit evaluations should triangulate information from multiple sources. When multiple sources of data agree, stronger claims can be made. For example, if a peer observation of teaching describes excellent in-class delivery and student ratings on delivery are similarly high, then units may confidently conclude that an instructor provides instruction that is well-delivered. However, when sources disagree, units may need to weigh some data more heavily than others. For example, students may provide feedback that a course’s material is not relevant to their careers, but peer review suggests that the content is appropriate, a unit may discount the student feedback, though they may also want to explore with the instructor why students don’t perceive the relevance of the content. 

• Annual reviews should prioritize feedback and evaluation at different stages of an instructor’s career. For example, a unit may focus on feedback in years 1 and 2 but focus on evaluation during the 3^rd year review and when an instructor is being considered for promotion.
• Units do not need to make the 3^rd year or promotion review purely evaluative. Units can explore mechanisms to provide feedback to instructors after the evaluation is conducted.
• While we recommend that units use the same process for teaching feedback and evaluation for instructors regardless of rank or track, it may be appropriate for units to have different levels of expectations for performance for different ranks or tracks. For example, units may have higher expectations of quality of teaching for associate-level faculty than for assistant-level faculty. 

We need more frequent data collection and more robust evaluations of teaching to improve teaching and make fair and equitable decisions. Teaching is a central part of our mission as a university. If we do not have robust teaching evaluations, we do not value teaching as an institution. Without richly informed feedback on their teaching, we limit the ability of our faculty to improve their teaching. Likewise, it is inappropriate to make high-stakes decisions about promotion or tenure based on poor or one-off evaluations.

Yes! Feedback is essential for helping faculty meet the criteria of teaching that is reflective/evolving. We are working to update the language in the Provost Communications to align with the guidance provided on this website.

While promotion dossier documents need to be written by a faculty member at a higher rank than the faculty member being evaluated, feedback can be conducted by any peer (See “mostly feedback” example in the table above). Peers also do not need to be from the same unit of the faculty member being evaluated (e.g., they could be faculty from related departments, faculty from peer institutions, or members of professional/industry advisory boards).

The two core principles of peer feedback – peer feedback should sometimes focus more on feedback and should include more than peer observations – are driven by this question.

If our new peer feedback processes need to happen more regularly, they need to provide more value. Focusing on formative feedback can provide more value both to the faculty being reviewed and for the faculty doing the review. By lowering the stakes of peer feedback at times, all faculty in the process can be open to learning and growing as instructors, both improving the quality of future evaluations and the quality of teaching on campus. Peer feedback does not need to be intensive. Peer observations are the most time intensive option for peer feedback, so units should explore many of the less time-intensive options, some of which you may already be doing (e.g., reviewing new course proposals).

Our current teaching evaluations already impact promotion and tenure cases. Making our teaching evaluations more robust is an essential first step to making them matter even more.

We are planning updates to the Provost Communications to align with the guidance on this website. The Provost Communications all reference the campus definition for teaching excellence as the primary guide for teaching feedback and evaluations. Therefore, units can create a single core process for teaching feedback and evaluation for all faculty, regardless of track. Units may want to vary how often they collect data for different tracks or tweak the expectations for excellence for different tracks.

Yes. Every other year is a minimum recommendation. We encourage units to provide feedback and evaluations for their faculty as often as is sustainable.

The Provost Communications are focused on promotion and tenure processes, so they are necessarily silent on teaching feedback and evaluations for full professors. Everyone can continue to learn from teaching feedback and evaluations, so units are encouraged to continue providing teaching feedback and evaluations for full professors. For example, feedback and evaluation can support development for leadership roles and awards.

The current Instructor/Course Evaluation System (ICES) is still in place for now, but we expect to replace the software and the questions by Fall 2025. We expect the new survey and system will align the new questions with the campus-wide definition of teaching excellence and with the goal of clarifying that students are providing feedback on teaching and not evaluating it.