Journal on Excellence in College Teaching, Volume 6, Number 3

Lack of agreement on how to evaluate teaching has been one of the main roadblocks to recognizing and rewarding the teaching accomplish ments of faculty in colleges and universities. The perception has been that it is not possible to specify what constitutes good teaching, and, therefore, that no attempt should be made to judge instructors. Whereas scholarly productivity is measured by counting the number of publica tions accepted in peer-reviewed journals, teaching productivity cannot be measured in a similar way. As a result, teaching has been evaluated on an implicit ("I'll know it when I see it") basis. It is not that teaching has not been evaluated in higher education (after all, faculty have been hired, tenured, and promoted on the basis of their perceived teaching abilities); rather, it is that the criteria for teaching excellence have not been made explicit for either judgmental or developmental purposes. As always, we encourage readers to ponder, use, and respond to the contributions in this volume. The dialogue is entered and you are invited to participate.