Evaluating Teaching Effectiveness
Recognizing that course and instructor evaluations often provide only partial information about teaching effectiveness, the Center for Teaching Excellence has gathered additional resources for reflecting on and evaluating teaching. These resources include articles and other scholarship as well as frameworks and tools that have been developed and used successfully at other institutions.
On this page, you will find recommended resources for getting started. We also invite you to explore additional resources for a deeper dive into teaching evaluations.
Getting Started
In a timely article in the Chronicle of Higher Education, Before teaching can be evaluated, good teaching must be defined, McMurtrie (2024) addresses the limitations of student course evaluations and reviews alternatives being implemented at various universities.
Establishing a framework for assessing teaching effectiveness (Simonson et al., 2022) defines effective teaching and provides a comprehensive tool for evaluating teaching.
The roadmap designed by Indiana University in Identifying Pathways for Excellence in Teaching provides a year-by-year plan for instructors to evaluate and document teaching effectiveness.
The Teaching Quality Framework initiative at CU Boulder includes a toolkit for departments to evaluate teaching in a more comprehensive and robust manner.
Classroom observation is frequently recommended for obtaining feedback on teaching. The Center for Excellence provides consultations and classroom observations at an instructor's request. In addition to engaging in pre-observation reflection, you may wish to use this post-observation reflection tool from the University of Texas at Austin.
Peer feedback is an important component of comprehensive teaching evaluations. To facilitate peer feedback, the Peer Evaluation of Teaching Tool allows you to create a customized evaluation template tailored to the goals of your evaluation.
Collecting mid-semester feedback is an effective way to evaluate a course in progress and to identify small changes that may benefit current students' learning. The CTE mid-semester feedback short survey can be adapted to meet your course and instructional goals.
Additional Resources
Further reading, frameworks, and tools, including guidance on collecting and using mid-semester and end-of-course feedback, can be found in our Teaching Evaluation Resource Collection.