University Times

By the end of the fall term, every Pitt college, school and regional campus will have in place its own system requiring peer and student evaluations of teaching, Vice Provost for Academic Affairs Jack L. Daniel told Senate Council Oct. 11.

Units that already have such systems include the four regional campuses, the College of General Studies, the Honors College, and the schools of education, engineering, law, library and information science, pharmacy, public and international affairs, and social work, said Daniel.

Personnel in each of those units developed their own system for that unit, and requirements vary according to the teaching done there, Provost James Maher told Senate Council.

In some schools, for example, faculty whose teaching is being evaluated must allow fellow faculty members to sit in on their classes to judge their teaching performance; other schools do not require peer classroom visits, said Maher.

But the Provost's office has studied and approved each system, Maher said.

"The only centrally imposed requirement is that the [teaching] evaluation process involve both student and faculty input so that when a department chair or dean is making a raise or tenure decision, the peers and the students have been consulted and it's not an arbitrary thing," the provost said.

The goal is for every teacher at Pitt to be evaluated annually — but not necessarily every course, said Maher.

National studies show that students get "burned out" when they're asked to complete evaluation forms for every class they take, he said, so it might be better if a professor teaching four courses per term is evaluated in just one or two of those classes.

However, any student who wants to comment on a teacher's job performance should feel free to write to his or her department chairperson regardless of whether evaluation forms were distributed in class, Maher said.

The drive to require student/peer teaching evaluation systems throughout the University dates back to a set of proposals that the Board of Trustees made five years ago to improve teaching here. Three years ago, Chancellor J. Dennis O'Connor assigned the Provost's office to work with each unit to develop such systems.

None of the evaluation systems is likely to be perfect and any one of them may be amended in the future to meet the changing needs of a particular unit, Maher said.

— Bruce Steele