It is important to know how to document your teaching so that you are prepared to apply for promotions and teaching awards. There are many ways to do this, and UCET is here to help you! We have workshops most semesters on ways to document your teaching and we also are available to consult one-on-one. We highly recommend joining the UCET PTR prep group the year before you submit your dossier for Tenure or promotion to Senior Lecturer. Just email us at ucet@iusb.edu to join the group.

What is excellent teaching?

FACET, the all-IU teaching group, has issued a statement on excellence in teaching. This provides excellent advice on evaluating teaching. It also provides good guidelines for those seeking to demonstrate teaching excellence.

A good first step in documenting your teaching is to take an inventory of all of the teaching-related activities you do. The Dimensions of Activities Related to Teaching (DART) model can help you brainstorm, and then organize what you have done in a meaningful way. You can download the DART model here.

DART v2.jpg

It can also be helpful to have a list of ideas for documentation. This detailed list organizes sources of evidence from you, your colleagues, and your students.Documenting Teaching detailed Handout 9.9.14.pdf

Notice that there are many options beyond Student Evaluations of Teaching (SET). Although SETs can provide useful insights, they do NOT do a good job of telling whether students are actually learning. There is also quite a bit of research suggesting that SETs are biased towards white male instructors. This blog provides many links to that research.

This is the handout from a Documenting Your Teaching workshop. Documenting Teaching UCET 9.2016.pptx

Berk wrote a nice article in which he describes 12 ways to document your teaching.

Nilson has a great article on measuring student learning. Take particular note of ideas for pre-and post-course direct assessment of learning. An ungraded early assignment compared to the end of semester assignment is the gold standard, and Nilson suggests several ways to achieve this.

It can be useful to have a summary table of the means of your teaching evaluations. You can organize this chronologically, over the semesters, or you can organize by course, whichever makes the most sense for you. If you teach very different courses (e.g. freshman vs senior), it makes more sense to organize by type of course. If you have improved over time, you might want to organize chronologically. This is a spreadsheet template that you can adapt for your own needs.

Course_Instructor Evaluations2010 template.xlsx

Peer review of teaching

It is important to have others review your teaching, both as a way to improve (formative review) and to document the quality (summative review). We strongly encourage you to invite others into your classroom and to observe them on a regular basis, first informally and later for formal evaluation. UCET can help you decide which option is best for your needs.

See the module on Peer Review of Teaching for more information about being reviewed and on becoming a reviewer.