One of the central tenets of faculty practice is that we generally keep what happens in our classrooms to ourselves. Beyond the occaisonal visit by a colleague and the anecdotes we love to share about our students, only rarely do we open our classrooms up to public inspection. Given our mania for peer reviewed publications, you’d think we would just as anxious to have peer reviewed teaching. It seems to me that the same benefits would accrue. Our colleagues could point out the strengths and weaknesses of what we are doing, could examine the underlying assumptions of our teaching in a particular course, and could comment on the wider significance of the results we are achieving with our students. Of course, for something like this to work, we’ll need the same kind of attention to detail and professionalism that our colleagues devote to reviewing one of our articles or manuscripts. And for that to happen the same sorts of informal rubrics of evaluation that we use when acting as peer reviewers for a journal or a press will need to evolve.
Some historians have caught the open classroom/peer review of teaching bug already. See, for examples, the World History and Age of Reform course portfolios posted by Amy Burnett of the University of Nebraska on the Peer Review of Teaching project website. Or Christopher E. Mauriello’s Transnational History of the 1960s at Salem State University. The American Historical Association posted one by me that I produced in 1999 (hence the frames…frames were cool in 1999) and another by Bill Cutler at Temple University several years ago, but to date there is no central clearing house for examples of course portfolios in history. Would that there were…
Following the publication of my portfolio on the AHA website (which is currently down because their webserver is in South Florida and got whacked by Hurricane Wilma), I wrote a piece for Perspectives on transparency in teaching. The responses I received to this article were fairly evenly divided between those who congratulated me on opening up my classroom and those who chastised me for doing so. The chastisers’ complaints largely focused on what they saw as a bad precedent being set by my willingness to ask for substantive and open peer review of my teaching. These complaints are, it seems to me, an indicator of how far we have to go before we can really expect the kind of peer review of teaching that we demand of our scholarship of discovery.