Peer Collaboration and Review: A Guide to Iterative Improvement in Learning

Abstract

In typical intellectual work, scholars collaborate with colleagues by providing feedback on ideas, methods of inquiry, observations, lessons learned, and next steps. Beginning in 1994 a series of projects provided opportunities for faculty members to collaborate on teaching and learning using this general pattern of mutual exchange of feedback. Over time individuals refined the descriptions of their intellectual work in teaching and shared them with a wider range of colleagues. The work of several hundred instructors generated a conventional format for shared reflections (known as a course portfolio) through large scale workshops organized by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. Course portfolios include: statements of learning goals, descriptions of methods used to enhance student success, examples and summaries of students’ understanding, and plans for refining successive iterations of a course to continue enhancements in learning. These documents were reading sources for seminars and teaching conversations aimed at yielding greater success in students’ understanding, often being specific to individual fields of study.During the late 20th century and early 21st many faculty questioned the validity of students’ perceptions as a sole measure to identify the quality of teaching. At that time peer review of teaching typically consisted of a colleague observing a classroom session and writing an opinion of the presentation quality. To many observers there was no gain in substituting a teacher’s opinion of classroom performance for that of students, as neither included any evidence of how well students’ understanding was enhanced by the entire set of experiences and activities included in the instructional design of the course. When use of course portfolios increased for faculty collaboration and improvement of student success, some teachers included course portfolios as evidence of excellence to complement the required student ratings. Since promotion committees were not typically familiar with this emerging genre, department committees would forward external reviews of those portfolios as part of the promotion or evaluation materials. In this way the intellectual work in teaching became visible within the system of academic quality review.The criteria for excellence in teaching have evolved in the last 20 years beyond being knowledgeable in one’s field and well regarded by students. The key element is that a teacher uses evidence from students’ understanding as the guide to continuous, iterative inquiry into enhanced student success. This process includes arms’ length colleagues able and willing to give critical feedback on the documentation of improved learning, and it has also given rise to frameworks of judgment that guide consistency in criteria and descriptions of increasing levels of accomplishment within various components of successful instruction. In this way the original collaboration of peers helping each other develop has itself generated a reasonable way to gather independent peer review of excellence in instruction.