Departmental Teaching Evaluation University Of Colorado Boulder

Bonisiwe Shabane

-Oct 30, 2025, 11:23 PM

departmental teaching evaluation university of colorado boulder

Evaluating teaching effectively requires thoughtful alignment with evidence-based practices and the inclusion of diverse perspectives. The Center for Teaching & Learning (CTL) supports departments and programs at CU Boulder in enhancing their teaching evaluation processes through personalized consultations and a wealth of curated resources. By aligning teaching evaluation practices with current scholarship, many CU Boulder units have successfully improved their methods. These efforts often involve: The CTL offers downloadable, editable documents and viewable PDFsbelow to help you implement effective teaching evaluation strategies. Explore these tools to ensure your department’s practices are equitable, evidence-based, and aligned with institutional goals for teaching excellence.

Frameworks provide standards for development to help faculty improve their teaching practices. They also provide structure and guidance to support meaningful implementation of teaching evaluation measures. Frameworks typically contain multiple “dimensions” that collectively capture the practice of teaching as a whole. In most cases, frameworks take the form of rubrics that are used to document, review, and evaluate university teaching (rubric-based frameworks). They can be used: The TQF framework above is adapted from a framework originally developed by the University of Kansas (KU) Center for Teaching Excellence.

You can find their Benchmarks for Teaching Effectiveness framework and many examples from KU departments at KU Framework. Evaluating teaching effectively requires thoughtful alignment with evidence-based practices and the inclusion of diverse perspectives. The Center for Teaching & Learning (CTL) supports departments and programs at �� Boulder in enhancing their teaching evaluation processes through personalized consultations and a wealth of curated resources. By aligning teaching evaluation practices with current scholarship, many �� Boulder units have successfully improved their methods. These efforts often involve: The CTL offers downloadable, editable documents and viewable PDFsbelow to help you implement effective teaching evaluation strategies.

Explore these tools to ensure your department’s practices are equitable, evidence-based, and aligned with institutional goals for teaching excellence. Frameworks provide standards for development to help faculty improve their teaching practices. They also provide structure and guidance to support meaningful implementation of teaching evaluation measures. Frameworks typically contain multiple “dimensions” that collectively capture the practice of teaching as a whole. In most cases, frameworks take the form of rubrics that are used to document, review, and evaluate university teaching (rubric-based frameworks). They can be used:

The TQF framework above is adapted from a framework originally developed by the University of Kansas (KU) Center for Teaching Excellence. You can find their Benchmarks for Teaching Effectiveness framework and many examples from KU departments��at . The KU Center for Teaching Excellence has developed a framework called Bench- marks for Teaching Effectiveness to support better methods of reviewing, documenting, and evaluating teaching. The framework is organized around a multidimensional rubric for reviewing faculty teaching. This policy provides requirements for the evaluation of faculty teaching. This policy provides requirements for the evaluation of faculty teaching.

This policy provides requirements for the evaluation of faculty teaching, the results of which may be used for annual performance evaluation, tenure and promotion, mentoring of the faculty member, and professional development: 1 At the Anschutz Medical Campus, faculty evaluation processes may vary from those described here. A peer evaluation process shall be used where appropriate, and normed student feedback shall be considered in the evaluation process whenever possible. A faculty member’s teaching shall be evaluated using multiple measures, including normed student feedback (such as FCQs or similar, campus-approved mechanisms), with actions to mitigate potential bias that evaluates the effectiveness of the course... The normalization process shall be defined by each primary unit. This information supports the faculty evaluation process and faculty rewards system.

The Teaching Quality Framework (TQF) initiative facilitates departmental and campus-wide efforts to provide a richer evaluation of teaching to enhance the value of high-quality teaching and reward scholarly approaches to improving student learning. The TQF team will work with interested departments to develop and adopt a new framework for supporting and assessing teaching. The framework draws from multiple sources of evidence of high-quality teaching, including the instructor’s materials, peer feedback, and student voices. The teaching quality framework is grounded in the scholarship of higher education, including the work of Bernstein and colleagues (2002, 2010) and Glassick and colleagues (1997). It defines teaching as a scholarly activity like research. In this way, teaching can be conceptualized in terms of seven core components of scholarly teaching — goals, content, and alignment; preparation for teaching; methods and teaching practices; presentation and student interaction; student outcomes;...

To garner support and recognition of scholarship in these areas, one can use three “voices”: from the faculty member being assessed, their students, and their peers. The framework supports improved teaching by providing standards for development to help faculty improve their teaching practices. The framework categories are held constant across all departments; however, the interpretation of these categories and their relative weights are defined at a department-by-department level, providing the university with a common approach to assessment... For more details on the TQF initiative, please see our Resources page which includes a single-page summary and a longer white paper describing the initiative. The TQF initiative is part of the consortium of leading-edge institutions that make up the TEval: Transforming Higher Education - Multidimensional Evaluation of Teachingproject to promote and study the use of scholarly approaches to... We are funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF, #1725959) and the University of Colorado Boulder (College of Arts and Sciences, College of Engineering and Applied Science, and Leeds School of Business).

TQF also benefits from strong ties with many local and national affiliates, including the Bay View Alliance (BVA) and the Association of American Universities (AAU). A list of partners, affiliates, and collaborators can be found below. If you have any questions, please contact noah.finkelstein@colorado.edu A vast array of resources are available through CU’s Teaching Quality Framework and Quality Teaching Initiatives. Building on and collaborating with the KU efforts, CU has adapted the KU materials and its predecessors to create a local 7-dimensional rubric, this is part of the broader framework that includes both the... A great place to start is CU Boulder's 1 page summary of their Teaching Quality Framework

For a bit more info, CU's 2-pager on TQF includes a brief introduction to its multi-dimensional rubric: Teaching Quality Framework Rubric - Oct 2020 Still want more, you got it: TQF example rubric-based approach to evaluating teaching Many units on the CU Boulder campus have been working in partnership with the Teaching Quality Framework (TQF) Inititiative to better align their teaching evaluation practices with known scholarship on teaching evaluation by: a)... These are designed to fulfill university requireiments - see "CU Policies Related to Measuring Teaching Effectiveness" for an annotated list of CU policies that support academic units defining their own measures of teaching quality... The following tools are designed to align with an overarching rubric (2 page version) that categorizes seven dimensions of teaching, and draws from three voices (peer review, self-evaluation, and student evaluation). Working with the TQF-team, departmental teams utilizing the Departmental Action Team (DAT) model (Corbo et al.

2016) have developed tools and processes for measuring teaching quality for the purpose of merit and / or reappointment, tenure, and promotion. Below we provide links to generic templates and department-specific examples of these materials, which currently fit into four broad categories: Peer Observation, Self-Evaluation, Student Evaluation, and Applying the Overarching Rubric to an Evaluation Form. Please note that many of the examples are still in development (notations below: “in use” = currently being used by the department in their evaluation process(es); “in review” = being reviewed and/or piloted by... As additional “in use” versions become available we will update this list. Unstructured peer classroom observations, i.e., those that are not based on a set of core criteria, can result in inconsistency and do not always address teaching practices that are valued by a department (AAAS... For this reason, scholarly literature on teaching evaluation recommends that academic units articulate the best teaching practices for their field and define core criteria to use in the observation process (AAAS 2012).

Feedback on teaching can be more effective in promoting growth and improvement when it focuses on specific issues, contains concrete information, and is based on specific data (rather than general impressions) (Brinko 1993). Toward these ends, departments working with the TQF have developed standardized peer observation protocols, peer evaluation plans, and associated materials. (return to top) These peer observation protocols are intended to provide structure and consistency to peer classroom observations. The templates and examples below draw heavily from the UTeach Observation Protocol (UTOP: https://utop.uteach.utexas.edu/) and the Oregon Teacher Observation Protocol (OTOP): Wainwright et al. 2003).

Many departments have chosen to explicitly include active learning as a category for peer observation; in departments where faculty may be less familiar with active learning, a more detailed addendum may be added to...

Departmental Teaching Evaluation University Of Colorado Boulder

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