Peer Evaluation of Teaching: Policy and Process

A primary tool in helping instructors improve their teaching skills is a careful assessment of the strengths and weaknesses they exhibit in the classroom environment. While end-of-semester student evaluations can offer valuable feedback on these matters, the numerical summaries and written commentaries those evaluations provide are often too unfocused to help teachers progress at their craft from one semester to the next. The intentions of the project were to 1) design and implement a process for on-going peer teaching evaluation that (i) is useful in helping the Department assess and nurture teaching excellence on our faculty, (ii) everyone in the Department understands and supports, and (iii) is consistent with the standards mandated by the College, the University, and the University of Texas System, 2) develop and adopt a formal Statement of Teaching Effectiveness in Finance that enunciates our Departmental view of what constitutes effective teaching in our discipline, and 3) develop and adopt a formal Policy for Peer Teaching Evaluation which expresses our Departmental intent this area and explicitly outlines the details of our process.