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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Main Authors: Eric Metzler, Lisa Kurz
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: Michigan Publishing Services 2025-03-01
Series:To Improve the Academy
Subjects:
Online Access:https://journals.publishing.umich.edu/tia/article/id/4800/
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author Eric Metzler
Lisa Kurz
author_facet Eric Metzler
Lisa Kurz
author_sort Eric Metzler
collection DOAJ
description 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.
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institution Kabale University
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language English
publishDate 2025-03-01
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series To Improve the Academy
spelling doaj-art-e796ecbd89b541758ff70c0149f1f9ba2025-08-20T03:58:49ZengMichigan Publishing ServicesTo Improve the Academy2334-48222025-03-0144110.3998/tia.4800Wearing the consultant’s hat: Training faculty to perform quality peer reviewsEric Metzler0Lisa Kurz1ReviewerReviewerThe 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.https://journals.publishing.umich.edu/tia/article/id/4800/peer review of teachingfaculty trainingstudent evaluations of teachingmeasuring teaching effectiveness
spellingShingle Eric Metzler
Lisa Kurz
Wearing the consultant’s hat: Training faculty to perform quality peer reviews
To Improve the Academy
peer review of teaching
faculty training
student evaluations of teaching
measuring teaching effectiveness
title Wearing the consultant’s hat: Training faculty to perform quality peer reviews
title_full Wearing the consultant’s hat: Training faculty to perform quality peer reviews
title_fullStr Wearing the consultant’s hat: Training faculty to perform quality peer reviews
title_full_unstemmed Wearing the consultant’s hat: Training faculty to perform quality peer reviews
title_short Wearing the consultant’s hat: Training faculty to perform quality peer reviews
title_sort wearing the consultant s hat training faculty to perform quality peer reviews
topic peer review of teaching
faculty training
student evaluations of teaching
measuring teaching effectiveness
url https://journals.publishing.umich.edu/tia/article/id/4800/
work_keys_str_mv AT ericmetzler wearingtheconsultantshattrainingfacultytoperformqualitypeerreviews
AT lisakurz wearingtheconsultantshattrainingfacultytoperformqualitypeerreviews