University of Portland
The university's Senate ad hoc committee on teaching began its work in January 2024 and submitted its final report and recommendations on April 2, 2025. Although that committee disbanded, the work to implement the recommendations in its report continues through standing Senate committees, the dean's council, and individual departments.
The committee was given the following charge:
- Define the components of effective teaching at the University of Portland. One of these components must include inclusive teaching.
- Propose new models of faculty teaching evaluation that includes a format and process for peer evaluation and removes the sole method of faculty teaching evaluation from the students.
- Create a process for the schools, the college, and programs to generate guidelines of what effective teaching is for their disciplines that utilizes the work completed in the other charges and is analogous to scholarship guidelines.
Several committee members were drawn from the UP lead team for the HHMI IE3 grant. LCC4 provided both resources and expertise. The committee's work and final report were informed by the LCC4 LT3 work and specifically by University of Oregon's similar initiative and University of Georgia's three voice model. This is reflected in the report's language, using terms such as "student experience surveys", "collegial observations", etc.
The committee's definition of effective teaching has been incorporated into the faculty handbook. That definition is as follows:
- Scholarly: College teachers, as scholars and professionals, are experts in their disciplines who stay current with knowledge in their field. They draw on content expertise to convey central concepts and foster skills essential to their discipline.
- Purposeful: Effective teachers design courses to support student achievement of learning goals. Course materials and assessments are selected based on evidence of student engagement, the scholarship of teaching, or learning theory.
- Learner-Centered: Effective teachers analyze their teaching through the lenses of inclusivity and responsiveness. Their interactions with students and teaching practices are tailored to support students in achieving course goals equitably.
- Reflective: Becoming and remaining an effective teacher is an iterative process that improves current practices through continued examination of experience, research, professional development and critique from colleagues and students."
In its recommendations for faculty evaluation, the Provost Council and Senate Rank and Tenure committee are tasked with aligning evaluation processes for faculty and students to the Definition of Effective Teaching and associated Teaching Effectiveness Framework, and standardizing evaluation format. The report also asks the Senate Rank and Tenure committee to adopt a "teaching portfolio" as the format for submission of teaching materials. The Senate Teaching and Scholarship committee should align student feedback to the definition of effective teaching, including revising student experience surveys and update criteria and materials submitted for teaching award. The Rank and Tenure committee should align documents and procedures to align with definition of effective teaching and support the development of a teaching portfolio approach. Academic units are asked to develop teaching guidelines aligned to the Definition of Effective Teaching and analogous to scholarship guidelines and a contextualizing document aligned with definition of effective teaching. This document should then be incorporated into review processes. The committee recommends development of collegial observation process for all faculty that is formative, instructor guided, reciprocal, and self-reflective.