March-April 2008

In the beginning, there were no teaching evaluations. We inferred pedagogical quality from the acclaim individuals received from colleagues and students, based largely on testimony and hearsay. It was presumed that someone who gave insightful and interesting lectures to colleagues was also likely to be a good teacher.

Institutional surveys of student opinion emerged out of the turmoil of the late '60s. Never intended to serve as professional evaluations, the surveys were the only tangible evidence of teaching effectiveness until some faculty opened their classrooms for observation by chairs and colleagues. Historically, the peer review of teaching has typically meant only that a faculty member has watched a colleague lead a class. An observation of an hour in the life of a course yields a letter describing the performance of a teacher, and that letter becomes the peer-review component of the professor’s teaching evaluation.

Over the past couple of decades, though, the peer review of teaching has evolved significantly. During the '80s, some faculty members began to assemble teaching portfolios from statements of teaching philosophies, syllabi, descriptions of course intent and content, reports of colleagues’ classroom observations, and summaries of student-survey results.

Daniel J. Bernstein is a professor of psychology at the University of Kansas (KU) and director of the KU Center for Teaching Excellence. He was active in the American Association for Higher Education’s Peer Review of Teaching initiative and continues to develop the genre of electronic course portfolios.

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