It’s time to drop the tyranny of student reviews of teaching

If you’ve seen the Netflix drama The Chair, you would have witnessed Professor Joan Hambling (played by Holland Taylor) set fire to her student evaluations, proclaiming she doesn’t “cater to consumer demands”.

While it is a somewhat exaggerated portrayal of academic life, many real-life educators in today’s universities probably want to do the same to their own evaluations (literally or metaphorically) after reading some of the comments they receive. Such assessments may sometimes provide useful feedback to modify or redesign a course, but it is increasingly evident that student evaluations often do little more than reveal student biases – reflecting distorted perceptions of a teacher rather than anything to do with their actual teaching.

Corporatisation of the higher education sector has intensified in recent decades thanks to New Public Management techniques and policies. In Australia, we have seen increased emphasis on performance and productivity, heightened competition for students and funding, growing wage disparities between senior management and other employees, and substantial cuts to staff who perform the core work of universities – teaching and research. Most of these trends are similar across many Western institutions.

It is perhaps not surprising that student evaluations have become the dominant mechanism for signifying and addressing the quality of teaching. After all, students are positioned as a key “customer” that university management must satisfy.

But where does this leave genuine instructional improvement and understanding of what actually constitutes quality teaching? Unfortunately, valuing student reviews as the main mechanism for improving teaching in universities has left the sector with a warped understanding of quality teaching.

Arguably, there are many ways to conceptualise ‘quality teaching’ in higher education based on the perspectives of different stakeholders. Students are concerned with the quality of their experience. Employers are concerned with the quality of graduates. Institutions are often most concerned about the marketability of their courses.

Student evaluations typically take up “quality” as a form of accountability, emphasising the delivery of products and services. Here, the management of teaching ends up being emphasised, however, rather than the practice of teaching.

Other dominant ways “quality teaching” is understood across the sector include conforming to standards, excellence to be rewarded and, more genuinely transformational, working toward positive changes in teaching and learning.

“Excellence”, like student evaluation, is a visible approach to addressing teaching quality in the academy. Academics who win institutional and national teaching awards are recognised as “good teachers”. Bestowed on a relatively small number of individuals, excellence awards function as a form of distinction.

Ultimately, however, such approaches often fail to address what actually constitutes effective teaching. They provide little or no support for academics seeking to understand and refine their practice. Even when teaching and learning are touted as the intended focus of academic development programmes, the pragmatics of teaching tend to dominate, with an emphasis on policy, logistics, and course management.

Complicating matters further, academic development is often narrowly associated with attendance at workshops or seminars, rather than seen as an ongoing component of academics’ legitimate professional work. Some institutions implement peer observation and feedback processes to embed a culture of professional growth and learning. However, such opportunities are often experienced as judgmental and focused more on procedures than pedagogy per se. And yet, academics are under increasing pressure to demonstrate effective teaching.

In this context, a fairly straightforward solution would be to shift attention from managing quality to realising quality in higher education. In Australia, the Higher Education Standards Framework (Threshold Standards) 2021 mandates that academics should not only have relevant disciplinary knowledge but also skills in contemporary teaching, learning and assessment. Yet as a sector we continue to fail academics, with little government or institutional policy focused on enhancing the quality of teaching.  

In a recent study, we trialled an evidence-based pedagogical framework called the Quality Teaching (QT) Model to enhance conceptual understandings of quality teaching in the academy. The wide-reaching benefits reported by participants signal a potential way forward. Academics from a range of disciplines and from associate lecturer to professor levels attended a short workshop introducing the QT Model and then used the framework for self-assessment, peer review, or within a community of practice.

A key feature of the QT Model is that it honours the complexity of teaching. In K-12 schools in Australia, professional development based on the QT Model has consistently demonstrated positive effects on teaching quality, teacher morale and student academic achievement.

In our study with academics, participants reported direct benefits for analysing practice, course planning, collegial collaboration, and improving the student experience. Importantly, the QT model provided a much-needed conceptual and practical way for academics to understand the practice of teaching, with fresh insights about what constitutes quality. It provided a new lens with which to reflect on, challenge and enhance ways of working.

Quality teaching in higher education remains a pressing issue. Genuine improvement requires a shift away from proximal measures of “quality” toward approaches that offer clear insight into how teaching can be enhanced. Institutions, employers, students and society at large would benefit from transformative approaches, such as engagement with the QT Model, that get to the heart of quality teaching.

Sally Patfield is a senior research fellow in the School of Education at the University of Newcastle, Australia.