Teaching for Learning and Learning for Teaching: Peer Review of Teaching in Higher Education

Abstract

Teaching for learning and learning for teaching focuses on the emerging global governmental and institutional agenda about higher education teaching quality. It emphasises the role that peer review of teaching can play through supporting improvements in teaching practice and student learning outcomes. This agenda is a pervasive element of the further development of higher education through the activities of governments, global agencies, institutions of higher education, discrete disciplines, and individual teachers. Over the past 15 years, there has been a rapidly expanding global marketplace for higher education to service a burgeoning demand for desirable forms of work (Klopper & Drew, 2013). In such a competitive climate, an imperative exists for education products and services to differentiate to market needs globally, regionally, and locally (Jones & Oleksiyenko, 2011; Marginson, Kaur, & Sawir, 2011); and to ensure that they are of an outstanding quality in terms of access (Morley, 2012; Rizvi & Lingard, 2011), processes and outcomes (Wong, 2012). Many universities have adopted student evaluations as a mechanism to appraise the quality of teaching. These evaluations can be understood as providing a customer-centric portrait of quality. When used as the sole arbiter of teaching performance they do not instil confidence in the system of evaluation by academic teaching staff. Providing peer perspectives as counterpoint, whether in a developmental or summative form, goes some way to alleviating this imbalance; that is the impetus for the resurgence of interest in peer review and observation of teaching. This book seeks to recognise contextual cases where the peer review and observation of teaching in higher education affirm best practices and identify areas that require improvement in establishing local, national and international benchmarks of teaching quality.