Teaching Consultants: A Collegial Approach to Better Teaching.

Abstract

ost academic departments and colleges have relatively few re sources to offer to faculty mem bers for systematically evaluating and improving their instruction.1,2 Peer evaluation of instruction is usually idiosyncratic, casual, and haphazard, except when tenure and promotion deci sions are being made, and these evalua tions are not usually designed to im prove an individual's teaching. Reliable evaluations from students certainly can be obtained, but even when they are in terpreted conscientiously, they usually have relatively little impact. Although there are differences among instruc tors, research on the use of student evaluations indicates that significant positive changes in teaching generally require personal intervention and one on-one consultation with a peer or an instructional expert (Aleamoni 1978, 1981, McKeachie 1979, Levinson-Rose and Menges 1981). Even though considerable research has been done on the use of various types of evaluation data for faculty de velopment (for example, Millman 1981; Fuller and Manning 1973), most departments and colleges do not have enough instructional specialists to con