By Jared Del Rosso, PhD., Associate Professor, Department of Sociology & Criminology; Leslie Cramblet Alvarez, PhD., Director of the Office of Teaching and Learning
The Teaching Excellence Task Force had a busy and exciting end to the academic year, learning with three members of the leadership team for Transforming Higher Education – Multidimensional Evaluation of Teaching (TEval) project: Noah Finkelstein (CU-Boulder), Andrea Follmer Greenhoot (University of Kansas), and Gabriela Weaver (UMass-Amherst). Members of the task force had several opportunities to discuss TEval’s framework for evaluating teaching.
- On May 12, Dr. Jared Del Rosso (Associate Professor, Department of Sociology & Criminology) hosted “Think and Drink #7: How Can Departments Transform How We Evaluate Teaching and Why Might They Want To?”
- On May 14, Dr. Barbekka Hurtt (Teaching Assistant Professor, Department of Biological Sciences) hosted “Think and Drink #8: How Can We Go Beyond Student Evaluations to Gather Evidence of Teaching Excellence?”
- The following week, the TEval team participated in the May 18 Provost Luncheon, “Advancing Teaching Excellence: A Conversation about Recognizing, Evaluating and Rewarding Teaching Across Rank and Series.”
All three events were open to the broader DU community and set the stage for the Task Force’s May 24 meeting with the TEval team on frameworks for evaluating teaching and models for engaging in campus-wide change processes. The task force will continue its work in the fall.