Teaching Observation Rubrics

Teaching rubrics: 

Canvas Review Rubric Download Canvas Review Rubric

Engagement Rubric  Download Engagement Rubric 

Note to faculty in advance of teaching observation: 

The purpose of this observation to provide some formative feedback on your course and support you in your teaching practice.  As you know, the observations are also a part of your PROF (annual evaluation). Scoring a “meets” on both the Canvas and Engagement rubrics (attached here) are part of our requirement for an assessment of “meets” expectations for teaching. Provided you score a meets on the observation, we don’t have to redo it again for three years—unless you’d like to do so! If you don’t score a “meets,” we will schedule another opportunity for you to meet expectations before the end of the evaluation cycle. Our goal is to encourage quality teaching and development—not to try to lock down an evaluation.

Please take a look at the attached rubrics and let us know if you have any questions. In particular, you are encouraged to provide your observer with some information about how you engage with students in your course. You’ll see on the rubric that there are three types of engagement: engagement with the course material, with you, and with other students. There are examples of what that engagement looks like in the rubric. Your observer will prompt you ahead of the observation to identify where they will find each of the three types of engagement in your course. You can say something like, “I provide feedback to individual students on at least one discussion post per term,” [engagement with faculty] or “I have students pair up for a quick 1:1 (“think/pair/share”) activity several times during the term” [engagement with other students] or “students respond to the case study in a short response essay that I administer during class” [engagement with course material]. It doesn’t need to be a long description, just something to let me know how and where you meet this item. We know the observer might not see evidence of each type of engagement during the class period they visit, and they can use your description of your course design, activities, and assessments as evidence that the standard is met.