Fostering Scholarly Approaches to Peer Review of Teaching in a Research-Intensive University

Abstract

This chapter examines a recently launched institutional initiative around scholarly approaches to summative and formative peer-review of teaching within and across the disciplines at the University of British Columbia (UBC), Canada. The peer-review of teaching initiative, led by a team of UBC national teaching fellows, was fuelled by institutional concerns about the quality of student learning experiences and the effectiveness of teaching in a multi-disciplinary research-intensive university context. Canadian universities have long recognized the importance of attending to the evaluation of teaching practices in their particular context; however, the enactment of localized scholarship directed at these practices remains very much in its infancy. Traditional approaches to the evaluation of university teaching have often resulted in the over-reliance on student evaluation of teaching data and/or ad-hoc peer-review of teaching practices with numerous accounts of methodological shortcomings that tend to yield less useful (and less authentic) data. Issues addressed in this chapter include contemporary approaches to the evaluation of teaching in higher education, faculty “buy-in” and the evaluation of teaching in a research-intensive university, scholarly approaches to summative and formative Performance Reviews of Teaching (PRT), faculty-specific engagement in summative and formative (informal to formal) PRT training and implementation, and strategic institutional supports (funding, expertise, mentoring, technological resources).