Evaluating Junior Faculty Members’ Teaching

This site provides guidelines and guidance for department chairs and personnel committees for evaluating the performance of junior faculty members in the areas of teaching and learning. University guidelines ask for multiple indicators in these areas, including but not limited to course evaluations and peer assessment of teaching materials (See ACD 506-06). To this end, this site’s discussion of course evaluation, the teaching portfolio, and peer review focuses only on summative issues, or on how teaching is evaluated once it has already taken place. For more comprehensive resources on teaching and learning, including both summative and formative issues, explore the Teaching Resources found on the Center for Learning and Teaching Excellence web site.

Understanding Teaching Contexts

Learning and teaching do not take place in a vacuum. Faculty members form their instructional goals and objectives from the contexts of their discipline and institutional departments. Therefore, review committees at the department, college, and university levels must know and understand these contexts as they evaluate the faculty member’s effectiveness. For review committees to do this, a prior step to evaluation at any level is a departmental statement, which outlines the department’s understanding of its teaching mission in the context of both ASU and its discipline(s). This departmental statement, with a focus on student learning, guides both the instructional activities of the junior faculty member and the forms of evaluation the department chooses to use—such as the course evaluation, the teaching portfolio, and the peer evaluation process.
Top

Interpreting Student Evaluations

At ASU, all courses are evaluated by the students every semester. Because these evaluation ratings are a required part of the junior faculty member’s tenure and promotion file, they are a cornerstone of the evaluation process at ASU. However, they provide only one perspective on the teaching effectiveness of the junior faculty member—that of the students. They offer information concerning the students’ level of satisfaction the course and with the faculty member. They also reveal how students perceive their own learning and the faculty member’s engagement with the course. To make the review of these evaluations as effective and fair as possible, this site offers insight into how to best read and understand course evaluation ratings. Further, the site offers evaluation items that focus on learning that occurs in courses.
Top

Using Additional Teaching Evaluation Strategies

In addition to course evaluations, the department must provide for each of its junior faculty members a peer or supervisory review of instructional materials. A teaching portfolio, which is constructed according to coherent and relevant guidelines, provides reviewers a credible view of the faculty member’s instructional contributions so that evaluation can be meaningful.
This site also offers guidance about conducting meaningful peer reviews of faculty. Peer reviews may not replace the review of instructional materials, but they often are a piece of the teaching portfolio.

Just as the course evaluations can be misused or misunderstood, so too can the portfolio and the peer review. This site is designed to provide tools to department chairs and personnel committees so that they might successfully implement and interpret these other evaluation pieces.