Wearing the consultant’s hat: Training faculty to perform quality peer reviews

The claim has been made for decades that college teaching, like research, should be peer reviewed if we are to see it as a serious scholarly activity; yet peer review as a method of evaluating teaching is not widespread. Interest in peer review is increasing, however, as institutions have sought way...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Eric Metzler, Lisa Kurz
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: Michigan Publishing Services 2025-03-01
Series:To Improve the Academy
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Online Access:https://journals.publishing.umich.edu/tia/article/id/4800/
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Summary:The claim has been made for decades that college teaching, like research, should be peer reviewed if we are to see it as a serious scholarly activity; yet peer review as a method of evaluating teaching is not widespread. Interest in peer review is increasing, however, as institutions have sought ways of evaluating teaching informed by professional practice instead of solely data gathered from student evaluations of teaching, which are based on consumer satisfaction models and have proved biased against women and people of color. Yet if faculty are to engage in peer review of teaching, whether for formative or summative purposes, they should be trained in best practices to ensure that the reviews are of high quality and, most important, that they focus on improving the observed instructor’s teaching. In this article we describe our program to train faculty to be peer reviewers, describe faculty reactions to our training, and outline the lessons we as consultants have learned in facilitating this program.
ISSN:2334-4822