Peer Evaluations Can Be Problematic

To the Editor. We read with interest the article, “A Peer Review Process for Classroom Teaching.”¹ We commend the authors for setting up and reporting the results of such a process. Despite the paucity of publications on the matter, there is likely much interest in the academic pharmacy community about peer evaluations of classroom teaching, and many schools, including our own, have attempted to establish similar programs.

We agree with the authors that student evaluations can be subject to evaluation bias, specifically, the “mirror effect” (ie, when student evaluations tend to mimic their grades). However, the peer evaluation process is fraught with many philosophical and practical concerns of its own. In addition to the authors' point that the process is time and labor intensive, we have encountered the following types of questions and concerns:

• What is the purpose of peer reviews? Are they to be used in a formative or summative manner, or both? Faculty members should be required or forbidden to submit them as part of annual reviews or promotion and tenure applications, as allowing them to choose whether or not to do so would bias the process. Also, what weight should be given to peer reviews versus student evaluations?

• How objective is the process? Neither the process that the authors describe nor our own is conducted anonymously. Often the evaluator and the one being evaluated have worked with one another for years, or at the very least, have the prospect of working with one another for many years to come. Not surprisingly, it has been our experience that faculty members are generally given relatively high marks in the peer evaluation process. Because of the resultant ceiling effect, it is difficult to use peer evaluations to differentiate teaching abilities of faculty members.

• Who is qualified to conduct the reviews? Having junior faculty members review other junior faculty members is arguably the proverbial “blind leading the blind.” Yet if only senior faculty members conduct the reviews, this only accentuates the problem of time/labor intensity. Furthermore, many newer schools may not even have sufficient numbers of senior faculty members to conduct these reviews at all.

• What teaching domains are best to be evaluated by peers (rather than students) and in what manner? Should evaluation criteria be the same for both student and peer evaluations? Should criteria be norm- or referenced-based? From a philosophical standpoint, classroom teaching is meant for students. As such, a faculty member cannot possibly perceive a lecture like the typical student because of differences in knowledge and experience. While we agree with the authors' teaching domains, we think that the chief concern is whether or not those items translate into student learning, which of course, is best judged by students.

• How often and when should peer reviews be done? Should they be conducted only for new faculty members or as part of a new course, or should they be part of a continuous process of improvement? As opposed to student evaluations, which are typically meant to measure the faculty member's performance over a lecture series or course, peer evaluations tend to be one-time measurements, and thus they may not be truly representative of the faculty member's usual performance.

Peer review of teaching plays an important role in the improvement and progress of the academy. Hopefully, this will evolve as a mechanism for faculty members to help one another via formative feedback as opposed to a mechanism for faculty members to offset poor summative student evaluations. However, we feel that the process would benefit from standardized guidelines specific to pharmacy education in order for the peer evaluation process to be most helpful within the overall assessment of a faculty member's teaching. We encourage the American Association of Colleges of Pharmacy to be a major driver in the further discussion and systematic development of such guidelines that identify both shortcomings and advantages of peer evaluation.

Marshall E. Cates, PharmD
Mary R. Monk-Tutor, PhD, MS
McWhorter School of Pharmacy, Samford University