Faculty assessment should promote participation and include the different activities undertaken by professors within the university to permanently improve the register of university teachers and contribute to academic excellence.
Thus, the primary objective of teacher evaluations should be to draw attention to achievements and to promote continuous improvement, working independently and as a team, and constant monitoring of each educators’ defined targets.
It should also facilitate evaluations made by supervisors, peers, and students during the academic year. It is a critical process for teachers’ development both within and outside the institution.
According to the OECD, it consists of an individual evaluation process that assesses the skills and performance of faculty during its teaching practice at a given time. Many different players take part in the assessment process; from students who mark a professor’s teaching quality after completing a class, to colleagues and managers who act as supervisors.
In general, the results of teacher evaluations are used for the following purposes:
For this purpose, any teacher management platform used by an academic institution should contain functions that contribute to these purposes in the following manner:
Since the platform centralizes all teacher management data, information should be easy to save and access by supervisors responsible for the teacher evaluation process.
The teacher evaluation process extends throughout the academic year. Therefore, the faculty management software installed by the institution should have an alarm and notification system for key supervision milestones.
It is critical that the management software centralizes comments by peers and administrators on teaching performance during the academic year. Together with registering the remarks, it should ensure that they are easy to find and access at any moment of the evaluation process.
The software should also provide the educator with the opportunity and ability to receive and see comments made by evaluators and to reply to them online and in real time.
The data that shapes the results of the teacher evaluation will come from different sources. Therefore, the software’s cross-referencing and analytical functions must be authentic, verifiable, and efficient. The management platform must allow cross-referencing of information in a way that does not allow room for doubt.
Teacher evaluation is a crucial teacher development process inside and outside the educational institution.
Evaluation results help to diagnose the teacher's current capabilities, weaknesses that need improving, and how to assess awards and rewards for high performance.
That's why it is crucial for a teaching management software to provide the necessary data to facilitate the evaluation of the educator. It is only with reliable data that an institution can fully understand the quality of faculty hired to teach its student body.