Journal on Excellence in College Teaching, Volume 15, Number 3

In the lead article for this issue of the Journal, Nancy Van Note Chism states, "Uncertainty over how to define teaching effectiveness is at the heart of many difficulties entailed in developing or administering approaches to teaching evaluation or faculty development activities" (p. 5). Yet, she continues, recruiting new teaching faculty, orienting and mentoring them into the profession, assigning teaching responsibilities, and evaluating teaching all take place routinely -- often on the basis of unarticulated, and hence unexamined, definitions of teaching effectiveness. Academic life goes on despite definitional despair. (p. 6) Chism goes on to review the literature on what the profession has discovered in its efforts to define and assess effective teaching, and concludes that there is broad disagreement. She argues for a middle ground between those who claim that the characteristics of effective teaching already are well established and those who throw up their hands in despair that teaching effectiveness cannot be defined or measured. The articles in this issue respond to Chism's claim by presenting various perspectives on what makes for effective -- and ineffective -- teaching.