Written by: Richard Badenhausen
Published by: The Chronicle of Higher Education on 6/8/2022
MBA News Digest Comment: Where is the leadership that is needed to bring about the reform that we all know is needed?
Extracted Content: One thing most academics can agree on: How we evaluate our colleagues’ work in the classroom is a vexed system, badly in need of overhaul.
A recent essay in The Chronicle, “How Peer Review Could Improve Our Teaching,” offers wonderfully clear advice on how to improve one element of that system: peer review of teaching. The authors offer ideas on how to overcome a host of entrenched, unproductive habits that now make peer review of teaching feel not just unsatisfying, but also punitive and hurtful at times.
I hope to build on the conversation by moving beyond the authors’ primary point that “we can do better” at peer review. We certainly can. I agree with all of their good suggestions to consider the full scope of an instructor’s teaching (not just in-class time), institutionalize regular classroom visits, and position peer review as a formative process. But for a true culture shift to take place about teaching, departments and institutions need to reform not just peer review but its many adjacent practices, too. Peer review sits within a larger nexus of evaluative customs — all of which should be similarly investigated, reformed, and eventually aligned with one another.