Procedural Guidelines
Timeline
- All full-time faculty (non-tenure-line and tenure-line) must receive a peer review of their teaching at least every five years.
Faculty Rights and Responsibilities
- Collaboration: The relevant administrator and the faculty member being reviewed should collaborate to choose reviewers.
- Reviewer selection: The faculty member under review
- Has the opportunity to submit names of potential reviewers.
- May reject a proposed reviewer after consultation with their administrator.
Administrator Responsibilities
- Types of evidence: Academic schools will determine which sources of evidence will be used in peer reviews, and how these sources will be reviewed. Furthermore:
- If course observation is an element of an academic unit’s peer review guidelines, the academic school must have guidelines for reviewing courses in a variety of delivery modes (e.g., hybrid, in-person, online).
- The academic school must make clear what constitutes a course observation.
- Consistency: Administrators must consistently apply their unit’s peer review guidelines across the academic unit and within ranks.
- Clear communication: The School Director must clearly communicate the unit’s peer review guidelines to faculty.
Reviewers
- Reviewers may be internal or external to the academic unit, and academic school guidelines should outline the need for discipline expertise, as well as rank requirements across reviewers.
Review Guidelines
Framework: Penn State's research-based “Elements of Effective Teaching” should serve as a foundation for the peer review of teaching:
- Effective Design
- Effective Instruction
- Inclusive and Ethical Pedagogy
- Reflective and Evolving Practice
Elaboration and examples can be found here: Elements of Effective Teaching
- Evidence-Based observation: The content of each evaluation should include only evidence-based observations. That is, the assessment (i.e., evaluations and conclusions) should be tied to corresponding evidence.
- Multiple sources: Summative peer review of teaching ideally consists of more than one source of assessment that may or may not include course observation.
January 2014
Revised April 2018
Revised September 2022
Revised June 2024