I recently received a wonderful question about best practices for classroom visits. This is something I plan to work on in my first year in a comprehensive way. But as I do this more comprehensive work, I want to share some initial thoughts and insights.
To begin, departments should create expectations for informal and formal classroom visits. How often will they occur? Will a common rubric be used? If not a common rubric, what are the expectations for written feedback? What will evaluators be looking for? Though departmental and course learning goals are common knowledge, new faculty may be less sure of how departments define and conceptualize excellence in teaching.
Departments looking for examples of rubrics can explore this rubric used by American, and this one used by Hunter College (and for a helpful comprehensive discussion, see the University of Colorado). No rubric is going to be perfect, so look at a handful of examples, and come up with something that works for your field of study and SLU’s mission as a residential liberal arts college.
If you don’t think a rubric will work, think carefully about how you provide narrative feedback. Much of your feedback should be descriptive. Describe what is happening in the classroom on the day you observe. What is the teacher doing, what are the students doing? Make note of how time is spent. For example, at 10:10 the lecture begins, at 10:30 students work in groups of 3, and at 10:40 the class of 15 is in a discussion where the teacher asks questions and students respond. Note things like: During the discussion, 4 of the 15 students speak, though all 15 of the students are actively listening.
After offering a detailed and non-judgmental narrative, offer an assessment against course goals and expectations for teaching in your department. What worked well, and what–if anything–can be improved? If there are issues, offer concrete suggestions for improvement. Bear in mind that telling someone how you would teach is often not very helpful.
At the risk of going on a tangent, think about how it feels to receive a peer review of something you’ve written where the reviewer (a) doesn’t seem to understand what you are trying to accomplish in your paper, and yet–nonetheless–tells you (b) how they would write a far better paper than the one you submitted.
To return to peer review of teaching, I firmly believe that there is a wide spectrum of good teaching. While some teaching is ineffective and some teaching is truly exceptional, there are many ways to demonstrate teaching excellence. When offering feedback to colleagues, help them grow into the good teacher that they aspire to become (not the teacher you think you are or they should be). We do this effectively when we (1) describe what we see them doing in the classroom, (2) have a clear vision of excellent teaching in our field, and (3) offer concrete suggestions that will help them improve their practice against that shared vision.
As a department chair and colleague, the peer review of teaching may be one of the most important things we do. Research demonstrates that student evaluations of teaching are of limited use. Our students deserve excellent teachers, and we deserve feedback that helps us develop into the excellent teachers we hope to become. Peer review of teaching is one way to achieve the end of excellence in teaching, and we need to be purposeful and intentional about creating a culture that provides effective feedback for learning.
More to come. In the meantime, if departments would like to talk about effective peer reviews of teaching, I invite the opportunity to continue this conversation.
Quick Update: I received an excellent reader question. The rubrics I link to above use ratings. I would modify the categories and descriptions of teaching targets when putting together a rubric, but encourage departments to write brief narrative feedback and not use ratings.
As well, when debriefing after a course observation, and before putting together written comments, I encourage you to ask some versions of the following questions.
- What did you hope your students to get out of the day’s class?
- How do you think it went?
- How can we support your development as a teacher?
It is remarkable how much you can learn from these three questions. Before offering our take on another person’s teaching, we need to know what they were hoping for. And before offering suggestions for improvement, we need to hear what our colleagues think would be most helpful.
In my years as a teacher educator–working with college students who planned to become k-12 teachers–I was always struck by how perceptive they were about what didn’t work and how they might improve. And I found that my student-teachers made the most progress when I started where they were, working with their self-understanding to guide their professional growth.