Document Type
Chapter
Journal/Book Title/Conference
Documenting Teaching Excellence
Editor
Karin deJonge-Kannan and Travis N. Thurston
Publisher
Utah State University
Publication Date
2025
First Page
43
Last Page
58
Abstract
The scholarly conversation surrounding excellence in teaching, including defining and documenting excellence, is both robust and ongoing in the academic literature across disciplines. My own experience as a teacher-scholar, program director, department chair, and faculty developer has demonstrated that often, one of the most significant challenges instructors face during required reviews is making their teaching—and, in particular, their excellence in teaching—visible and tangible to colleagues outside of their classroom spaces, including fully articulating and demonstrating the why and how of that teaching. Although some institutions or individual units (i.e., departments or programs) may provide explicit descriptions of and expectations for teaching excellence, in other cases in order to encourage and to reward a wide range of diverse activities and applications, instructors may be expected to demonstrate this excellence with few specific examples or guidelines. Mentoring may play a role in how instructors learn to document or find models for documenting teaching excellence, yet because it is often informal, that mentoring, as much scholarship has demonstrated, can be uneven and inconsistent across instructor experiences, including for minoritized and underrepresented instructors (Costello, 2017; Denise & Louis, 2024; LaMonaca Wisdom, 2021; Mettetal & McGuire, 2013; Sotto-Santiago, 2020).
Recommended Citation
Guglielmo, Letizia, "3. A Scholarly Approach to Excellence in Teaching: Identifying, Framing, And Planning Faculty Work for Success" (2025). Documenting Teaching Excellence. Paper 8.
https://digitalcommons.usu.edu/documenting_teaching_excellence/8