Introduction

I wanna share with you one piece of joy that I have around peer observation of teaching. So I’ve been doing a lot of work with Newman University’s Center for Teaching and Learning, and with the director in particular, Marguerite Regan. Marguerite has done a lot of work with critical teaching behaviors, and in this past year, she created a community of practice around pure observation of teaching. Now, this is a story told secondhand, but I’ve heard it from Marguerite so many times that I’m happy to share it as my own piece of joy because we’ve worked closely on this. Marguerite’s institution had gone through some very difficult times. They’d had a number of reductions in force that had left the university dwindling in faculty numbers, and there was a lot of discouragement and gloom on campus. When Marguerite was appointed as director of the Center for Teaching and Learning, one of her first priorities was to establish a positive teaching culture on campus.

Now, considering the reductions in force they’d faced, this was actually a pretty big deal and she was facing an uphill battle. The first thing that Marguerite did was look at establishing peer observations of teaching. Why? Because we know that they have a power and potential to shift culture when they’re well designed, and that’s exactly what Marguerite did. She spent an entire year researching how do you design an effective peer observation program, and that’s where I started working with her. Over the past year, she implemented that community of practice, and she’s now had up to 50% of the faculty at Newman University trained on how to conduct peer observations.

What faculty are saying about this experience is that it has changed teaching for them. It has reinvigorated their interest in teaching well in finding ways to innovate and engaging with their students, and instead of finding out that they’re doing everything wrong, they’re in fact finding out that they’re doing so many things right! It has been affirming, it has been confidence-building, and it has built excitement around teaching at Newman University. She has seen a 180 culture shift in the last year with this community of practice, and that’s the power of peer observation that we’re here to share with you today. So I hope that this story of joy inspires you to continue with this course and take the ideas that we shared with Marguerite and move forward at your own institution.

When I think about what drew me to this work, I often think back to my very first experience with being observed. At that point, I was a graduate student and my supervisor came to observe my class. He sat at the back of the class, and I remember just being super aware of his presence in the room. Afterwards, I got really good feedback and a detailed list of suggestions of what I could improve, and they were well intentioned and constructive. But the whole time I felt like the experience was a little bit one-sided. It was something that was done to me and not with me. It didn’t feel like I was a real part of it. Later then, in a different setting, I participated in a micro-teaching session where several of my peers observed, and that experience felt just completely different.

After the session, we sat down together and had a conversation, not just about what I could do differently, but about what we were noticing in each other’s teaching. Some people said, “Hey, that was such a good idea, I want to use that in my own teaching,” and that was just a much better and much more joyful experience. That moment really shifted things for me. It felt like a shared experience, like we were learning alongside each other, and really that is what made it joyful. It shaped also how I think, not just about peer observation, but so many conversations I try to foster in my work around teaching. That’s what I’m excited about this course, because I believe peer observation can be one of the most energizing things that we are doing in our professional practice, when it’s done in a way that centers collaboration, colleague geology, and mutual respect.