Theme 1: Align policy change with what matters

Introduction

Teaching evaluation policy has multiple stakeholders: those who teach (e.g., faculty), those who experience teaching (e.g., students), and those who conduct evaluations (e.g., administrators, promotion and tenure committees). For teaching evaluation policy to be changed, these stakeholders must be motivated to make the change. In other words, any changes in teaching policy need to be aligned with what matters for the individuals and units involved.

Different teaching evaluation policies will have different stakeholders who will perceive different benefits and costs related to the policy change. Different stakeholder groups (e.g., faculty, administrators) are also likely to have both shared and distinct values, which may influence whether they are motivated to change policy or maintain the status quo. These perceptions and values need to be considered to motivate stakeholders to proceed with policy change and adhere to the policy once it is changed. For example, changing institution-level policies about teaching evaluation will likely require buy-in from institutional leadership as well as faculty and staff involved in teaching activities. Departmental or unit-level policies will have department members as stakeholders (e.g., faculty, chairs, or heads), but may or may not require buy-in from individuals outside the unit. Because departmental policy changes need to be consistent with institutional policy, the perspectives and motivations of institutional stakeholders will also be useful to consider.

The policy change initiatives underway at Learning Community Cluster 4 (LCC4) institutions have all made efforts to align policy change with what matters for their units and organizations. These change efforts reflect three overarching motives: (1) relevant evidence, (2) organizational identity, and (3) equity and justice. Each is described below and accompanied by specific examples that span institution types. Importantly, these motives are not mutually exclusive, and several institutions aligned their policy change work and messaging with multiple motives.

Relevant evidence

Several institutions relied on internal data from institutional research offices or centers for teaching and learning to make a compelling case for changing teaching evaluation policy. Other institutions garnered evidence in the form of literature that showed disconnects between current policies and desired outcomes for students. Yet other institutions invited outside speakers to present evidence in the context of a compelling story, such as how their institution changed policy and how these changes made a difference. All these strategies ultimately provided evidence that helped convince stakeholders that policy change was both worthwhile and feasible.

• Georgia Southern University established an Ad Hoc Promotion and Tenure (P&T) Committee, including a sub-team on evaluation of teaching for P&T. The team was charged with reading the literature on best practices for the evaluation of faculty teaching performance, and used what they learned to draft a rubric that reflected these practices. Thus, evidence from literature served as the foundation for modernizing teaching evaluation policy.
• University of Georgia invited a series of speakers from peer and aspirant institutions to talk about their efforts to promote effective and equitable teaching. Key stakeholders, including university and department leadership as well as faculty thought leaders and change agents within departments, were invited to hear the speaker seminars. Arrangements were made for individual or small group meetings with speakers to learn about operational details, including challenges and workarounds. This speaker series helped provide realistic examples of how policy change could happen at similar institutions and what difference it could make for students, faculty, and the institution.
• University of Oregon conducted an analysis of campus-wide data from student course evaluations and identified two issues. First, there was a systematic pattern of lower ratings based on instructor gender. Second, students were under-rating courses where they seemed to be learning more based on their grades in follow-on course grades. Equipped with these results, the University Senate established a task force to change policy regarding student surveys, including a requirement that evaluation of teaching be conducted against clear criteria.

Organizational identity

Multiple institutions aligned their policy changes with implicit or explicit elements of the institution's identity. For instance, research-intensive institutions, in which most faculty are evaluated at least in part by their success in garnering extramural funding, built policy change work into grant-funded projects. Change agents at other institutions aligned efforts to revise teaching evaluation policy with institutional strategic planning or other priorities such as national visibility and reputation. Equipping institutional leaders with information, talking points, and evidence that teaching evaluation policy change helped accomplish institution level goals and priorities helped smooth the way for policy changes.

• University of Oklahoma was awarded a five-year, multi-million dollar ADVANCE grant from the National Science Foundation for Oklahoma-Elevate. Improving faculty evaluation processes was proposed as an integral element of the project; the grant requires reviewing and revising teaching evaluation policy. This policy change work is further supported because it aligns with the university's strategic plan, which includes an effort to "develop fair and rigorous metrics for evaluating teaching effectiveness, and reward and promote outstanding performance."

Equity and justice

Certain institutions have placed high priority on recognizing inequities and injustices in higher education and working to promote fairness and justice. In the context of teaching evaluation, injustice can manifest as unevenness in faculty workloads, including that diversity, equity, and inclusion work can go unrecognized and be undervalued. In addition, teaching evaluations can be unfair if they rely on a sole source of evidence to make high-stakes judgments about a faculty member's teaching, especially if that evidence has been shown to be biased against faculty with particular personal characteristics or who teach particular types of courses. Institutions that place high value on equity and justice aligned their teaching evaluation policy changes with this value by emphasizing these injustices and inequities, thereby motivating their communities to change policy.

• The Faculty Personnel Committee (FPC) at Gustavus Adolphus College determined that certain candidates for promotion and tenure were doing extensive "invisible work" to promote equity and inclusion through their teaching. They made a conscious decision to revise policy such that this invisible work could be documented and valued in decisions for promotion and tenure.
• Pomona College noticed that faculty efforts to promote diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging were not always recognized or rewarded. To address this issue, the College made a conscious effort to pay faculty for "outside of the ordinary" engagement with inclusive excellence. For example, faculty receive a small stipend for participating in faculty programming related to diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging (year-long faculty cohorts). To recognize faculty who have long practiced inclusive teaching, instructors known for their commitments to inclusion and equity are also invited to present to faculty cohorts and paid an honorarium for their time.  Faculty also receive additional modest compensation for submitting a written reflection on their own evolution and practices related to inclusive teaching, based on a set of question prompts. These reflections go to the Institute for Inclusive Excellence Team and have yielded the current working definition of inclusive teaching at Pomona.
• The University of La Verne observed from the literature and faculty experiences at ULV that evaluating teaching based solely on student course evaluations was unfair, ​​and that more robust ways of measuring teaching quality were needed. During the process of rethinking teaching evaluation, the Faculty Senate determined that a more holistic revision of faculty evaluation policy was needed. This provided an opportunity to integrate consideration of an instructor's efforts to be inclusive and equitable in their teaching into the new framework.