To help address funding and teaching resource disparities across districts in the state, Texas leaders developed the Teacher Incentive Allotment (TIA). The Allotment aims to make the teaching job more appealing and sustainable, particularly in rural areas and in areas with a high concentration of economically disadvantaged students. This document…

Teaching evaluation is a central process across institutions for faculty retention, promotion, and tenure. While there is a rich literature on methods for evaluating teaching, there is less scholarship on the goals and processes for reforming systems of teaching evaluation. Surprisingly, there is little to no information on teaching criteria at…

This chapter proposes the need to define the qualities of effective teaching in higher education and introduces a framework to assess teaching effectiveness (FATE) that can be adapted by other institutions for evaluating teaching, with the goal of promoting instructor development and growth.

This chapter continues the argument that quality teaching requires a set of defined competencies. It also presents a roadmap to identifying, developing, and assessing teaching competencies for on-the-ground instructors in outcomes-based military education, using the process developed by Air University as an example.

Traditional teacher evaluations -- full-lesson observations, write-ups, and debriefs -- are time-consuming and largely ineffective. As a principal, Kim Marshall found that mini-observations -- short, frequent, unannounced classroom visits, each followed by a face-to-face coaching conversation and brief narrative summary -- actually improved…

This conceptual paper discusses 'unseen observation' as an alternative model of classroom observation to support teachers' professional learning. The paper starts with a critical synopsis of how observation has been appropriated principally as a performance management tool for monitoring teacher effectiveness in the UK. It argues that the…

When it comes to generating better practices, feedback--a fair representation of professional performance--plays a crucial role due to its transformational power of enhancing skills, which helps ensure high-quality teaching in the classroom. However, principals' lack of time, lack of knowledge of curriculum content, and lack of training are the…

We describe the development and implementation of a holistic annual review process for nontenure-line faculty in the management department at a large, research university. We also discuss the department's evolution from solely utilizing Student Evaluations of Teaching (SET) to a broader array of review criteria, developed by the department's…

In this article, we describe the process of revising our writing program's teaching observation forms and processes over the last several years, drawing from descriptions of best practices in conducting teaching observations in writing programs (Comer; Jackson). We analyze the teaching observation form as it functions in a structurational nexus to…

Effective, inclusive, equitable, and evidence-based teaching is widely recognized as a crucial part of higher education change efforts with direct implications for student success and belonging, particularly at the undergraduate level where coursework plays a large role. It is also essential that faculty enact effective curriculum design and…

This brief discusses equity-minded faculty practices and provides resources to support equity-minded faculty hiring. It focuses on the four hiring practices that have been proven to contribute in a positive way to faculty diversity, including: (1) developing equity-minded hiring criteria; (2) equity-themed cluster hiring; (3) equity-minded…

Most science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) departments inadequately evaluate teaching, which means they are not equipped to recognize or reward effective teaching. As part of a project at one institution, we observed that departmental chairs needed help recognizing the decisions they would need to make to improve teaching…

What information addresses teachers' greatest concerns and actually has value to improve their impact on student learning? Thomas Guskey and Laura Link share new research that points to five characteristics for effective instructional feedback.

Feedback is an essential ingredient for professional growth, but teachers receive limited feedback that is actually useful. Audrey Amrein-Beardsley and Tray Geiger discuss the flaws in two common forms of teacher feedback, value-added measures and classroom observations, often used as part of a summative evaluation. They suggest that student…

This colloquium brings forward the "inside" voices of early childhood student teachers in order to critically examine the impact of the edTPA (Educative Teacher Performance Assessment) on student teaching experiences, especially the "educative" function that the edTPA claims.