Excellence in Teaching and Learning is a key strategic priority for the University of Iowa. We are dedicated to fostering high-quality teaching and dynamic educational experiences that empower all students to achieve their aspirations. To reach this goal, our strategic plan calls on us to enhance support, incentives, and structures that facilitate teaching excellence and student learning.

To ensure our commitment to supporting learning for all students, we must align our policies and practices for recognizing and rewarding teaching excellence. This alignment of university values will help validate instructors’ ongoing work to engage students in learning and will empower them to continue investing in efforts to support student success.

Update on progress

We are building on previous efforts to advance progress in this area. Since 2018, leaders from every college and additional stakeholders from central units have gathered input from the campus community about practices for assessment of teaching, satisfaction with current practices, and perceptions of the institutional climate for assessing and improving teaching. There has been widespread agreement among faculty, department, and college leadership that existing practices must evolve to better capture and recognize the depth and quality of faculty engagement with teaching and learning. 

Engagement with the Association of American Universities (AAU) and the Association of Public and Land-grant Universities (APLU) networks has demonstrated that many peer institutions are similarly seeking to create better systems for recognizing and rewarding faculty investment in teaching and supporting the success of all their students.

New Framework for Assessing Teaching Effectiveness

In view of our own campus consensus and observations of peer institution efforts, the Teaching Effectiveness Task Force was charged in 2022 with developing a framework to support a more robust, evidence-based approach to the assessment of teaching. 

Since that charge, the Task Force has worked with many campus partners to articulate a statement on the value of teaching and a framework to provide the campus with a flexible understanding of the criteria for teaching effectiveness. This framework can be contextualized by colleges and departments to best represent teaching quality in their unique settings.

Framework Summary 

The University of Iowa is a leading research university dedicated to excellence in teaching and learning. Instructors, staff, and university leaders work together to provide a learning-centered campus culture that supports student success at every level. Together, we are committed to creating high-quality learning opportunities for all students.

Guided by this shared commitment, the assessment of teaching is based on evidence that demonstrates the following characteristics:

• Learning-centered teaching practices that are engaging and inclusive (not limited to formal classroom settings).
• Integration and alignment of learning goals, course materials, assignments, activities, and assessment strategies.
• Responsiveness to feedback from students and peers related to supporting student learning.
• Commitment to ongoing growth and professional development as an instructor.

Next steps to implement strategic plan goals for teaching and learning

The Office of the Provost encourages all who are invested in excellence in teaching and learning, with direction and support from collegiate leadership, to build on the work of the Teaching Effectiveness Task Force and develop a contextualized process for implementing the teaching assessment framework. 

These characteristics will not be adequately captured by student ratings alone. Implementation of the framework will make it necessary for colleges and departments to identify additional sources of data that will be recognized as evidence of teaching quality. The Office of the Provost has charged the Teaching Effectiveness Task Force with continuing to develop strategies and resources to support implementation of this new framework. We are also supporting academic units with setting the expectation that going forward, assessment of teaching will need to be based on at least two distinct sources of evidence and a teaching statement in which the instructor discusses the evidence they have provided.

We recognize that this expectation is aligned with best practices already in use in many departments on campus, but we also recognize that it will represent a change in practices in some cases. Colleges will be asked, in consultation with their departments, to identify the length of time they will need to make this the standard practice college-wide. The Teaching Effectiveness Task Force will continue working with colleges and departments to support their efforts during that time.