17 Our teaching excellence: Effective teaching as an inherently collective endeavor to enhance student learning

Introduction

Higher education has long pursued excellence in its core pillars: research, service, and teaching. Yet, public trust in higher education is at an all-time low. In 2024, nearly 1 in 3 Americans reported little to no confidence in higher education (Nietzel, 2024). Another survey revealed that 1 in 2 Americans think a college degree is less important now for getting a well-paying job compared to 20 years ago (Pew Research Center, 2024). Individual faculty continue to secure tenure through demonstrated teaching excellence, yet higher education struggles to convince the American public of its effectiveness. Why does this discrepancy exist?

One reason may be how we measure teaching excellence. Academics evaluate colleagues for teaching excellence in ways that seem mismatched with the public perception of an effective education. Faculty define excellent teaching according to our own traditions, viewing tenure and promotion as shared rites of passage. Yet, our students and the public, a step removed from these processes, do not see this excellence. From the learner’s perspective, the value of what we offer may be found lacking (Nietzel, 2024). This raises a critical question: When did the act of teaching become detached from learning?

As higher education faces greater scrutiny than ever, a reset in how we conceptualize excellence in teaching is warranted. Current approaches to documenting teaching effectiveness^[1] rely on outdated assumptions about college-level learning and alienate the very audiences we serve. To argue that higher education deserves continued government and public support, we must reconsider our processes. Drawing on my experiences as an assessment professional in a Center for Teaching & Learning, a role at the intersection of assessment and faculty development, I argue that the belief that effective teaching is, or even could be, an individual enterprise limits student learning. Worse still, failing to address the connection between effective teaching and student learning reinforces perceptions that higher education has lost its value.

This chapter first explores the historical divide between the fields of assessment and faculty development, reflecting tensions around individual vs. collective accountability. I then examine how these tensions manifest in policies for evaluating teaching excellence. To address accountability, I propose defining effective teaching as a collective effort, supported by evidence of individual involvement in that shared work. Finally, I offer organizational strategies to lay the groundwork for this new paradigm. As a staff professional who supports instructors and a previous instructor with identities marginalized in higher education, I emphasize that structures must adapt rather than putting the onus solely upon individuals’ teaching labor.

The Evolution of Accountability for Teaching Effectiveness

While recent calls for teaching evaluation reform focus on holistic, bias-resistant approaches to documenting teaching excellence (Davis, 2025; Heffernan, 2021), this section discusses how our definition of effective teaching remains divorced from rigorous assessment of student learning. This discrepancy can be traced to the independent evolution of the fields of assessment and faculty development, each with distinct priorities and notions of efficacy.

History of Assessment

The GI Bill of 1944 and the Higher Education Act of 1965 directed significant federal funds into higher education through student financial aid. By the 1990s, increasing demands for accountability in educational outcomes led to an emphasis on “quality control.” As students defaulted on federal student loans at higher rates, later reauthorizations of the Higher Education Act required accreditation to enforce federal loan eligibility (Kelchen, 2017). Under heightened public scrutiny, these accreditors that previously focused on continuous improvement through peer review assumed the additional role of upholding financial accountability for institutions.

While accreditation encompasses broad indicators of institutional health and success, assessment of student learning has become central to this process. Regional accrediting bodies require academic programs to articulate learning goals and provide evidence that students meet these goals (CHEA, 2019). This emphasis on student-centered outcomes was further reinforced by the 2006 Spellings Commission report, A Test of Leadership: Charting the Future of U.S. Higher Education. Paired with the rising costs of a college education, these concerns pushed the assessment profession to prioritize “quality assurance” in academic programs on behalf of learners.

Over the past few decades, organizations such as the National Institute for Learning Outcomes Assessment (NILOA) and the Association for the Assessment of Learning in Higher Education (AALHE), founded in 2008 and 2009 respectively, have provided professional development to support the field of assessment. Beyond compliance with accreditation, assessment professionals collaborate with instructors to measure student learning and plan strategic improvements (Jankowski & Slotnick, 2015). However, assessment often yields low faculty involvement, if not outright resistance, due to various negative perceptions of the process (Andrade, 2010). Tensions arise when instructors view assessment professionals as imposing an external sense of accountability not felt internal to faculty communities (Deneen & Boud, 2014).

This evolving focus on “quality assurance” has further complicated the assessment field under the growing influence of Neoliberalism in higher education (Shah, 2021). Increasingly, higher education is framed as a transactional experience, where students “purchase” credentials as financial investments (Mintz, 2021). This shift in framing is exemplified by the Financial Value Transparency and Gainful Employment ruling from the Department of Education in 2023, which requires institutions to report the return-on-investment for academic programs as a form of “buyer protection” for students.

While designed to address the student loan debt crisis, such policies raise philosophical questions: What is the purpose of learning in a system focused on efficiency, competition, and market gains? What does teaching excellence look like in this system? As accountability demands grow, assessment professionals alongside university leadership may be caught in the middle between accreditors and faculty.

History of Faculty Development

Similarly, student unrest and dissatisfaction in the 1960s and 1970s sparked calls for better teacher training, ultimately giving rise to the faculty development profession. As Lewis noted in 1996, the field of faculty (or educational) development emerged alongside the formation of Centers for Teaching & Learning (CTLs). These centers provided opportunities for instructors to reflect on and refine their teaching practices (Lewis, 1996). In 1976, the POD Network was founded to “provide professional development and a community of practice for scholars and practitioners of educational development” (POD Network, nd). Specifically, the POD Network convenes those in educational development roles, who advance teaching and learning through support for educator colleagues.

Faculty development is inherently instructor-centered and attentive to faculty challenges like balancing teaching, research, and service or burnout (Ouellett, 2010). While it aims to improve teaching through awareness of our increasingly diverse student populations and their needs, faculty development also emphasizes understanding the learning process for instructors themselves. Faculty developers apply principles of learning science with instructors in the role of the learners. This focus has cultivated a professional ethos rooted in community and care.

Despite this supportive role, faculty developers operate within a complex political landscape regarding definitions of teaching excellence used to evaluate and judge faculty. Faculty development prioritizes individual growth and agency, yet participation in these opportunities is typically voluntary. CTLs assist instructors in becoming effective instructors through programs and services, but they rarely directly evaluate teaching. Such responsibilities fall to instructors’ home departments. As a result, faculty developers work to enhance the overall quality of teaching on campus while remaining outside the formal mechanisms of accountability for enforcing “quality.”

Bringing Disciplines Together

Although their historical trajectories are distinct, both assessment and faculty development emerged in response to public demands for accountability in student experiences. Despite repeated calls to integrate these fields (Kinzie et al., 2019; Montenegro & Jankowski, 2020; Jankowski, Baker, & Eynon, 2020; Flaherty & Cruz 2024; Bender & Ko, 2024), these disciplines struggle to unite given their differing organizational structures and political positionings. However, with skepticism of higher education at an all-time high, now is the critical moment to align these efforts and collaboratively demonstrate true teaching excellence.

With this backdrop in mind, I will lay out how the individualistic lens of faculty development has influenced current policies in the evaluation of teaching excellence. I will identify specific tensions around accountability inherent in these policies and then describe how redefining teaching effectiveness as collective work seeks to address such tensions. Enacting this new definition of excellent teaching requires bringing together the work of the fields of assessment and faculty development to achieve better student learning outcomes.

Accountability as a Source of Tension in Teaching Effectiveness

These historical developments shape today’s expectations for how instructors demonstrate and document teaching excellence. To identify current policy trends in the evaluation of teaching, I drew from written documentation on how “teaching excellence” or “teaching effectiveness” is evaluated, at the largest public college systems by student enrollment. Note that public institutions were favored given their visibility and accountability to their constituents. Generally speaking, such institutions aimed to comply with state or local government expectations for transparency or shared explicit expectations on the evaluation of teaching when instructors were unionized. By focusing on the largest of public institutions, this review surfaced policies affecting large populations of faculty and by extension students.

Policies for evaluating teaching effectiveness across these major public university systems^[2] grapple with balancing instructor agency and fairness, both real and perceived. Decisions about what to include or exclude in defining and documenting teaching excellence reflect assumptions about individual vs. collective accountability in teaching. Diving into these assumptions reveals tensions and, at times, contradictions, in how instructors are held responsible for student perceptions and learning when institutions themselves may not fairly distribute teaching loads.

Tension 1: Accountability for Student Perceptions

A common assumption across tenure and promotion policies is that instructors are, or should be, responsible for how they are perceived by students. Many policies include student evaluations of teaching—anonymous surveys that capture student perceptions of the classroom and instructor—as key evidence of teaching excellence. While these policies suggest that student perceptions are central to defining excellent teaching, should they be?

Students’ feelings play a crucial role in learning, as the process is inherently emotional (Cavanagh, 2016). However, learning often involves negative emotions as well as positive ones. Many students report negative feelings about procedural aspects of courses, such as exams or grading (Beiter et al., 2015; Blum, 2020), which may not accurately reflect the course’s impact on learning (Uttl, White, & Gonzalez, 2017). Instructors frequently observe that meaningful learning often involves emotional ups and downs (Pekrun, 2006).

While student perceptions and emotions can affect their engagement in learning, evaluations often focus on satisfaction rather than the complexity of the learning experience. Worse, they frequently emphasize perceptions of the instructor as a person, such as their likeability or alignment with in-group biases, rather than their impact on student learning (Lazos, 2012; Kreitzer & Sweet-Cushman, 2022). Even when students report interest in the course discipline, this metric fails to account for the inequitable assignment of courses in a curriculum where enthusiasm varies widely between required courses and electives.

Tension 2: Accountability for Student Learning

Policies at major public institutions reveal a key assumption: instructors are not solely responsible for student learning, nor is evidence of student learning the primary means of documenting effective teaching. In documentation at several universities, the instructor’s role in fostering learning is omitted from the definition of an excellent teacher, and direct evidence of learning is disregarded. The reasoning for these omissions is often unclear.

The use of assessment of student learning to determine teaching effectiveness faces both procedural and philosophical challenges. For example, the Academic Senate for California Community Colleges opposed the use of student learning assessment in individual faculty evaluations, citing harm to “collegial peer process, academic freedom, and local bargaining authority.” These statements responded to accreditor standards, which maintain institutional accountability for student learning. At the heart of this tension lies the question: When student learning does not occur, who is responsible?

Even considering divergent teaching philosophies, instructors might resist responsibility for student learning. Those with a student deficit lens resist said responsibility with the belief that students can be inherently incapable of or unwilling to put in the necessary effort (Davis & Museus, 2019). In contrast, if the deficit is attributed to systemic problems, instructors may view a lack of learning as too large a problem to remedy in one course. Despite these opposing views, both scenarios result in reluctance to take personal responsibility for student learning.

However, American accreditation standards consistently require institutions to collect, review, and plan around evidence of student learning (CHEA, 2019). Regulatory bodies hold institutions accountable when learning fails to occur. How this accountability trickles down to departments and individual instructors remains unclear.

Tension 3: Accountability for Teaching Load

Major public institutions often articulate universal standards in evaluating teaching quality, likely aiming to ensure fairness. However, this assumption of fairness ignores the unequal circumstances instructors face. Teaching loads and course assignments are rarely equal, creating disparities that affect instructors’ ability to meet universal standards. Teaching evaluation reform attends to differences in discipline and course context, yet it overlooks other challenges encountered by individual instructors.

Universal standards in the definition and evidence of teaching effectiveness warrant scrutiny in the face of inequitable teaching assignments. For instance, using student learning assessment to document effective teaching requires addressing how teaching workloads are distributed (Gordon, Willink, & Hunter, 2024). Instructors stretched thin across multiple courses or teaching large courses cannot be expected to demonstrate student learning gains comparable to instructors with lighter or more specialized teaching assignments. Departments often rely on junior or contingent faculty to handle heavier teaching loads with larger enrollments, even though such individuals hold precarious employment most affected by the evaluation of their teaching (Caruth & Caruth, 2013).

Defining a Collective Endeavor: Student Learning as Effectiveness

Current approaches to documenting teaching effectiveness reveal flaws beyond mechanics. The premise of evaluating teaching as an individual activity perpetuates inefficiencies and inequities in student learning experiences. While assessment is often seen as a collective departmental effort, individual instructors focus on areas within their direct control, i.e., their course design or personal journey in faculty development.

This divide must be addressed by fundamentally rethinking our definition of teaching excellence. Can teaching effectiveness ever be meaningfully defined without student learning? Ignoring student learning in our conceptualization of teaching effectiveness lets this core value fall through the cracks. Teaching excellence must reflect collaboration in all aspects of teaching and shared responsibility for student outcomes that matter. Embracing these principles empowers higher education to speak to the accountability demanded by students, government, and the public. Teaching as a collective endeavor prioritizes each instructor’s curricular impact, their engagement across educational spaces, and their contributions to program-level learning.

Principle 1: Prioritizing Curricular Impact

Faculty life in the United States has historically favored individualistic views (Fatehi, Priestley, & Taasoobshirazi, 2020). This culture is evident in research with individualized milestones of success: scholarship and publications credited to the individual or grants naming the individual as a primary investigator. Faculty are primarily valued for building their individual renown within their fields.

However, these individualistic standards do not translate effectively to teaching responsibilities. Students enroll in higher education seeking credentials tied to the completion of academic programs, a curriculum collectively owned by faculty in a department. Developing a cohesive and effective curriculum is an undervalued aspect of teaching excellence that is essential for improving student learning outcomes. Through an individualistic lens, instructors revise or improve courses they “own.” They may seek opportunities to learn evidence-based instructional practices or design innovative new courses aligned with their expertise. These efforts may impact some students, but their long-term effect is limited by a narrow focus.

Research in learning science has demonstrated that students need repeated opportunities to practice, transfer, and apply their learning in authentic, real-world contexts (Lovett et al., 2023). Although instructors may embed these principles into a single course, benefits diminish when confined to one term. Sustained student learning requires a curriculum with a connected sequence of courses that links to program and career goals. Instructors maximize impact by collaborating on a seamlessly integrated experience, where courses align to program-level learning goals.

Principle 2: Honoring Diverse Educational Spaces

Current approaches to measuring teaching excellence often legitimize certain learning spaces while overlooking others. Research shows that student learning occurs across several formal and informal spaces: office hours, study groups, peer mentoring, advising, tutoring, fieldwork, study abroad programs, and internships. The learning systems paradigm (Jankowski & Marshall, 2017) emphasizes this systems view of learning as a process shaped by many interconnected and overlapping parts. Limiting teaching excellence to course-based measures ignores the fact that students navigate multiple educational spaces daily, and learning happens across all of them.

Rather than embracing the holistic nature of college education, institutions isolate distinct elements of teaching for evaluation, often sending mixed or discouraging messages to instructors. For example, how are individual or small-group interactions through office hours, advising, or mentoring acknowledged when course evaluations or syllabi are the primary evidence of teaching excellence? When overlooked, faculty may disengage from such activities, viewing them as counterproductive to their success. Institutions and departments often formalize these efforts as “mentoring” or “service,” distinct from teaching, further reinforcing the misconception that such work does not also promote student learning. This arbitrary separation undermines the kind of teaching excellence that results from instructors supporting learning across multiple accessible environments.

Principle 3: Measuring Program-level Learning

Treating courses as distinct, isolated experiences is misaligned with how students learn. Separating courses by instructor, term, or syllabus creates an artificial boundary that ignores the continuous process of student development. Deep learning cannot be achieved in a single course, but all instructors within a department can collaboratively create an academic program that fosters lifelong learning and prepares students for future success.

While no single course can meet all program-level learning goals, each course should incrementally advance a subset of these outcomes. Consequently, instructors are not solely accountable for student learning but they do hold responsibility as part of a collective that is fully accountable for program outcomes. Accreditation standards require evidence that learning occurs at the program level, and this expectation must connect with how teaching effectiveness is defined for individual instructors.

What does this connection look like in practice? Instructors’ course design and teaching practices should aim for modest yet lasting increases in student learning across the program. Individual instructors may only influence a portion of program-level learning, but their contributions are vital. As the Association of American Colleges and Universities (AAC&U) emphasizes, “Faculty and programs must work in cooperation for students to achieve high levels of demonstrated accomplishment” (AAC&U, n.d.). Collaboration between faculty in a program is needed instead of placing the full burden of outcomes on individual instructors.

Results, i.e., a marked improvement in students’ demonstrated skill or understanding, cannot be expected immediately and all measures of learning are relative. Each instructor can focus on improving their teaching practices over time, ensuring their efforts lead to increased student learning across the curriculum. Benchmarking and increased assessment at multiple levels and time points will be essential for pinpointing how instructors, individually and collectively, advance student learning outcomes.

Documenting Excellence from Individual to Collective

While these guiding principles prioritize student learning outcomes, they complicate the documentation of teaching excellence. If teaching excellence is to be documented for the purpose of recognizing and rewarding individual instructors, we must undertake the difficult work of both constructing and deconstructing shared excellence.

Just as educators often assign group work or team projects to students, claiming they reflect “real-world” or corporate expectations (AAC&U, 2009), we must uphold similar expectations for instructors as members of teaching collectives. We must evaluate both the collective’s success and the contributions of individual members. Instructors should be acknowledged not only for tangible outputs, such as curriculum contributions, but also for the interpersonal and emotional labor that fosters effective collaboration. Recognizing teaching as a collective endeavor will also necessitate drawing on multiple data sources and diverse perspectives for holistic and accurate evaluation (Weaver et al., 2020).

If we value teaching as a collective endeavor where we prioritize impact on the curriculum, honor diverse educational spaces, and measure learning across programs, instructors can present evidence of individual actions in alignment with these principles. This section introduces possible evidence of these principles. Policies can orient departments and instructors to document individual contributions to assessment capacity, teaching collaboration, and systemic leadership.

Evidence Source 1: Contributions to Assessment Capacity

Evidence of learning improvement is scarce in higher education (Fulcher & Prendergast, 2021), underscoring the value of laying the foundation for rigorous learning assessment. Individuals should be recognized for their assessment efforts beyond the typical compliance orientation, which leads to scattered, disjointed data. Recognition of instructors who contribute to assessment would, in essence, reward those who provide the institution with demonstrable evidence of meeting their core teaching mission.

These efforts may culminate in a variety of tangible deliverables, including but not limited to: revised course learning goals that better align to program-level learning goals, course assignments that prompt students to demonstrate program-level learning goals, and instruments that assess student learning in a course against program-level learning goals. Instructors can also systematically analyze student coursework for program-level learning outcomes and bring this data to department conversations. Essentially, the instructor can play a vital role in building a department’s curriculum map and bringing it to life.

Assessment requires significant effort, curiosity, and vulnerability. Instructors who engage in an inquiry of student learning with the rigor of research, particularly by completing a full assessment cycle, deserve recognition (Suskie, 2018). While such work is sometimes reframed as scholarship of teaching and learning (SoTL) or discipline-based educational research (DBER), completing and documenting the assessment cycle is valuable in its own right. Learning captured as a snapshot in one course reflects curriculum design leading up to said course. Thus, this work not only prioritizes student learning but also gives the department a window into student learning across the program.

Evidence Source 2: Teaching Collaboration

Collegiality has garnered criticism especially when it is conflated with congeniality and likeability, the same traits that complicate student evaluation of teaching. While civility is essential for departmental relations, critics argue that collegiality as a criterion for evaluation pressures individuals to conform. Freedman argues that departmental “dissenters and curmudgeons and eccentrics” play a key role in “genuine debate and exchanges… for a more robust collegium” (Freedman, 2017). This skepticism is valid for intellectual diversity, but a degree of collegiality—defined as “the cooperative relationship of colleagues”—is integral to departmental teaching efforts. Instructors must maintain productive working relationships for a coherent curriculum to ensure the achievement of student learning.

We must distinguish between the varied viewpoints within disciplinary research from the singular curriculum experience that a department offers. Courses that introduce differing perspectives on core disciplinary questions enrich student learning, while courses that focus on disconnected notions of disciplinary canon do not. The faculty collective cannot simply agree to disagree on important matters, i.e., determining program-level student learning outcomes. Academic freedom should be preserved with instructors embracing their own unique teaching philosophies, provided they contribute to student learning goals. However, when instructors “go rogue” and disrupt the cohesion of the curriculum, student learning suffers.

Collegiality, when cultivated intentionally, can enhance individual teaching practices and overall faculty satisfaction in their work, which can lead to better student outcomes (Massy, Wilger, & Colbeck, 1994). Faculty learning communities, a widely favored approach in faculty development, exemplify how collegiality can empower instructors to improve their teaching (Cox, 2004). Collegial relationships have been found to be “productive” in fostering professional growth (Oxendine, Robinson, & Parker, 2022).

While collectivist cultures readily embrace the interdependence that underpins collegial faculty relationships, individualistic Western norms resist these notions in favor of self-reliance (Triandis et al., 1988). These individualistic norms have long devalued collegial behaviors that benefit the curriculum. As Chang (2022) argues in her exploration of Confucian relationality amongst faculty, teaching is “relationally complex,” and “evidence from a product perspective” often fails to capture its quality (p. 109). A process-oriented lens emphasizes that instructors’ actions should reflect core values like integrity, respect, and a commitment to student learning. The instructor who collaborates with colleagues to align courses, supports junior faculty, partners with senior faculty, and adjusts their teaching to promote cohesion across the curriculum exemplifies this commitment. The instructor who speaks of shared accountability for student learning in departmental conversations embodies this commitment. Building a culture of student-centered learning requires an ongoing collective process rooted in collegiality.

These relational aspects are best documented through letters of support and general peer observation not isolated to one class session. Cycles of feedback and mentorship can construct an ongoing, holistic narrative on the instructor’s collaborative nature and contributions to departmental teaching activities.

Evidence Source 3: Systemic Leadership

To acknowledge the intangible contributions of an instructor to departmental teaching culture, a framework is needed to move beyond personalities or pleasantries. The learning systems paradigm suggests that individual contributors should demonstrate systemic leadership, a natural extension of systems thinking. Systemic leadership emphasizes understanding the interconnectedness of the curriculum to make sustainable, long-lasting impacts. This leadership involves meaningfully engaging stakeholders through participatory practices, surfacing values and assumptions, identifying leverage points, and promoting communication and coordination to align members and resources in making change (Dreier, Nabarro, & Nelson, 2019; Senge, Hamilton, & Kania, 2015).

In the context of teaching, systemic leadership entails facilitating generative conversations between instructors, students, employers, and colleagues at other institutions. Effective leaders consider stakeholder viewpoints in curriculum design. Leaders utilize inclusive approaches to build relationships and communities with a shared vision for student learning. They foster collaborations that leverage limited resources and always ask what it takes for change to endure. Sustaining change may involve the leader finding new opportunities or connections beyond the department. In higher education’s intensely bureaucratic structures, systemic leaders pay attention to both practicality and policy.

This framework discourages one-off innovation in teaching or course design. These changes may look impressive from an individualistic standpoint, but such changes prove unethical if they result in uneven or short-lived improvements for students (Kezar, 2018). Systemic leaders commit to co-creating a future bigger than what any individual could accomplish alone.

In addition to the aforementioned letters of support shedding light on how an individual exercises systemic leadership, this mindset can be further made visible in an instructor’s teaching statement or reflection accompanying their teaching portfolio. Their choice of elements to include in the teaching portfolio can also reveal to what degree their teaching approach aligns to principles of systemic leadership.

Instructors can document participatory processes in course design and how they integrate student, alumni, and employer perspectives. Moreover, individuals can explain how their course design connects effectively with other courses in the curriculum sequence, or even across different institutions that students typically transition between. Importantly, all described changes and processes must be sustainable to demonstrate systemic leadership. Instructors must effect change by reallocating resources rather than relying on transient and unsustainable resources.

Challenges and Possibilities of Shared Excellence

A large departure from the status quo may seem daunting. This radical reimagining will undoubtedly prompt criticism. These criticisms are not new. Even minor tweaks to teaching evaluation systems face political, practical, and financial obstacles. However, departments and institutions can take small steps to enable the evaluation of individual contributions to a shared teaching effort, such as through greater capacity and flexibility in the areas of assessment, evaluation, and written standards.

Strategy 1: Building Assessment Infrastructure

The challenge of demonstrating the impact on student learning is most pronounced at institutions where assessment efforts are sporadic, conducted only in response to accreditation. If assessment of student learning is embedded and ongoing, it becomes feasible to look into how instructors impact student learning. Consistent assessment would not only support institutions in meeting accreditation standards but also guide effective curricular revisions. Longitudinal data is illuminating in tumultuous times. For example, many faculty and departments have sought useful data to guide policy and action during the rise of Generative AI.

Regarding teaching excellence, readily available evidence of student learning links changes in courses and curriculum to their impact. With student demographics shifting across higher education, it is unrealistic to assume identical student needs and achievement year over year. Assessment at the beginning, throughout, and at the end of an academic program empowers departments to track student trajectories and more accurately attribute shifts in learning to specific courses and instructors.

Strategy 2: Addressing Evaluation Capacity and Bias

Capturing an instructor’s contributions to collective success requires both capacity and expertise to gather reliable evaluations. Departments can address these needs by decentralizing teaching evaluation and engaging all stakeholders in establishing and maintaining this new system.

Bias cannot be resolved with a singular, quantitative approach. Mitigating bias requires surfacing preconceived notions of “good” or “bad” teaching that influence evaluations. Departments must engage in regular conversations to build a shared understanding of effective teaching and improve fairness. Consensus-building, often skipped or rushed, is essential for developing transparent benchmarks of teaching excellence. These standards must be periodically revised to reflect the evolving perspectives of the collective.

Departments can enhance evaluations by incorporating additional perspectives for a more robust “360-degree review” of an instructor’s teaching effectiveness (Fleenor, Taylor, & Chappelow, 2020). Consistently involving department members in reviewing evidence and recognizing teaching strengths fosters a shared sense of teaching excellence. Instructors at all career stages—senior, mid-career, and new—benefit from writing and reading letters of support, as well as participating in facilitated discussions of teaching effectiveness.

To support this process, institutions can provide impartial mediators to departments who check moments of evaluation bias or lack of rigor. This role could involve cross-department service by a trained faculty member or a partnership with their CTL. Such structures are not new, with external reviewers commonly called upon to provide objective feedback during Academic Program Reviews. Critical external perspectives encourage departments to reflect on and justify their process of documenting teaching excellence.

Strategy 3: Reconsidering Universal Standards

Departments and institutions can make headway in rewarding individuals who contribute meaningfully to student learning by making peace with personalized standards for excellence. Personalized standards do not imply that all instructors will succeed effortlessly, that the standards will be arbitrary, or that they inherently lack rigor. Departments upholding standards on an individual basis must still do so with fairness and accountability.

Universal standards for teaching excellence may appear fair, but fail to account for vastly different teaching contexts. How instructors teach is influenced by their diverse roles, prior training, and course assignments. Courses may be lower or upper division, serve non-majors, fulfill general education requirements, or tackle content areas known to be especially challenging for students. Some disciplines face historical inequities, variations in student preparation, or “chilly climates” (Riegle-Crumb, King, & Irizarry, 2019; Ackerman, Kanfer, & Calderwood, 2013; Morris & Daniel, 2008). These factors not only shape the time and effort instructors dedicate to their teaching but also influence how students, responding to uniform questions, perceive and rate their instructors.

Concerns about individualized evaluation often stem from valid fears of prejudice and discrimination. Critics worry that one-off standards could invite unconscious or conscious bias, resulting in arbitrary assessments. However, higher education’s current reliance on course evaluations has long demonstrated bias against faculty with marginalized and underrepresented identities (Boring, 2017; Chávez & Mitchell, 2020). Personalized standards, if implemented carefully, can reduce reliance on these flawed metrics.

Increasingly, teaching portfolios and growth-oriented assessments provide opportunities for personalized standards of teaching excellence. However, without proper training for evaluators, even qualitative measures like course observations or portfolio reviews can perpetuate unconscious bias. Countering the impulse to rank and compare instructors against universal metrics creates space to recognize unappreciated forms of teaching excellence.

Looking Ahead

Teaching excellence is fundamental to the mission of higher education, yet its definition and demonstration remain complex challenges. Documenting teaching excellence will likely remain a “wicked problem” with no clear or universal solution (Lönngren & Van Poeck, 2021). Despite these challenges, institutions must exhibit bold leadership if student learning is our core goal. Evidence of student learning must be considered to ensure accountability and guide action.

As Chang argues, the actions of faculty in service of this teaching mission cannot, and perhaps should not, always be subject to quantification. She asserts that, “By taking responsibility for creating the conditions for seriously supporting learning about teaching, administrators may rely less on attempts to measure the outcomes of teaching as a sole approach to determine quality” (Chang, 2022, p. 119). This perspective invites us to take a step back to question our motives in documenting teaching excellence, as with all long-standing traditions in higher education. Rather than focusing solely on documenting excellence, we must prioritize nurturing it to ensure student success.

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