Faculty-led Inquiry into Reflective and Scholarly Teaching (formerly known as the Peer Review of Teaching Project) aims to engage faculty in documenting, assessing, and improving student learning and performance via extensive analysis and reflection on course development, instructional strategies, classroom activities, and students’ work.
During the year-long program, faculty engage in individual work, faculty retreats, and small group discussions with peers to complete careful course planning and conduct assessment of learning and teaching. Participants are provided dedicated time to reflect on and develop the course structure and activities, with the goal of documenting, promoting, and valuing the intellectual work of teaching.
The program is offered at two different times: the Fall-Start is for those who want to focus on a Spring semester course, and the Spring-Start is for those who want to focus on a Fall semester course. The program has two components: First-year and Advanced.
Capturing the Intellectual Work of Teaching
Faculty in higher education are increasingly asked to document, assess, and make public their teaching practices. Yet even faculty who value and support excellence in teaching have articulated difficulties in capturing the intellectual work of teaching.
The FIRST program will help you learn how to:
- Show the intellectual work of teaching taking place inside and outside of my classroom
- Systematically investigate, analyze, and document my students’ learning
- Communicate this intellectual work to campus or disciplinary conversations
Although student evaluations are useful for inquiring about what occurred during a course, other aspects related to the intellectual work of teaching are not always as visible to students. FIRST helps you capture the scholarly work of teaching by combining inquiry into the intellectual work in a course with a careful investigation of the curricular and department goals.
Project Goals
FIRST is a faculty-driven approach for developing a campus climate for teaching improvement and reform. Invited faculty work in teams over the course of a year to discuss approaches for documenting and assessing student learning within particular courses.
Rather than advocating any particular instructional strategy, FIRST focuses on helping faculty document student learning occurring in their course and then reflect on whether student performance demonstrates achievement of the curricular and department goals.
Specific outcomes for participating faculty include:
- Reflecting upon, developing, and writing a course portfolio about one of their courses,
- Identifying common teaching and curricular issues across academic disciplines,
- Becoming skilled as a reviewer of a course portfolio (and other teaching materials),
- Discussing the challenges in teaching and addressing the needs of diverse student learners,
- Developing a common vocabulary for talking about and assessing the intellectual work of teaching,
- Being nurtured to become a leader in creating and advocating department, college, and university teaching policies.
Project Objectives
First-year
By the end of the first-year program, you will be able to:
- Understand and articulate the importance of assessing, documenting, and studying student learning
- Identify key stakeholders in your teaching success
- Identify and articulate key course objectives that are appropriate to the target course and student learning
- Select and design assignments, course activities, and evaluative measures that will assess students’ achievement of course objectives
- Plan and implement assessment tools that enable optimal and informative evaluation of student learning
- Engage in empowered and empowering conversations about student learning and ways to improve UNL education, recruitment, and retention
- Produce a professional document (i.e., the course portfolio) that may be used to “make the case” (e.g., tenure, course design guide for GTAs, curriculum change, ACE certification)
Advanced
By the end of the advanced program, you will be able to:
- Understand and articulate the importance of assessing, documenting, and studying student learning
- Plan and implement assessment tools that enable optimal and informative evaluation of student learning
- Engage in empowered and empowering conversations about student learning and ways to improve UNL education, recruitment, and retention
- Determine an empirical question about teaching and/or student learning
- Design and conduct a study to answer an empirical question about teaching and/or student learning
- Share the study and conclusions with an audience beyond UNL (e.g., conference presentations and/or publications)
- Contribute to the SOTL theoretical advancement
Innovations
FIRST promotes educational reform at three different levels: by assisting faculty in evaluating and improving their students’ learning, by building a campus community that supports and refines this inquiry into student learning, and by challenging a research university’s attitude and policies about teaching. As a result, FIRST has helped to broaden the scope for improving student learning outcomes from individual classes to improving outcomes across programs, curricular areas, college departments, and different colleges. Key components of the project include:
- Having faculty explore what is going on in their classrooms, to analyze their course objectives, and to document and assess whether what they want to be happening is really happening. It offers a systematic and long-term approach that requires thoughtful collection and analysis of learning and teaching.
- Supporting the external review and evaluation of faculty course portfolios. External reviewers assess the portfolios based on criteria such as the intellectual content of the course, the appropriateness of teaching practices, levels of student understanding, and the portfolio author’s effectiveness in documenting his/her teaching. Having faculty outside of one’s university assess the work parallels the strategy for using external reviews of scholarly publications and research proposals.
- Engaging department teams to talk about their teaching goals and the linkages between their courses. Often times, these are the first conversations partners have ever had about their learning objectives and each other’s student performance.
- Having faculty work in teams and participate in interdisciplinary teaching conversations that are more focused than the usual sharing of teaching techniques. These conversations help faculty identify common teaching and curricular issues across academic disciplines (e.g., writing critical examinations, teaching with technology, using small groups, teaching via distance).
- Developing campus leaders by having faculty who complete the fellowship program continues in an advanced program and/or as a mentor to other fellows.
- Establishing peer review as a high-quality, evidence-based measure of teaching effectiveness that should be integrated into campus policies for promotion and tenure, merit reviews, and teaching awards.
While peer review by colleagues is routinely used in research, it is also a valuable process in the teaching arena, particularly in terms of evaluating teaching effectiveness. Pat Hutchings, who directed the Teaching Initiative of the AAHE, stated, "The peer review of teaching can, in its most powerful forms, be less a matter of judging teachers than of improving teaching, with the focus moving increasingly to ways we can help each other improve the quality of our collective contribution to students’ learning."