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The University of Nebraska- Lincoln has a small core of faculty who have been engaged in peer consultation and review of teaching for about two years. Working as part of a national project organized by the American Association for Higher Education, seven faculty members have refined their own teaching through peer review and encouraged the documentation of teaching excellence in their own units. The existence of peer evaluated documentation of teaching performance has made it possible for the University to bring teaching more into balance with research as an essential part of professional life.
The campus leadership was very pleased with the peer review process and its products, and the FIPSE grant was initiated to make that opportunity available to as much of the campus as possible. A peer perspective on teaching has become so highly valued at UN-L that all tenure and promotion files now must include peer review of teaching, just as they have long included peer review of research. The University funded new summer fellowships in teaching, and the FIPSE grant allows those fellows to have organized access to existing avenues of peer consultation and review. Faculty are recruited through departments and selected by peers to engage in the peer interactions developed by the AAHE project, and the process and resulting documentation have inherent value in the development of their teaching. After engaging in peer review themselves, the fellows will be a resource for other faculty across campus who will be documenting the effectiveness of their teaching. Over the course of the project 32 faculty fellows will consult with each other, engage in formal written reviews of teaching effectiveness, and provide these examples to colleagues.
The UN-L project has provided faculty with compensated summer time to generate a useful, formal product of peer consultation about teaching that focuses on student learning. The UN-L administration has readily provided three forms of support that have built the project into the institution's ongoing structure. The University requires peer review of teaching for promotion and tenure, the University provides funds for the summer fellowships, and the University provides access to chairs and deans for describing the utility of the products of peer review. Three other institutions have hosted workshops on the UN-L model this year, and three more will host workshops in the final year of the project.
We are collecting a broad stream of information about the teaching done by the 32 fellows. Measures of student performance are the primary criterion for evaluation, but we are also gathering descriptions of teaching methods and classroom performance, student perception of effort and learning, and narrative accounts of faculty attitudes toward teaching and learning. Interest in the project at UN-L has been very great, and over 70 faculty applied for the 32 positions. The first two waves of peer review have been well received by the 22 participants, and they report the activity is valuable and enjoyable. Both teaching and learning are being assessed before and after peer review to see if there are any measurable results from participation in the three-year program.
ONLINE REFERENCE:
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Daniel J. Bernstein
University of Nebraska -
Lincoln
Department of Psychology
Lincoln, NE 68588-0308
Tel: 402-472-3786
Fax: 402-472-4637
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