Peer Coaching for Better Teaching

Abstract

A recent article in the New York Times announced: Cornell to Evaluate Teaching Ability in Tenure Decisions. It is an account of Cornell's efforts to place more emphasis on teaching by establishing rigorous stan dards for evaluation to be used by tenure and promotion committees (DePalma 1992). The remarkable aspect of this arti cle is not the exemplary system that Cor nell proposes to implement, but the fact that a major university deciding to focus on the improvement of teaching made headlines in an influential newspaper. Fueled by public and media perception that many institutions overemphasize research at the expense of excellence in teaching, colleges and universities are revisiting their priorities, with particular stress on evaluating and improving teach ing. The University of New Hampshire's doctoral program in psychology, for exam ple, now includes a learning-to-teach com ponent in addition to a strong focus on research skills (Fernald 1995). The growth in programs that provide for peer review of teaching is further evidence of the new focus. The 1991 Phister Report at the Uni versity of California, for example, recom mended that teaching be peer reviewed