I. Rationale
Business school faculty produce three primary outputs: teaching, scholarship, and
service. Standard 7 concerns impactful teaching. The direct outcome from teaching is
successful learners, which are covered elsewhere in standards related to learner
success. However, that success is dependent on teachers who are prepared, current,
and pedagogically astute. This standard is meant to ensure that the school provides
development activities and has evaluation systems to promote teaching effectiveness.
II. Clarifying Guidance
Teaching Effectiveness and Faculty Preparedness
The peer review team will typically review materials and policies related to hiring,
promoting, and maintaining qualified educators. The school should describe the current
teaching and learning strategy, together with major initiatives to maintain and improve
performance and impact. The school should demonstrate that resources to maintain
effective pedagogy in the relevant discipline are available to all faculty. The peer review
team would, for example, expect to see formal evaluation policies for both participating
and supporting faculty, as well as orientation programs available to ensure effective
teaching for all faculty. Institutions frequently anchor on just one teaching evaluation
metric. This standard expects the use of a broad array of measures and sources to
assess teaching quality and effectiveness. Such examples may include, but are not
limited to, peer review of teaching, student evaluation, and faculty professional
development.
Specific documents, governance, resources, or processes related to teaching
effectiveness that may be reviewed are:
- Hiring policies that demonstrate that new faculty are qualified to teach;
- Hiring policies and practices that seek to attract a diverse faculty;
- Faculty orientation programs that include teaching;
- Availability of teaching mentoring;
- School or university center for teaching and/or access to other programs designed to enhance teaching;
- Teaching evaluation policies and procedures (multi-measure);
- Promotion and tenure standards related to teaching;
- Teaching development activities (e.g., pedagogy workshops, pedagogy grants, sending faculty to teaching conferences, classroom visitation and feedback);
- Policies and practices to ensure faculty employ inclusive pedagogy;
- Policies, practices, development activities, and dedicated resources to ensure faculty are current with appropriate technologies;
- Resources available to faculty to maintain discipline expertise;
- Recognition practices for outstanding teachers (e.g., awards);
- Examples of professional engagement of faculty;
- Office hour policies and any other policies or practices promoting learnerfaculty engagement; and/or
- Opportunities for faculty to participate in high-quality international conferences of disciplines or in highly regarded global academic organizations.
Faculty currency may be assessed through analysis of curricular offerings and
inspection of select course syllabi. For example, does the school offer courses in
current or potential future topics such as disruptive technologies, cybersecurity, design
thinking, artificial intelligence, or data analytics? The peer review team may review the
composition of faculty teaching some of these forward-thinking courses to determine if
they are full-time faculty or if the more current topic courses are staffed with primarily
supporting faculty. While supporting faculty may be effective in their delivery of highly
relevant current or emerging topics and technologies, the school should take care not to
rely solely on supporting faculty to do so. Core permanent faculty are charged with
remaining current in their field, as well. Traditional courses and syllabi should also be
current and may be reviewed to assess currency and relevancy of assigned readings,
for example.
Teaching Impact
The impact of outstanding teaching can be difficult to assess, though there can be
output signals of teaching effectiveness. Many schools offer graduation or outcome
surveys that assess learner satisfaction. The ability of a school to attract highly qualified
learners and boast of robust enrollment might be an input measure of teaching impact
to the extent that the school has a reputation for high-quality teaching. Alumni are an
excellent source of input regarding teaching impact. Talented teachers often
disseminate their teaching knowledge and skills at seminars, through blogs and other
social media outlets, by writing textbooks, and in workshops. The peer review team can
look for these types of outputs as a reference for teaching impact. There may be
examples of thought leadership through the scholarship of teaching and learning, which
also reflect teaching impact.