How is my teaching evaluated?

Dear Aggie,

I am new to New Mexico State University and was wondering about how my teaching will be evaluated. Is it just the end-of-semester student evaluations?

~New to NMSU

Dear New to NMSU,

I hope that your first semester has gone well all around. As you probably know, faculty prepare an annual performance report at the end of each calendar year. This report is submitted through the Watermark Faculty Success System, and that is how your evaluators (e.g., Department Heads, P&T committees) will be able to access your reports. So my first piece of advice is to make sure that your Watermark is up to date with respect to your progress and accomplishments.

For teaching, the NMSU Administrative Rules and Procedures (ARP) section 9.31 states that multiple forms of evidence are to be used to document the effectiveness of your teaching. More specifically, state law minimally requires student evaluations of teaching as well as one other form of evidence. The other forms of evidence that can be provided are (i) evidence from the instructor (e.g., self-reflections), (ii) evidence of student learning, and (iii) evidence from other professionals (e.g., peer observations and evaluations).

While this is a reporting requirement, doing this each year gives you an opportunity to think about what worked well, what didn’t work as well as you had hoped, and what changes you might make in the future to make your teaching even more effective. This is a great opportunity to really reflect on your teaching, and I encourage you to use the evidence from the instructor (your self-reflections) to really reflect on your teaching.

Things you may want to consider include:

• What did you do/what approaches did you take and why did you try things this way?
• What types of professional development did you participate in to improve your teaching? How have you incorporated what you learned into your teaching?
• What do student evaluations suggest about your approach?
• What do any peer observations suggest about your approach?
• In looking at your evidence for student learning, were there specific areas that students seemed to struggle with? If so, what would you do differently next time?
• If you experienced challenges, what can you do differently next time? If you do consider specific changes you want to make in the future, commit yourself to making those changes (your reviewers will appreciate seeing that you are acting on your own self-reflections).

With respect to the other forms of evidence:

• Student evaluations are to be qualitative (no numerical rating, ranking or letter grades of instructor performance). I encourage you to summarize and reflect on the student evaluations as part of your self-reflection.
• Peer observations are more meaningful when they are more than an isolated observation of a single class meeting. Give your observer access to your Canvas course. Give them some context of where a class fits in the entire course, give them some specific points that you would like them to pay attention to during the observation. Plan to have a follow-up meeting with your observer to discuss what they observed and any suggestions they may have.
• Final grades are not direct evidence of student learning. You could demonstrate student learning by showing improvement between a pre-test and a post-test. Or you could show improvement during the development of a final capstone project. For example, you could have students submit drafts, and demonstrate improvement on successive iterations.

I hope you enjoy the opportunity to report and reflect on your teaching, and realize the impact you are having on your students.

~Aggie