From: David DeVidi, Associate Vice-President, Academic and David Porreca, President, FAUW
To: Regular Faculty
Dear Colleagues,
We write to announce the launch of the University’s Peer Review of Teaching process, beginning in January 2025. This is a “soft launch” which means that participation in 2025 is optional. We also want to take this opportunity to encourage those who receive an invitation to participate.
All Faculties will be implementing systematic Peer Review of Teaching in 2025.
- Most will be using a centrally developed system for matching reviewers and reviewees. This system provides reviewees with a list of names of potential reviewers and an opportunity to veto options in cases of conflict of interest. After that, reviewers are assigned at random from the remaining names on the list.
- Reviewers will have had Peer Reviewer training, offered through the Centre for Teaching Excellence.
- It is strongly encouraged that all reports be written using a standard form which is grounded in the University’s Framework for Teaching Effectiveness.
- Beginning in 2025 with the soft launch, the Teaching Assessment Processes (TAP) team will gather information to help make Peer Review of Teaching more useful and efficient in the future. To that end, we will gather information about matters like: whether reviewers feel that the training covered all the topics it should; how effective the matching process was; how long it takes to complete a peer review, both as a reviewer and a reviewee; whether those reviewed felt like the reviews provided them with useful feedback that will help them become better teachers in the future; and so on.
Any Faculty that does not implement the PRT process using the centrally developed system will be implementing the process in some closely related way that satisfies conditions 2-4 on this list. This will facilitate comparison of results of the different approaches at the end of the first year.
Peer Review of Teaching is a key part of the University’s holistic teaching assessment model. When the University, following the encouragement of Senate, adopted the new Student Course Perceptions survey tool for all Waterloo courses in 2019, it gained the support of FAUW (and of the student leaders of the day) for doing so by simultaneously committing to this holistic approach to teaching assessment. Holistic assessment is intended to provide fairer assessment and to gather information about aspects of teaching on which students are not in a position to provide effective feedback.
To put this joint sentiment of the Administration, FAUW, and student leaders into action, Senate passed a motion to establish the Complementary Teaching Assessment Project Team (CTAPT) to investigate additional sources of information about teaching effectiveness beyond the information available from student surveys. This group worked, in two phases over three years, digging into the relevant research literature and consulting widely and repeatedly on campus. When it concluded, CTAPT recommended pursuing two main avenues to improve assessment of teaching: systematic Peer Review of Teaching, and better opportunities for instructors to self-report about activities relevant to their teaching effectiveness (e.g., at performance review time and in dossiers for tenure, permanence and promotion consideration). During the course of its work, CTAPT reported annually to Senate, and this work was endorsed in various forms on different occasions.
The current PRT process is intended to implement the practices recommended by CTAPT. As noted, these recommendations were produced by a committee that had representation from every Faculty, the membership on which was jointly selected by the AVPA and the President of FAUW at the time, and that consulted widely on campus and reviewed the relevant literature. We believe this process will promote fairness and consistency while fostering a culture that values and rewards excellent teaching. We encourage you to participate and contribute to this important initiative.