Penn State University
Summary In the summer of 2020, The Pennsylvania State University, through a collaboration between the University Faculty Senate and the Office of Faculty Affairs (formerly the Office of the Vice Provost for ...

University of Georgia
The University of Georgia, spurred by an initiative to improve undergraduate instruction in STEM disciplines, established a university-wide teaching evaluation policy. The policy change process was enabled by emphasizing the types of evidence necessary to make judgments about teaching effectiveness and to help faculty improve their teaching over time in a way that was feasible across disciplines. Change frameworks and exemplars from peer and aspirant institutions served as inspirations and distributing leadership for the change effort made the work feasible and sustainable over time.

University of Portland
The University of Portland is reviewing the criteria for evaluating effective teaching, including defining inclusive teaching practices, developing processes to evaluate teaching more holistically, and potentially updating guidelines for evaluation. The current policy for Rank & Tenure procedures regarding faculty evaluation can be found in the Faculty Handbook. This work started with the University's Academic Senate. The Senate voted to convene an Ad Hoc Committee to review best practices in inclusive teaching, faculty evaluation, and holistic evaluation of teaching. The committee began its work in January 2024 and issued its final report in April 2025. The committee proposed a new definition of effective teaching, which was accepted by the senate and incorporated into the faculty handbook. The report also included recommendations for teaching evaluation criteria and procedures. Implementation of these recommendations is expected to take at least another year for most and as much as five years to fully implement collegial observation and integrate it into the evaluation policies.

University of Oregon
The University of Oregon (UO) Office of the Provost and the University Senate have been working together since spring 2017 to revise UO's teaching evaluation system. Changes began with revisions to course evaluation surveys, but expanded to more holistic work to establish a criteria-based, multi-sourced system—a system with a broad but substantive definition of teaching quality at its center, and where information from students, faculty colleagues, and faculty themselves are considered together when making judgements about teaching quality. UO's Senate initiated central policy changes that are now in the hands of academic departments to adapt to their own disciplinary contexts.

University of La Verne
The University of La Verne's Faculty Policies Committee has been working on creating and implementing a new framework for teaching evaluation since 2016. The new framework moved the teaching evaluation process away from sole reliance on student course evaluations and toward a more robust set of measures, including cultural competence/inclusion, that assess teaching effectiveness through observations (peer, supervisor), student feedback, and self-reflection.

Georgia Southern University
College-level promotion and tenure policy revisions were approved by faculty vote in the Georgia Southern (GS) University College of Science and Mathematics (COSM) in spring 2022. The guidelines for the evaluation of teaching were developed using insight gained from a survey of the faculty; discussions with the departments, leadership and Faculty Governance Committee in the College; and evidence-based strategies as outlined in peer-reviewed articles and teaching evaluation policies from other universities and organizations. The recommended guidelines aimed to account for the range of perspectives and backgrounds of students and faculty, and varied teaching and learning styles. The document-revision period spanned fall 2021 to spring 2022. However, foundational work and discussions regarding this process began in 2018. At the time of this writing (fall 2024), the College is gearing up to do another round of policy revisions.

Pomona College
At Pomona College, the faculty have taken an active hand in creating policy change to enhance inclusion and belonging among students as well as faculty. By moving policy forward in conjunction with necessary cultural changes, they have been able to craft approaches to inclusive practices that can be broadly adopted.

Gustavus Adolphus College
Summary Gustavus Adolphus College adopted guidance for their tenure and promotion process that explicitly values inclusive teaching. This policy change originated in a desire to illuminate and value the invisible ...

University of Oklahoma
A partnership between the Faculty Senate Executive Committee and the administration at the University of Oklahoma led to the creation of an updated student course survey called the Course Reflection Survey (CRS) in order to update the process for gathering student feedback about their course experiences. The new survey is impacting the role course surveys play in teaching evaluation, leading to more actionable feedback for instructors and, in time, more meaningful teaching evaluations. The ultimate goal is the improvement of teaching and learning for all OU students.