Why Evaluate Teaching?

The evaluation of teaching has two purposes. The first,called formative evaluation, is aimed squarely at improvingteaching. It centers on two questions:

• “Am I an effective teacher?”
• “How can I become a more effective teacher?”

Formative evaluation emphasizes personal reflection and growth, and finding new and better ways to convey information to students, helping them to appreciate the subject matter, and empowering them to become self-learners.

Interestingly, both types of evaluation entail many of the same assessment processes. Indeed, if teachers focused primarily on becoming better teachers through formative evaluation, they would have little concern about the outcome of summative evaluation. For this reason, we emphasize formative evaluation.

What Is To Be Evaluated?

When teachers consider teaching and its evaluation, they generally think about what they do in the classroom: the clarity of lectures, the extent to which they engage students in discussion, and so on, but teaching involves more than classroom performance. Faculty prepare for hours in advance of class, create and grade tests, and meet students during office hours, to name but a few teaching activities. Students should learn something about our subject matter because of what faculty do outside of class, and the outcome of this process also is relevant for evaluation. Thus, a broader perspective on teaching encompasses four dimensions: course organization and preparation, classroom performance, approachability and availability, and assessment of student learning.

Course Organization and Preparation

In evaluating teaching, faculty often overlook course organization and preparation in deference to classroom performance. How they prepare and organize their courses should drive what they actually do in the classroom, and thus what students learn. Ideally, courses are organized around what faculty wish their students to learn. Once this issue has been addressed, teachers must entertain three other important questions to evaluate course preparation and organization:

• Are these outcomes appropriate to the level and content of the course?
• How do I connect these outcomes with specific course activities?
• Will these outcomes stimulate intellectual growth and enjoyment of learning?

Answers to these questions should appear in the class syllabus and unambiguously convey to students: student learning outcomes, the nature of the subject matter, the teacher’s orientation to learning (e.g., lecture versus a greater emphasis on student involvement), the kinds of classroom learning activities practiced, how students will be engaged, the approach to assessing student learning, and classroom management practices.

Classroom Performance

Being able to communicate psychological knowledge clearly and enthusiastically is one key to effective student learning, and therein rests a secret to becoming a truly great teacher. Becoming a successful teacher hinges on teachers’ abilities to establish rapport, an interpersonal dynamic that increases the likelihood that students will pay attention to and understand the teacher’s message. Essential aspects of building rapport include, among other things, learning students’ names, using relevant examples, treating students respectfully, using appropriate humor, and starting and ending class on time (Buskist & Saville, 2004). Clearly, the quality of faculty teaching transcends their disciplinary knowledge— it includes their personal characteristics as well.

Approachability and Availability

Faculty demeanor in the classroom influences their students’ willingness to initiate one-on-one contact with them outside of class. If students perceive faculty to be supportive and caring, they are likely to perceive them as being approachable outside the classroom. Questions to askto assess approachability and availability include:

Assessment of Student Learning

Perhaps the most overlooked factor in the evaluation of teaching is how faculty assess students’ learning. This oversight is perplexing because the ultimate goal of teaching is, of course, to facilitate student learning. Teachers need a logical rationale for (a) assessing how well they are accomplishing this goal, and (b) contemplating possible answers to several questions helpful in their teaching

Choices in Assessment of Teaching

A teacher’s preparation and organization, classroom performance, approachability and availability, and assessment of students’ learning are all fair game for evaluation. The question,of course, is how to go about the assessment process.

Who Provides Evaluative Data?

Students are the most common source of evaluative information. When most faculty think “teaching evaluation,” they imagine their students completing a survey at the end of the semester. Although the validity of data from student evaluations has been questioned (e.g., Greimel-Fuhrmann & Geyer, 2003), they remain a primary source assessment tool. Nonetheless, additional forms of assessment, such as selfassessment and peer review, provide useful supplemental information that is not available from student evaluations such as feedback regarding developing appropriate student learning outcomes, developing and revising syllabi, understanding the relationship of student learning outcomes to student learning, and creating effective formats for assessing student learning.

When Should the Evaluation be Conducted?

Evaluations are most commonly given at the end of the semester providing a snapshot of teaching over the entire course. The disadvantage to this approach is that it provides no opportunity for a teacher to address problems that may exist in the class, and so students’ learning and enjoyment of the course may suffer.

The alternative is to evaluate one’s teaching earlier in the semester. That way, the end-of-the-semester evaluation can be used, in part, to gauge how successfully a teacher has resolved previously identified problems. Students frequently voice their appreciation of a teacher’s willingness to incorporate their suggestions into improving their classroom learning experience.