Student evaluations can be seen as an opportunity for students to vent their views on the quality of teaching that they receive, and sometimes instructors trivialise the importance of this opportunity for dialogue with students and colleagues and reflection on teaching practice. This paper takes student evaluations of teaching quality seriously and proposes a new theoretical framework that enables greater utilisation of such information. We illustrate how information from evaluations can be used to identify areas where the whole department has strengths and weaknesses and where individual instructors perform relative to their own department. This information can be used to identify individuals with specific areas of expertise and shape best practice within departments, across departments and/or across institutions. It can also be used to highlight individuals who may require further professional development and reveal areas of mediocrity that are at risk of intervention from a higher level. Finally, it suggests ways to implement shared best practice in order to improve department teaching quality assessment results and individual teaching performance.