In 2019, as part of the Road Map for Transformative Undergraduate Education, former Provost Jay Akridge charged the Teaching Academy at Purdue with defining teaching excellence and creating a cultural shift such that it is understood, supported and valued across campus.
The Teaching Academy initiated a research process to define teaching excellence at the Purdue West Lafayette campus and to determine how to document, evaluate, and recognize it. This study resulted in the Framework for Teaching Excellence that is not only grounded in scholarly literature, but also based upon Purdue-centric perceptions of teaching excellence.
Any cultural shift on a university campus requires support and adoption from multiple stakeholders. In order to ensure that the campus culture of excellent teaching was as fully reflected as possible in the framework, the research team collected data from many subunits within Purdue University, including faculty, staff, students, and the university administration. Additionally, the researchers reviewed digital artifacts relevant to the Roadmap for Transformative Undergraduate Education Initiative, including transcriptions of in-person interviews, observation notes from several listening sessions, and student reflections. Furthermore, survey data collected by the Center for Instructional Excellence informed the study.
Researchers used content analysis, allowing for the systematic transformation of a large amount of data into a concise summary of key results. From this analysis, researchers identified emergent themes, which became the five elements associated with teaching excellence. The analysis also suggested appropriate tools for evaluating teaching excellence on the West Lafayette campus. Finally, researchers checked for consistency by comparing the study findings with scholarly literature, survey data from the Center for Instructional Excellence, and external university websites.
View TimelineThe Framework for Teaching Excellence provides a common language for the development and documentation of teaching excellence, language that is grounded in the Purdue West Lafayette campus culture of teaching and learning. It describes the elements of teaching excellence at Purdue, descriptors for each element, and tools for holistic evaluation.
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