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…

The teaching quality evaluation of college teachers is an important indicator of school evaluation, performance assessment and teacher promotion. However, the existing evaluation methods are only limited to the formal evaluation of teaching behavior, and have not achieved objective, reasonable and scientific evaluation results. The purpose of this…

The requirements for the quality of the teacher's pedagogical work and its assessment are constantly increasing. The paper focused on knowledge related to teacher competence. It resulted from research activities in several scientific research projects (e.g. the Slovak Research and Development Agency, Evaluation of Teacher Competencies),…

With the aim to provide teachers with more specific, frequent, and actionable feedback about their teaching, we explore how Large Language Models (LLMs) can be used to estimate "Instructional Support" domain scores of the CLassroom Assessment Scoring System (CLASS), a widely used observation protocol. We design a machine learning…

The evaluation of teaching quality and practice is increasingly important in higher education and usually done via student surveys (quantitative data) alone. Much less attention is given to teachers' self-evaluations of teaching practice (qualitative data). This emphasis on quantitative over qualitative data can result in incomplete and biased…

Most institutional practices to evaluate teaching are inadequate, inaccurate, neither improve teaching directly, nor incentivize teaching improvement. This is often because effective teaching is difficult to assess and most tools do not adequately or accurately do so and are often without established standards. Because of this, faculty may be…

Recent lawsuits reveal common mistakes plaguing current teacher evaluation systems. Drawing on arguments in court documents for prominent cases, the authors find that evaluation systems using value-added measures (VAM) suffer from a) inconsistent and unreliable teacher ratings, b) bias toward and against teachers of certain types of students, c)…

In response to research demonstrating that Tennessee Extension agents desired a performance appraisal system that better reflected their jobs and provided for appraisers' professional development, a committee of University of Tennessee and Tennessee State University personnel undertook a 2-year initiative to revise the performance appraisal…

As states are continuing to refine teacher evaluation models, there are opportunities for student learning in the arts to be documented and connected with teacher evaluation. The Tennessee Portfolio of Student Growth in the Arts ("the Portfolio") has provided a new perspective on documenting the relationship between student growth and…

Effective teaching practice focused on encouraging deep engagement helps all students learn and succeed. Considerable work by researchers and change agents, encouraged by national organizations such as the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the National Research Council, has promoted greater use of evidence-based educational practices, such as…

Student ratings have long been used by many institutions of higher education as a primary form of summative evaluation of teaching. In recent years, studies have brought into question the validity of student ratings, highlighting the need for more effective evaluation methods that recognize and reward evidence-based teaching practices. To begin to…

Discipline-based education research (DBER) is an emergent, interdisciplinary field of scholarship aimed at understanding and improving discipline-specific teaching and learning. The number of DBER faculty members in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) departments has grown rapidly in recent years. Because the interdisciplinary…

This paper presents policy document analysis as practical tool that can be put to valuable use by educational leaders and can also be adopted as a research method. Educational leaders are at the forefront of policy interpretation and consequently need knowledge and skills that enable them to analyse policy as part of their work in developing,…

Collegiality is a difficult concept to define and still more difficult of a concept to translate to practice as an effective tool to measure desired performance in the higher education setting. As faculty in kinesiology transition from retention to tenure and promotion, it is imperative that collegiality be clearly defined in measureable and…

In this Reflection on Practice I argue the case for using the principles of scholarship of teaching and learning (SoTL) to serve as a framework for evaluating and designing peer observation programmes in higher education contexts. I suggest that for peer observation to be an activity worthy of SoTL, it should be systematic, collaborative,…