Making Teaching Community Property:
A Menu for Peer Collaboration and Peer Review
by Pat Hutchings
Washington, DC: American Association
for Higher Education, 1996
Pat Hutchings is director of the American Association for Higher
Education's Teaching Initiative, a project designed to raise the
consciousness of teaching and create a culture of teaching and learning.
The central vision of that effort is that "teaching, like other forms of
scholarly activity, is substantive, intellectual work" that must be peer
reviewed if it is to be appreciated. The program was inspired by Lee
Shulman, who has said that teaching is undervalued because it is largely done in
solitude apart from one's colleagues. ("Teaching as Community Property:
Putting an End to Pedagogical Solitude." Change 25 (6): 6-7.
November/December 1993.)
The book's nine chapters describe pilot projects designed to find
ways to facilitate collaboration and peer review of teaching. Each
chapter begins with a description of the strategy or activity, followed by
narrative reports from faculty members who participated in the projects.
The chapters conclude with references for further study. The strategies
and activities cover a broad spectrum of collaborative efforts.
- Teaching circles are small groups of teachers, usually from
different disciplines, who meet regularly and work together to help each
other with teaching concerns. Activities described in the chapter include
teaching seminars and online discussion groups.
- Reciprocal visits and observations are ways for as few as two
teachers to collaborate on teaching. The chapter includes helpful
suggestions for making such visits and collaboration successful and
explains how videotapes can be used effectively.
-
A description of teacher mentoring programs tells how one
school used faculty tutorials, in which faculty members taught each other
about teaching.
-
Some of the activities focus on student learning. For example,
two faculty members interviewed each other's students and suggested ways
to improve teaching. Another program made students active agents in their
learning by asking them to develop requirements for themselves,
classmates, the course, and the instructor.
-
Teaching portfolios are ways for teachers to share their
teaching philosophy and document results. The chapter suggests a
variation -- course portfolios -- to provide details about the development
and evolution of particular courses.
-
Team teaching activities include coordinated studies, in which
small groups of teachers teach the only course students take in a given
term. These arrangements offer unique opportunities for peer review and
collaboration.
-
In some collaborative inquiry and pedagogical scholarship
efforts, participating teachers have maintained and exchanged personal
journals about teaching.
-
One chapter describes departmental occasions for collaboration.
One institution, for example, requires prospective faculty members to conduct a
pedagogical colloquium as part of their interview. Other schools have
started professional development programs for graduate students and
created teaching libraries.
-
Peer review and collaboration can extend to other campuses with
external peer review (similar to reviews of research output) and
long-distance interviews with students.
This book is very useful as a reference resource about several
programs that promote public collaboration and peer review of teaching.
Readers wanting more information and assistance can refer to the many
sources listed at the end of each chapter. Teaching is going to have to
become community property if it is to be valued and improved.
Institutions will have to develop and foster a culture of teaching
comparable to the culture of research. This book, and the projects it
represents, will go a long way toward making that possible.
Tom Bowers
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
